Every year mobile hardware gets more and more powerful, rivaling the cutting edge graphics found on dedicated gaming systems. And that’s great, but, it’s important to remember your roots too. That’s why I think there are so many retro-inpsired games still being released. People still love that pixely, old school look. But there’s a difference between something being “retro-inspired" and something feeling like it could have straight up been released on the NES twenty five years ago. Venture Kid, an upcoming platformer that I ran across during a deep dive in our forums, falls into the latter category. From the sounds, visuals, gameplay, and even the cutscenes, Venture Kid feels like the kind of game that you’d need to blow the dust out of before playing. Check out the trailer.
Obviously, there’s a huge Mega Man influence going on in Venture Kid, which I’m actually really digging. Of course, when it comes to these types of games on touchscreens, everything hinges on how well the controls are implemented. That’s something we’ll have to wait to find out, but hopefully it won’t be too long, as the developer has stated in our forums that he’s shooting for a Q1 2014 release. I’m anxious to get my hands on Venture Kid, and I’ve got my fingers crossed it’ll be launching in the not too distant future.
Update: I received an email from FDG Entertainment, who are publishing Venture Kid, and they’ve let me know that what’s shown in this current trailer is quite early footage of the game, and they’ve implemented some new effects like parallax scrolling. So if you think it looks good now, the final product should look even better. Unfortunately, though, they said release won’t be before Q2 of 2014, so it won’t be coming quite as quickly as I’d hoped. At any rate, keep your eye on this one for sure.
