Who Says 2D Gaming is Dead?

Retro Gaming with Racketboy has up a feature looking at the best modern 2D games out there, all on the PlayStation 2. He highlights the best of every genre, from the modern classic RPG/beat-em-up Odin Sphere to the timeless beauty that is the Metal Slug series. "Disgaea: Hour of Darkness & Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories: Disgaea greatly resembles other strategy RPGs. Its isometric perspective, 3D battlefields, and nice-looking 2D characters are clearly reminiscent of most other games of this type, and on first impression, so is the game's turn-based combat system. However, you'll soon realize that this game actually plays very differently. The gameplay itself is, in a word, weird."

Comments

It will always be alive

[MLCT]

Despite having around a dozen modern games installed on my machine at the moment (and that ranges from Civ4, through HL2 and ending up at Simpson's Hit & run) I just spent the last two hours playing Lemmings. Enjoyable, engaging, straightforward and fun. I can play it while running 5 other things & it doesn't take over my system. I don't know what the "kidz" today would make of a basic 2D game like Lemmings - it would be interesting to see if games of that time really have something special, or if I am just being nostalgic.

Re:It will always be alive

[Iwanowitch]

Hmm, let me be the 10%... Shit games? Have you played some of the 'classics' of the new wave of IFs? Things like Photopia, All Things Devours, Slouching Towards Bedlam, Metamorphoses, Shade or Vespers? Or whatever the latest IF competition is going to yield?

Seriously, these things are worth your time. Not as big and time-consuming as the old Infocom classics, I agree. But they do what they have to do (entertain you for a few hours) and the price is right. Damn better than most of the commercial games these days.

Re:Disgaea

[mrchaotica]

So it all comes down to the question of what classifies a game as 3D? We have accepted that it is not the use of 3D models because many early games used 2D sprites. That really only leaves us with control mechanics.

Hey, just because the enemies in Wolf3D and Doom were sprites, doesn't mean they weren't 3D! Was their position described in terms of 2D screen coordinates or 3D level space? Did the levels have 3D geometry? Could you aim up and down, as well as left and right (thereby requiring vectors representing shot trajectories to be 3D)? Any of those things would cause the games to be classified as 3D, from a technical perspective.

Now, if you want to classify games instead by the way they look, lots of even really old games could be 3D. Take racing games on the Super Nintendo, for instance. Even though the console was entirely 2D, games like F-Zero and Mario Kart allowed apparent movement in all three directions (movement down the track, side-to-side movement, and jumping). Heck, Top Gear for the SNES even had hills! And even Pole Position had the same sort of perspective (but had neither jumps nor hills).

So, what's the answer? I say that either the distinction should be based on whether the game world is described in terms of 3D space (whether it uses sprites or not), or all of these games -- from Pole Position to Doom -- should be classified as "2.5D."