Bomberman Act: Zero showed up on Xbox 360 in 2006 with a darker, more mature take on a series about cartoon characters blowing each other up inside a grid. It satisfied almost no one.
That flop is the whole argument in miniature. Bomberman had gotten by for decades on simple arena architecture and vibrant characters with no fine details. When explosions fill the battlefield, they’re fairly subdued. They’re also still fatal, and players keep coming back for the mayhem anyway.
The simplistic visual design gets the job done. The one time somebody reached for spectacle, the audience left.
Why the prettiest game in the room isn’t always the one you keep playing
Graphics matter in games. There’s no getting around it, and for many years they were one of the best reasons to buy a new console or pour money into a gaming PC. But there have always been games that didn’t bother competing for a spot at the head of the pack.
Their developers understood the value of a compelling gameplay loop, fiendish difficulty, multiplayer appeal and innovation long before those things reliably drew a crowd. So while everyone waits on the visual powerhouse that is Grand Theft Auto 6, it’s worth looking back at the games that won on everything else.
Nintendo shrank Link and fans lost it
At a Spaceworld event, Nintendo wowed crowds with early footage of the next Zelda. Link and Ganondorf looked much as they had in Ocarina of Time, only with more polygons.
Then Nintendo went back to the drawing board.
The next look at the project had Link shrunk down to child size. Gone was the gritty design, replaced by something closer to the cartoon drawings of Link that used to turn up in game instruction manuals. Plenty of vocal players were certain the series had jumped the shark.
A lot of them came around in the years after release. They came around again for the HD port on Wii U. And a Switch 2 update of The Wind Waker still sits near the top of a lot of wish lists, which tells you there’s more to a Zelda game than how it looks.
DuckTales got a fresh coat of paint and lost the plot
DuckTales drops Scrooge McDuck into colorful cartoon environments around the world. It was a pretty game from day one, with detailed environments that brought the cartoon to interactive life, but the real joy was the freedom to explore.
Years later, WayForward built a remastered and reworked version for newer platforms, complete with improved visuals and voice work from the original cartoon talent. On paper, an upgrade in every direction.
It didn’t resonate the same way. The visuals were better. The formula had always been about more than pretty graphics, and those other things turned out to be what mattered.
A sequel nobody at Capcom asked for
When the original Mega Man didn’t sell as well as Capcom hoped, its developers turned the follow-up into a passion project and built it without much interest from their employer.
What came out was Mega Man 2, one of the best games of the 8-bit era. The visuals were attractive for their time, sure, but players were more taken with the stronger level design, the rocking soundtrack and the expanded roster of robot bosses.
The series kept a large audience for the rest of the NES era while making only marginal improvements to its appearance. The formula did the work, one game after another.
The Final Fantasy that went backward on purpose
Final Fantasy games have tended to push visual boundaries, one after another. Final Fantasy 8 gave its memorable cast realistic models. Final Fantasy 9 followed it and went somewhere else entirely.
Its chibi characters were expressive and its world beautiful, though in some respects it played like a visual regression, one that Final Fantasy 10 corrected a year later. Even in a world that includes Final Fantasy 16, this much older entry remains a delight to play.
N+ is the console version of N, which started life as an Adobe Flash game before Metanet Software partnered with other developers to bring it to Xbox Live Arcade. The controls are extremely simple: run, leap, repeat, across hundreds of stages in treacherous and mostly barren environments. Nothing about it turns heads. The loop kept players there for dozens of hours.
Rodents, cities and the case for less detail
Before DMA Design became known for biting satire and 3D open worlds, before it made Grand Theft Auto and turned into Rockstar North, it had a few hits. The biggest was arguably Lemmings, a game about rodents rushing to the sea for one final swim.
You assign strategic roles to members of a lemming group and try to get as many of the critters as possible to a safe exit. The visuals were typically quite limited, and the design was better for it. Busy backgrounds and complexity would have risked burying the details that mattered, or stripping the characters of the personality the game needed to work.
SimCity popularized urban simulations and looked fine doing it, without ever being impressive. It found its audience by handing players control of a city and then making them deal with transit and economics. People sank dozens of hours into suburbs, industrial complexes and commercial districts, and nobody was thinking about framerate or 4K resolution. The creativity was the point. Nintendo worked with Maxis on a Super Nintendo port, and an NES version was planned and shown at CES 1991 before it was canceled.
Two games that never needed to grow up
Terraria, from developer Re-Logic, isn’t ugly. It isn’t visually impressive either, and it doesn’t have to be. Players show up to wander, craft, build, fight and mine. That’s the whole thing, and it works because it pulls together everything people want from a sandbox. The retro pixel art suits them fine.
Worms is the game that made a lot of players finally pay attention to Team17. It took simple turn-based strategy mechanics and wrapped them in a cute visual style that got players invested in a bunch of maniacal worms and their endless war. Backgrounds are detailed and the worms have personality. Since the Amiga days, the franchise hasn’t evolved much, and it hasn’t needed to.
The weapons of destruction are still the star of the show.
