Ronin Rumble: Kyoto Wild Announced

Keep your ruddy great pixels, mate. They may signify 'retro' but don't mean nowt to me, as my interest always lay in early 3D worlds. Low-res textures and, even better, flat-shaded polygons are what jab and tug at my nostalgia glands. Kyoto Wild pleases me an awful lot, with the hard edges of 3D before we started gabbing about Gouraud shading being photorealistic, trees like something mangled with vertex manipulation in Worldcraft, and player models with obscenely high-poly hats that could easily appear in a Milkshape 3D viewport render posted to Planet Half-Life.

I'm also pleased because it's a four-player murderfest with one-hit-kill weapons including a fan.

Kyoto Wild sees retired ronin brawling around the dojos, courtyards, and festival halls of a town in feudal Japan, fighting with whatever's on hand, like swords, rakes and, yes, a fan. (I'm always excited by fan-fighting in martial arts movies, you may guess.) It's a four-player competitive brawler, fighting down until one ronin is left standing before the action moves to a new part of town.

"But Alice," you may wonder, "if all we have to go on right now is a handful of details and a few screenshots, isn't this excitement a bit premature?" Perhaps! But I should also mention it's being made by Teddy Diefenbach, a designer on Heart Machine's Hyper Light Drifter, the 2D action-RPG that our Nathan has quite enjoyed. Diefenbach probably knows a thing or two about good people-hitting, then.

And if people flipping their lids over visible pixels has somehow been cool and hip for years now, I'm allowed at least a few weeks of being excited by neo-primitive 3D (doesn't Skipping Stones look amazing?). I was young once too, you know. I can remember things from the '90s too, you know.