The summer of arcade now official over with the latest release of Shadow Complex.  I managed to get a quick fix to see why this game was hogging all the spotlight from Trials HD.   After taking out the first boss, I knew that this game was something special yet familiar.  Everyone seems to draw the comparison to Metroid and Castlevania; with no other games being mentioned beyond those two.  However, it should draw a comparison to every old school action platformer that encouraged exploration as a way to become powerful and to move on to the next stage of the game and to reach places you couldn’t reach before.  Games like Mega Man, and Blaster Master could fit into these molds as inspiration to Shadow Complex as well.

Though this article is not about what makes Shadow Complex a great arcade game, it’s about a growing trend or a changing of the guard.  The first mark of this trend was Warhawk released on the PSN.  Warhawk don’t share any similar game mechanics as Shadow Complex but, they both fall into a new way to approach bite size gaming.  Most games that have fallen on to both the PSN and Xbox Live have been either smaller casual experiences such as Flower, Flow, Pixel Junk Series, or nostalgia laced experiences ranging from TMNT to Street Fighter.  Now the time has come for Battlefield 1943, Warhawk, Trails HD, and Shadow Complex to be viewed as a level above what an arcade game  is perceived to be.

To be quite honest I would like to see more of these enriched bigger game concepts scaled down for both of these services.  We already seen that these types of games can indeed become profitableand be a huge hit among gamers.  Now we need developers to really start opening up the flood gates with more genres.   Let’s start to get RPG’s designed by Square or Namco for PSN and XBLA, fighting games being built by Capcom, or Tecmo.  It’s time to stop with the nostalgia of the past and present to the audience a new form of classic games that one day in the future could be looked back on with fond memories.  Lets all hope that this is not a short live trend and look forward to a bright gaming future.

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