You know something? NES nostalgia pieces may have run their course. It's odd of me to say that, considering the fact that this is the bloody Nintendo Project Resumed, but one gets tired of the same old same old. That being said, amazing things have been done with NES nostalgia. Amazing things, but also dark forces. I said as much when I talked about Shovel Knight way back when, but loving tributes to old video games are a sort of alchemy. You can get a perfect Philosopher's Stone like Shovel Knight, which expands and improves upon the formulae perfected over the life of a little grey toaster box... or the putrefaction that was the Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures. That one's a shambling homunculus, a Hyde prone to violent outbursts... and yet it gets away with it. SO REWARDING AND SO NINTENDO HARD, JUST LIKE THE GOOD OLD DAYS. Absolutely not, but this is not our intent. Our intent is to zoom the lens out, and ponder something. Why have we let the Nintendo alchemists overwhelm this field of electronic equivalent exchange? Where are the Genesis madmen with their volatile blast processing vials? The patrons of the Master System and Game Gear, the little system that could? Show me some love for your Wonderswans, your Neo Geo Pockets, your Commodore 64s. Off the top of my head, there are two of these unconventional alchemical love letters to the obscure systems. The first is La-Mulana, a wildly successful homage to the MSX days in its original form. The re-release I have just replaces all the MSX tapes with laptop programs. Something has been lost. The second is what I finished playing a few days ago; Rock Boshers DX, from an alchemy outfit called Tikipod. Their goal? Bring back the ZX Spectrum.
In the 1980s, Japan was a hazy island that the video gaming children knew little about. In 1983 it produced a red and black box that became a grey box when it came to North America and took us all by storm. We know this song well. Over on another hazy island, one called the United Kingdom... a different sort of beast emerged. The ZX Spectrum, a decidedly low-tech but affordable computer machine. Seven colors, the minimum of graphics and sound, but with a "do-it-yourself" mentality that took the island by storm. One need only witness a program like Manic Miner to see the oddity of the Spectrum. The shrill and harsh digitized classical music, the simplistic platforming, the unforgiving nature... hell, England ate it up. I don't know why, seeing as I was not around for this, but it was a scene. The ZX Spectrum was popular, and it grew its following. Rareware, the fellows who would entertain my childhood and frustrate my adulthood, got their start on this thing. The Spectrum happened, and 30 years later Tikipod here have capitalized on it. Their alchemy, much like Shovel Knight's, takes the base and expands on it. At over 100 megabytes, it easily dwarfs an average Spectrum game. The point is that they did their best to remain faithful. It looks and sounds like a Spectrum game, even if I was playing it on a handheld that would have blown my mind 15 years ago, let alone 30. They take the formulae, and work with every trick in their playbook to make a fantastic evolution; the next new Spectrum game. Then they go further, and make things oddly fitting. It all begins with a faux Spectrum loading screen, but once that's done the real magic begins. The true power emerges, and here we are. It is 2015 and 1983 at once, and we are playing Rock Boshers DX.
At its core, Rock Boshers DX is a twin stick shooter. One moves with an analog stick, and fires in another. This created a problem, I must admit, on my Vita. The itty bitty analog sticks meant that shooting right or diagonally right was difficult. In the heat of the moment, this caused misfires and frustrations. Were I playing on PC, I get the feeling that this would be less of an issue... but I cast my lot with the Vita, and this is what I got. Let us focus more on what Rock Boshers is. It is a double 80's nostalgia piece. There is the obvious nostalgia for the 1980s and the Spectrum, but the game's setting is no less than the 1880s. You play as Queen Victoria, on a steampunk adventure to Mars to blast at turrets, tanks, and zombies in order to stop a man in a top hat from taking over the British Empire with his absolute power. So, we're at the very heart of alchemy itself, then. The iconography of the Victorian era, with its playable character as the namesake of that era, no less! These are the stakes we play for, and we play a difficult but mostly fair game. The action is fast-paced but also dangerous. Death can come quickly, and often. Still, one learns how to work. Shoot and move. Run in laps. Bait out homing missiles and equip new weapons to survive. Oh, and don't forget to take a break for tea and scones. They'll unlock things.Of course, in the end, we cannot escape the gravity of those NES alchemists. I just learned about this. The Steam version has an option to play it in 8-bit console style mode. The NES formulas snuck into the brew somewhere down the line. Not on the Vita, as far as I can tell... and to be honest, I prefer it that way. We've had enough NES nostalgia, as I've said. There are steps in the alternate directions, beyond Rock Boshers DX. La-Mulana in its original form invokes the MSX. Games like John Thyer's Fugitive pull forth power from the original Game Boy. Daniel Linssen's Roguelight is a shade of red away from being a Game Boy game played on the Game Boy Color, in default palette. This is good, but I wish to see more. Invoke the Master System and Game Gear. Invoke the Neo Geo Pocket, the Wonderswan, the Commodore. Invoke everything obscure and unique that you can. Rock Boshers DX can be the first step to a larger world of reimagining nostalgia, if we allow it to be. We can observe the history of these consoles, find what made their core games tick, and then advance them for the modern age. It's 2015 and we have that power... so why not do it? Queen Victoria can. Why don't we?
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