As most of you probably know, the newest Silkgames project "NEStalgia" has been in development for several months now with a couple of rounds of private tests already completed. So I'd like to divulge my thoughts concerning how I think the game is shaping up. Mostly in relation to how the tests have gone, how it relates to other games I've played, and the impact on the BYOND community that I hope that this game brings.

My job as a tester is to basically play through the game and say "hey this isn't working" when bugs crop up and post a little message describing the problem. With a handful of people doing a really good job of thoroughly testing the games' systems in this method, bug fixes and updated versions came out faster than in any other Silkgames project I've worked on before. But the real thrill for me is the progress that has been made in game mechanics. I probably spend more time nit-picking Silk about balance issues with spells and stats than anything else. And these were resolved just as fast as the general bug fixes had been.

It is rare for a game to get a stamp of approval from me when it comes to balance, but this definitely does. Being that the whole concept is about the game playing like an oldschool NES RPG, it's done a pretty fantastic job of achieving that. The four current classes (Soldier, Ranger, Cleric, Wizard) all are incredibly well balanced, with each possessing equal amounts of strengths and weaknesses. Then the strength of monsters and bosses are so far perfectly tooled to just skirt the edge from being neither a cakewalk, nor a grind-fest. A rare trait on any BYOND RPG, including Silk's previous titles.

I've been a big fan of classic console RPG's for most of my life, particularly the Dragon Warrior series, and to a lesser extent the Final Fantasy's. And while this game borrows concepts from the former (my all time favorite series), you can easily see aspects from numerous other titles as well. As I played this I would actually forget that I was playing a game on BYOND instead of an emulator, or even my old NES. But this is better because there is multiplayer! I hadn't actually had that retro feeling while playing a BYOND game since DWO. And while that was a fangame, this is all completely original, which impresses me all the more.


Now lately I've noticed a lack of good new BYOND games, I don't doubt that they exist, but they're few and far between. My favorite retort several years ago when people first started obsessing over Naruto fangames/rips was "wtf is a Naruto?" And that still kind of holds true today (concerning both the obsession of Naruto and my lack of knowledge about what the heck it's about). I don't care if people enjoy this or that anime fangame rip. But back in the days when that community was shoved aside in it's own niche, the system was ripe with far more lively and fun original games and even fangames that weren't based on rips or anime's.

My hope with NEStalgia is that it helps to provide a new (and old) standard for games that are worth being both developed and played in this community. That said, I hope to see a great showing when the game is finally released publicly!

We still have a bit more content to test out privately in the mean time though, so perhaps I'll make another post in the future about how things are progressing.