There’s a difference between a love letter to a genre and a complete re-creation.
To avoid tackling ground already covered when making video games that reference the 8- and 16-bit eras of the 1980s and ‘90s, Yacht Club Games co-founder David D’Angelo says one of his go-to references is “You’ve Got Mail.” Yes, the 1998 Nora Ephron-directed rom-com starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Or, specifically, its relationship to the 1940 Ernst Lubitsch-directed film that inspired it, “The Shop Around the Corner.”
“It’s the same thing,” D’Angelo says in discussing how the West Los Angeles team behind the retro hit game “Shovel Knight” developed the mission statement for Yacht Club. Viewing “You’ve Got Mail” alongside the original “The Shop Around the Corner,” he says, can at times be a challenge for audiences weaned on more recent acting and filmmaking techniques.
is inspired by a long line of games that didn’t seem to care whether you enjoyed them.
Ninja Gaiden, and other ultra-difficult platformers of its era, found charm in making you stick around through each punishing death. Developer Mechanical Head Games has modernized that approach to challenge with
Cyber Shadow by making something that lives up to the legacy of those retro games, while also feeling approachable and fair.
Cyber Shadow is a 2D action-platformer that follows a cyber ninja named Shadow who has to save a dystopian city that’s been overrun by evil machines. As in most platformers, this means that I spend most of my time jumping over spikes, traps, and dozens of other obstacles, all while using Shadow’s katana to take out the robots that are in my way.