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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."
Next question?
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.
Half the games on that list aren't even fully 2D, but 3D with restricted movement. The other half is made up of decade old series or derivatives from them (Street Fighter, MetalSlug). Original 2D games are near non-existent these days, except for a few ones left on the DS, but even there its mostly sequels or already 3D or well, both (Metroid, Zelda:PH).
I do love 2D games, but there really isn't much at all left these days, especially when you want original content instead of just some new food to celebrate nostalgia.
and that's the way we liked it! Oh, the times we'd spend in between shifts in the poison mines, playing Dots on a Line...
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
play Lemmings while running 5 other things? I have a hard enough time running 5 things within Lemmings, let alone 5 things in addition to that game!
The gameplay itself is, in a word, weird.
That one word description is, in a word, non-descriptive.
Play Command HQ online
Plenty of great 2-D games on Arcade all original .. suprised no one has mentioned them yet.
.. all under 50MB, not including the re-releases of old classics. And there's still a plethora of great 2D Flash games for free all over the internet. Plus the achievements drive me to play them (and re-play them) more than any other 2D game has before. I can honestly say that I haven't touched any of the Mario Bros. games after completion unless it was for nostalgia.
Aegis Wing - 2d Shooter for free dreamed up by a team of interns.
Alien Hominid - not just fun side-scroller but with a fantastic art style.
Heavy Weapon - Cute 2d shooter with a nice sense of humor.
Small Arms - Smash Bros.-esque multiplayer fighter with guns.
Those are just the ones I've played
It scared me into thinking the article was written by some idiot who though that the best 2d games were all on the PS2. Not the best 2D Games on the PS2. Anyone who thinks 2D games are dead should really look into the indie PC scene though. Aquaria (IGF 2006 Winner) is a beautiful game; and there are many others in development. Heartforth Alicia features some of the best 2d graphics I've seen in a while. http://www.tigsource.com/ You can find a ton of awesome 2d games on there.
The title of the Slashdot article itself is slightly misleading. Since when are 2D games even the exclusive dominion of the PS2? And how do they define 'modern'? Last 2 years? I can name off just oodles of (especially arcade) 2D games over the last 10 years, though, I suppose there are few for the PC or bad modern consoles these days, and few games (though particularly 2D) for any platform that actually try to be original. Many of those listed are just yet more basic rehashes. Even since Marvel vs. Capcom 2, the 2D landscape hasn't been all that barren. I know it's slightly offtopic, but I saw '2D gaming not quite dead?', and thought of one (PC) game that really stands out, and I still think it'd be of interest to Slashdot readers on the topic. In particular since most would theorhetically be viewing Slashdot via a capable PC, and not via PS2. ;b
Hammerfall. I'm not even sure how to describe it, aside from "there probably need to be more Russian gamemakers". It's a non-casual physics based game that is an interesting combination of action and adventure. It reminds me of the days when games were actually something to get excited about and actually buy. If I were to buy a game, say, 15 years ago, it was an investment. You were expecting many dozens of ours of entertainment out of the purchase price. There are plenty of games now where there's no reason to keep playing after the first time, and even that's a paltry 10-or-less hours while still being full price. Then again, that (and later) was also back when there were just oodles of sharewhere and freeware games that were decently entertaining and quite a few were a bargain at $5 or $10. But I digress. Hammerfall is just very...unique, innovative, and even if you don't care about the story, the gameplay is just sublime.
There's just something satisfying about taking your beat up Flying Contraption and *smacking* an attached hammer into someone at full speed, causing them to crash into the ground, break apart part of the level (yes, really), and catch itself (and other things) on fire. And the current 'demo' is a pretty complete game in and of itself, despite being pre-release.
It's a pipe dream, but a girl can hope that someday notions like "innovation" or "original" or "risky", actually return to the gaming proper, rather than something to be feared worse than death by companies looking to make an extra billion profit this year instead of spending a few lousy dollars taking a chance on the lost artform of games.
"A Goddess rarely smiles for she is forced by others to be an island unto herself." - Zephiris
49 million bots don't count.
What about the Animal Crossing series? Or does that count as "3D with restricted movement?" I'm not sure what you mean by that label - personally, I like (and consider 2D) anything that doesn't make me swing the camera around, because that confuses me and sometimes makes me dizzy. If it has a fixed camera angle, even if the graphics are 3D-ish and you have 360 degrees of freedom in your movement, it's 2D for most intents and purposes.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
So are a ton of Wii games, and probably more than half of all DS games. I love those two consoles, they are the last bastion of 2D gaming. After this generation ends, so does a huge part of 2D gaming. Even cell phones have 3D games now :-(
Not only is 3D not uniformly better than 2D, but 2D is very often better than 3D.
There is one genre where 3D is most often better than 2D: Car racers. There's one genre that doesn't work in 2D at all: FPS. Other than that, almost all games would be better off in 2D, in my opinion.
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."
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz