You might think it’s a
little unfair of me to add a game like Mercenary
Kings to this miniseries, by way of it being a shooter in the sole sense
that “it has guns”. But then again, I
could counter that by saying there was never any exact definition as to what
sort of shooter would appear in the ShootStravaganza. Given that there’s a third-person shooter
coming up, is it really so far-fetched to have a game that leans hard toward being an old-school 2D
platformer?
No. No it is not, good sir or madam.
Moving on to more
pertinent matters -- this game has sprites, and that makes me happy. I agree with the sentiment of a lot of
gamers, and think that sprites are cool…and on top of that, something precious
ended up being lost in the transition from 2D to 3D. I’ve got one of the later Breath of Fire games on my PS3, and the
animations there make me lament that that didn’t become the future of
gaming. Same goes for Street Fighter; I like (and still play) IV, but there’s just no beating the
marvel of Alex tearing his shirt, Sean’s two-fisted dragon punch, and pretty
much everything about Makoto and Elena.
A well-made sprite leads to a level of artistic expression that 3D can’t
always match. Or if not that, then it at
least offers something friggin’ cool.
So the same applies to Mercenary Kings, as you’d expect. I just wish there was more to it than that.