Cover art by @nwyattal.
Our monthly feature highlighting the merits of forgotten and misbegotten games for @PIZZAPRANKS‘ Indiepocalypse returns! This month brings us… Resident Evil 2?! Is this another April Fool’s gag? Nah: We’re just talking about its Tiger Game.com conversion. Doing so gives us the opportunity to talk about modern-day demakes and retro throwback games, and the excuse to make our plea to indie developers to keep bringing us back to a pixelated past:
I guess the message I’m really trying to get across to indie developers here is as follows: Please demake more games in the style and constraints of obsolete and obscure systems. Someone try to find a way to reconceptualize Katamari Damacy for the ColecoVision, or convert S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl to the Watara Supervision. Bring Elden Ring to the Fairchild Channel F where it truly belongs, and give us the portable version of Assassin’s Creed XIVV (or whatever the hell installment that fuckin’ series is up to now) for the TI-83 calculator that high school kids have been demanding. I don’t even know if that last joke plays any more or if that franchise is still going, but I honestly can’t be bothered to check. In all seriousness though: Demakes probably make for some valuable development practice and design insight, and I reckon we could always stand to see more of them make their way onto the web. They’re also pretty trendy too, if the idea of getting featured on Kotaku for a day before promptly receiving a takedown notice on the next appeals to you. And at that point, you can just rework the title slightly and change all the characters’ names in a pinch, and still have yourself a hot little “retro throwback” game on your portfolio. You can’t lose!
