this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
132 points (100.0% liked)

RetroGaming

19508 readers
204 users here now

Vintage gaming community.

Rules:

  1. Be kind.
  2. No spam or soliciting for money.
  3. No racism or other bigotry allowed.
  4. Obviously nothing illegal.

If you see these please report them.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Xylinna@lemmy.world
Tenthrow@lemmy.world
gts@lemmy.world
132
Old games with interesting perspective switches were neat. (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by tomkatt@lemmy.world to c/retrogaming@lemmy.world
28 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I'm mostly thinking about 8 bit games, and NES in particular, but it was a thing that continued at least into the 16-bit consoles. There were a lot of games that come to mind that did the perspective shift, sometimes blending genres in the process. Stuff like:

  • Guardian Legend (sh'mup with 3rd person action)
  • Blaster Master (mix of side scrolling and top down)
  • Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link (top down, but sidescrolling battles and dungeons)
  • Contra and Super C (change in perspective from side scrolling to top-down / 3rd person)
  • Actraiser (sidescroller + god game)
  • Battle Golfer Yui (adventure/golf game mashup)

I'm sure there's plenty of others I'm not thinking of. It just feels creative, like even if in some cases a title might not be a "good" game, stuff like this just feels interesting, and there was a lot of experimentation with genre mashups and perspective changes like this in the 8 and 16-bit era.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] VeeSilverball@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

My favorite example of "weird camera" is Journey to the Planets. It's an Atari 800 game with graphics that are more 2600-esque. It's mostly side view, but the proportions are abstract, like a child's drawing: the spaceship is about 1/3rd the size of the player sprite, but then as you lift off it shows zoomed out terrain and the sprite is the same size. The game is based around solving adventure game puzzles with objects that are mostly just glowing rectangles, but your way of interacting with the puzzles involves a lot of shooting. Even though there's so little detail, every room feels "hand-crafted".

I'm pretty sure the game permanently altered my sense of aesthetics.