Cuphead makes me think of bootleg VHS tapes of old cartoons. The quality would be shoddy. I think people don’t really remember how bad a poor-quality VHS tape really looked. After a handful of viewings, you’d notice artifacts and glitches. The tape itself would become stuck during a rewind, requiring manual intervention with your own fingers. You’d try to reel it back perfectly, but it would inevitably fold on itself somewhere, and that crease would never fully flatten out again. When you’d watch the tape, you’d see a flaw in the screen at the same time the crease would pass through the player.
Audiophiles talk about lossless quality today. VHS tapes (and cassettes) were the best example of loss quality.
The irony is, these bootleg VHS tapes of old cartoons were likely the ones being repeatedly played the most. You might watch a VHS movie a few times. But 60 minutes of bootleg cartoons? That’s going on repeat.
Cuphead’s art style—the main reason to explore this world and play this game—takes cues from 20s/30s cartoons, but nobody living today watched these cartoons in a movie theatre with real film. If they’ve seen them at all, they’ve likely seen them because of bootleggers, and most of that would be on VHS. The nostalgia here is as much for 100-year-old cartoons as they are for the artifacts and flaws we saw on top of them.
And the makers of Cuphead knows this, because you can see these kinds of flaws in the graphics (it’s more CRT and film-reel flaws than VHS flaws, but I’m really nitpicking there, aren’t I?) The flaws are part of the presentation, flattened together as an art project as much as a video game.
The game itself is a shoot-’em-up with some floaty platforming. You mostly jump and move around to dodge attacks from enemies. There’s not a lot of strategy here besides dodge and shoot. Cuphead’s design strategy is to consider the level before a boss fight to be fat, and they’ve largely cut that part out.
But you won’t survive without figuring out enemy patterns, which you do by looking at the graphics a lot. And that’s what the makers of Cuphead want you doing anyway, because these are amazing graphics. So in that way, a shoot-’em-up is maybe a great way to get gamers to walk through an art gallery.
Screenshots: https://parosilience.tumblr.com/tagged/Cuphead
Audiophiles talk about lossless quality today. VHS tapes (and cassettes) were the best example of loss quality.
The irony is, these bootleg VHS tapes of old cartoons were likely the ones being repeatedly played the most. You might watch a VHS movie a few times. But 60 minutes of bootleg cartoons? That’s going on repeat.
Cuphead’s art style—the main reason to explore this world and play this game—takes cues from 20s/30s cartoons, but nobody living today watched these cartoons in a movie theatre with real film. If they’ve seen them at all, they’ve likely seen them because of bootleggers, and most of that would be on VHS. The nostalgia here is as much for 100-year-old cartoons as they are for the artifacts and flaws we saw on top of them.
And the makers of Cuphead knows this, because you can see these kinds of flaws in the graphics (it’s more CRT and film-reel flaws than VHS flaws, but I’m really nitpicking there, aren’t I?) The flaws are part of the presentation, flattened together as an art project as much as a video game.
The game itself is a shoot-’em-up with some floaty platforming. You mostly jump and move around to dodge attacks from enemies. There’s not a lot of strategy here besides dodge and shoot. Cuphead’s design strategy is to consider the level before a boss fight to be fat, and they’ve largely cut that part out.
But you won’t survive without figuring out enemy patterns, which you do by looking at the graphics a lot. And that’s what the makers of Cuphead want you doing anyway, because these are amazing graphics. So in that way, a shoot-’em-up is maybe a great way to get gamers to walk through an art gallery.
Screenshots: https://parosilience.tumblr.com/tagged/Cuphead