Post by: mburns on February 05, 2014, 01:01:11 PM
Propeller rats and King Knight's trumpets are highlights of the Shovel Knight demo.
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/impressions/36469
After contributing to Shovel Knight’s Kickstarter campaign at the end of March 2013, I made a point to ignore the dozens upon dozens of Project Update emails Yacht Club Games sent throughout the year; I was determined to discover everything the game had to offer only after the finished product was downloaded onto my 3DS at the end of September. Then, they missed their deadline and I got Scroogey.
Since then, I’ve learned a few things. First, Kickstarter projects never arrive when they’re initially promised. Second, I should probably take back that vow because some of the best developers in the world are now building the games they’ve always wanted to make thanks to the shift from corporate investments to crowdfunding. Third: My Lord, has Yacht Club Games been busy these last few months.
Last week, I sat down to play both the 3DS and Wii U builds of what I later found out was actually a pretty old demo of Shovel Knight. And while I won’t bother going over the demo in detail since Neal has done that already, I do want to share some of the things I noticed about the game that have made me more excited about it than ever before.
- Propeller Rats: I don’t know what these guys are doing in King Knight’s stage or who decided to strap propellers onto a bunch of helpless rodents — maybe Propeller Knight knows? — but I can’t get over how perfectly representative they are of the power of pixel art to convey so much with so little. They float limply in the air, seemingly resigned to their little ratty fates, their tiny, single pixel eyeballs seeming to say “don’t worry about me. Just do what you gotta do. I'm here for you.” Yacht Club’s artists are second to none, but that shouldn’t really surprise anyone since they honed their craft at WayForward.
- King Knight’s Trumpets: I’m not really sure what the purpose is of the trumpets that pop up during the showdown with King Knight at the end of the demo as they don’t seem to affect the battle in any way, but I don’t really care because they add a unique sense of style to what would otherwise be a fairly typical Mega Man-style boss fight. It reminds me of the little-known Sunsoft classic Trip World, which set itself apart from pretty much every other 8-bit platformer on the market by populating its five stages with crazy characters that you’d only ever see one time during the entirety of the game. Game companies back then could only fit so much in the tiny ROM chips that held their games, but today’s developers have a virtually unlimited amount of storage to include these kind of little one-off flourishes. It’s one of the reasons 8- and 16-bit game design is in the midst of a second renaissance: artists are finally able to create what they dream up without being constrained by the limits of technology.
- ”Virt” and the Mega Man Legacy: There are very few musicians working today whose video game compositions can transport me back to my halcyon days like Jake “Virt” Kaufman. From Shantae to Retro City Rampage and beyond, Kaufman excels at writing original music that sounds like the it came from a lost NES game, and I’m still stunned by how “Mega Man” his Pridemoor Keep track sounds while being a wholly original composition for Shovel Knight. And speaking of Mega Man, did I mention Manami Matsumae wrote a couple of songs for the game? How rad is that? Now if only they can sign Bun Bun up for Shovel Knight 2…
Okay, so Shovel Knight missed its September delivery, but as far as I’m concerned, Yacht Club has more than made up for it. Get your shovels ready: the game is less than two months away.
