Team Fortress 2 parody, Gang Garrison, now considered polished.
Eight-bit ‘demakes’ are a growing fad in independent game development. They boil a modern game down to its core elements – along with vapourising most of the pixels and audio quality – essentially, recreating a recent game with the retro dial set to twelve. It’s basically the reverse of the modern, prettied-up remakes of old games we’re seeing, such as Bionic Commando Rearmed.
If designed well, they maintain the fun of the modern edition, and one of the newer titles to successfully pull this off is Gang Garrison. Version 2.0 of the free game was released today, along with a long enough list of improvements for the developer to now happily call it “a complete and polished game”. You can find the announcement and a little back story right here.
Gang Garrison takes Valve’s Team Fortress 2 and throws it in a 2D platform shooter using Game Maker. Surprisingly, it works really well, with the developer going so far as to include 2D versions of the real maps among its own. Many things are heavily simplified in comparison, such as the spy class can only shoot with a hand gun or go invisible and knife opponents, but this is all in the spirit of a fun and balanced demake.
It certainly helps that the developer has a playful sense of humour. Aside from the game’s name, it whipped out the thesaurus, calling itself ‘Faucet,’ the game’s launcher ‘Smoke,’ and appropriately renaming all nine classes, including ‘Overweight,’ ‘Runner,’ and ‘Firebug.’
It really is a load of fun, but there’s an annoying downside – terrible network code. It seems your character is entirely controlled server-side, so this makes for some extremely painful moments, such as when trying to move forward and jump up on a ledge, which requires timing. So, you’ll often end up in a pit which requires even more ledge jumping. The solution is to either host it yourself or find a low ping server – unfortunately, you can’t see the latencies when choosing a server.
Anyway, give it a whirl, particularly if you’ve played the game it’s parodying. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised, if only by the striking similarities.
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