![]() ![]() As you’re going to need a big old power meter. Our advice is to “git gud”, and all that, but also to hoard as many gems (money) as you come across in each level. Shovel Knight games are accessible but tough. All set to that gloriously nostalgic, enchanced 8-bit aesthetic. That, in addition to the sprawling core adventure itself, means the end product includes an in-game music player for the ear-wormy chiptunes composed by Jake Kaufman ( Shantae) and Manami Matsumae ( Mega Man), a mammoth grab bag of achievements, a New Game+ mode, multiple flavors at launch (PC, 3DS and Wii U, with Mac and Linux versions to follow) and all the other stretch goals-a 4-player battle mode, a challenge mode, a gender swappable protagonist, and playable bosses-planned as free post-launch DLC updates.Graphically it’s the most impressive entry yet, with dramatic background flourishes. >The gamepad is washed in perspiration and slipping from my grip. By the time its funding drive wrapped on April 13, 2013, studio Yacht Club Games had amassed over $311,000. This is the best-case scenario when veteran game designers get roughly four times the amount of cash they asked for: Shovel Knight was conceived on a Kickstarter budget of $75,000. The game is bristling with all the features and additives you'd want in a "next-gen 8-bit" title. I pause next to a gap that's sparkling, tap a button while holding Up on the D-pad and cast my line: Did I mention you can fish for power-ups, too? Giant cauldrons suspended in the air fill and tip, fill and tip, spilling something that might be lava, or maybe it's sand-call it deadly either way. Ooze-green turrets that resemble the tips of subterranean drilling machines thrust into a troubled violet sky. I dash across battlements made of rectangles so perfect they seem like polished gems. It's retro yet hyper-real, the perfect realization of some long-ago 8-bit ideal that revels in its exactingly crude 8-bit-ness. There's something uncanny about seeing that happen on a big pixel-perfect screen. ![]() Shovel Knight looks like an NES game you've never seen, a time machine back to an alternate history where 8-bit NES games ran on 1920-by-1080 pixel flat-screens and employed advanced post-NES features like multi-scrolling backdrops alongside intricate animations. It's a calculated grab bag of trials and tribulations, a delightful surprise around every corner. ![]() It has chorus lines of flying enemies you must bounce off of to bridge chasms, enemies that materialize from nothing and creep toward you like magnetized cottonwood seeds, enemies that morph into bigger enemies and subject you to a multitude of withering attacks. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and why shouldn't it? Here's a nigh-Platonic realization of an 8-bit side-scroller, with platforms that spit fire or crumble at your touch, platforms that elevate endlessly, platforms that rocket across the room and leave you plummeting like Wile E. You've played this sort of game before it's just been a while. ![]() You almost inevitably fail, yet you revel in it, even after the dozenth attempt. Playing Shovel Knight, released today on PC, Mac, Linux, Wii U and Nintendo 3DS, is like chopping wood, only here the cords are split-second choices you make every microsecond. Training for a marathon or rolling through Oscar Peterson’s finger-tangling jazz exercises on my piano is kids' stuff compared to mastering this maddening, brilliant, heartless, utterly gorgeous throwback to the platform games of yore. I tell myself, "Just one more try," but who am I kidding? I could do this all night, partly because of how well it controls: Shovel Knight is a game that handles like a brick that handles like a Maserati. I want to call it quits, throw in the towel, chuck the gamepad at the towel. It's taunting me like a carnival barker, like a cheap prize dangling at the end of an arcade claw crane. ![]()
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