I was wondering recently why retro, low-res games are so popular in the indie gaming community and was hoping some of you could offer your opinions.
If you look around, an awful lot of games are deliberately pixellated, use tinny square sound effects like early consoles, and have similarly simple gameplay (ie not too many objects, as if the game were even designed for NES style hardware with limited processing). I understand that many people see NES/Megadrive/retro games as the 'glory' days of gaming when gameplay, not graphics, mattered (and disillusion of modern commercial titles) - but it seems disproportional. Why do so many people, the majority of indie game makers it seems, ignore the new creative possibilities modern technology allows for? For example, you can trivially create a thousand objects and barely see an FPS hit. Or you can mix a hundred sounds playing simultaneously and it has almost no impact on performance (none if your audio mixes on another core, which XAudio2 does). Or you can run several advanced layer effects and a modern graphics card won't even get lukewarm. This just makes me think of all the cool things I could do to make games more interesting.
I can think of a few reasons people stay retro. Low-res artwork is probably easier to do, as for the sound. Some people still use really crap computers, and you know your game can run on that as well. Maybe some other tools like Game Maker really start to creak under their own inefficiency if you try to get that far. Or just to try and reach in to the previously mentioned 'retro glory'. But of course the fact a game is retro doesn't necessarily mean it is good.
What do you think? If you still make retro style games, what is it that makes you want to keep to that style? What are the main detractors to hi-res gaming?