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

[mattack2]

"You can still get them..."

http://www.ifarchive.org/

There are some that various reviewers have said are as good as the Infocom games. Also, using the Inform programming language ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform ), you can write games that will play on all Infocom interpreters.

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.

2D is dead, this list proves it

[grumbel]

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.

Back in my day games were all 1D

[spun]

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...

How the hell can you...

[r_jensen11]

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!

Descriptive

[Boronx]

The gameplay itself is, in a word, weird.

That one word description is, in a word, non-descriptive.

Topic Summary

[Shabadage]

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.

Re:What about Maple Story?

[samwh]

49 million bots don't count.

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."