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What Made Those Old, 2D Platformers So Great?
TheManagement writes "Many current developers of web games seem to have a fondness for 2D platformers. However, their desire to capture what made Sonic and Mario games so great is rarely achieved. In an attempt to breach that gap, Significant Bits takes a look at three common design principles that made those classic titles so enjoyable. 'To start off, the interface needs to be quick and responsive. Input should have an immediate effect on the character in order to foster a sense of full control. Granularity and different control techniques, i.e., pressing, tapping and holding, are also important as they provide a level of precision to the movement. ... Now, as far as the environments themselves, it's not a coincidence that they're often filled with all sorts of slides, bridges, trampolines, ladders, etc. In a way, they're simply playgrounds for the player, both literally and figuratively. They're catered to the moveset, and they enhance the flow of the game.'"
The fact that you were younger and less jaded then.
One word: nostalgia.
Keep your eyes to the sky.
That horrible wasting-mind disease known as nostalgia. On average, the same percentage of platformers were good as, for example, the percentage of first-person shooters that are good. The thing is, people still play the good platformers-- like Mario 3 or Sonic 2, and as a result, they completely forget about the thousands of crappy platformers out there.
If you want a more even perspective, take a look at Something Awful's ROM pit: http://www.somethingawful.com/d/rom-pit/ They review the bad platformers you've forgotten.
Now, can we please stop seeing topics like this based entirely on nostalgia?
Comment of the year
What I absolutely hate the most about any modern 3d game is that even a relatively beefy machine, I get a noticeable LAG on the input, even if framerates are good, unless i set graphics options to low/low/low etc .
It makes my games unplayable, and I lose interest because it prevents any kind of immersion.
Those games were terrible compared to today's standards. Extremely dull. However, people seem to rate games according to how good they were for their time, rather than how good they are now. That's why the "best games of all time" lists should really be renamed "best games of their time".
2D is a superior approach for such games because they allow you to see everything in your vicinity, makes moving simple, and so on. It's just the better approach for such games.
That's the problem with the novelty effect of 3D, it had us under the delusion that 2D was a thing of the past and that everything had to be 3D, as much as possible, as if it was something you couldn't get too much of.
It surely has a name, but that's just a common thing when a novel technology/technique/approach appears to believe that it can replace entirely anything else. Which means I believe soon enough when the novelty of 3D graphics will have died for good then we'll see ourselves definitely sticking to 2D for certain types of games. Just because sometimes it's better (see Sonic on Genesis vs Sonic in 3D)
You just got troll'd!
Older video games did not require much sacrifice to play. Because your social life was not significantly affected, playing them was less of a lifestyle decision than it is with today's video games, which require more serious consideration. I don't remember anyone worrying that their roommate might be addicted to Pac-Man.
Especially the Atari 2600 version. Man that sucked.
Seriously
*button *button Fail
*button *button Succeed ENDORPHINS *button *button Fail
*button *button Succeed ENDORPHINS *button *button Succeed ++ENDORPHINS *button *button Fail ANGER
Continue ad infinitum
The trick is to space out the fails such that you don't give up to quickly, but not so far apart that you don't break the flow every now and then. The other trick is to have enough wiggle in your gameplay such that success can be defined many ways, not just winning.
Oh no, carp came in when I flooded the plump helmet field, there are skeletal elephants blocking the caravan, and someone has an odd mood for jello? I'm screwed! *massive endorphin rush*.
I could waste eons on Asteroids and Tetris, and hold lengthy arguments with the young whippersnappers about how "back in my day...."
Face it, whatever's from your childhood is gold, no matter how weak it may look compared to today, it still wont' lose that lusture in your mind.
They weren't great, most of them. Anyone who grew up in the 80's and 90's videogame era, knows that at least 90% of those old 2d platformers... were truly, brokenly awful.
Fortunately, those are rarely remembered - the reason why we consider them 'so great', is because it's only the good ones that get remembered and replayed, years later, with any fondness.
Without 3D, and often without mouse, you got people doing advanced A-B-B-A-Select-Start-A whatever combos to play the game. Now it's a lot more focus on being in the right position to fire their gun or do the jump and kick. Yes, 2D games are great and fun in many ways - but they're also quite limited. Don't get me wrong, I loved the old isometric games, but I also love the freeform 3D capability of rotating the view, zooming the view to watch exactly what you want from the angle you wnat. Very often the flat 2D battles would involve exactly one tactic, moving in the same way around the screen each time. In 3D you might still have much of the same but it's always more different, more varied. I think a good eaxmple would be old Super Mario vs Super Mario Galaxy - essentially the same game in 2D and 3D. I much prefer the 3D version. Same with King's Bounty: The Legend which I think is a much underrated - the freeform 3D makes it so much better than old HOMM games. Sorry, but the only time I think 2D is that great is when I put on my big old nostalgia glasses.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
One of the thing that made these 2D scroller feel so great was the perfect scrolling synched with the "VBL" (Vertical Blank Line). There were many amazing 2D scrollers, for example, on the Amiga. The screen could refresh at either 50 or 60 Hz depending on your location (europe and US, for example, had monitor with different default refresh rate).
This is not at all "nostalgia": it's not something I'm making up. It is not an opinion, it is a *fact*. You cannot argue with a fact.
A game run on a system that refresh the screen 60 times per second, where the game's background move by 1 pixel (or 2 [1,2, 3, 4 used to work fine]) at every refresh at a very special "smooth" feeling that has *never* been matched.
It wasn't just Sonic's great control, the cool game elements, the great "simplification" that 2D brings: it was also a very special visual "feeling" due to having the game's logic intrinsically tied to the hardware it was run on.
Years after my "Amiga 2D scrollers time", I was playing competitive Counter-Strike, using "low-poly" mods to enhance the framerate of my (sucky) PC. I reached 99 fps but 3D games will never *ever* reach the smoothness that a good 2D scroller tied to the hardware had.
The young generation shall never understand this. I'm probably very bad at explaining it. It's something you need to see to understand what the "old grandpa's" are "nostalgic" about.
Just like demo from "the scene", way before it was called "the scene" had amazing effects that newer demo simply cannot match.
Sure, you have 3D effects using 100 millions polys/sec running at 800 fps (just half-joking) but the "smoothness" of the good old 2D Amiga demos has never been matched.
Food for thoughts.
This AC mostly agrees with the parent.
However, I think Mirror's Edge has shown that 3D platforming can work, too. It adhered to the same design principles while being 3D, and the platforming felt very solid.
As for the controls, they were relatively simple, input had an immediate effect, timing was important, and controls could be combined into sequences for more complex stunts (e.g. wallrun + turn 90 + jump + turn 180 + jump from opposing wall to quickly reach that roof during the New Eden chapter). The environment was pretty much designed to provide a sense of flow with the available moveset, after the player has practiced a bit.
Too bad the story and the tacked-on combat system sucked. I had great fun with the platforming parts.
-AC
Braid, World of Goo, N+, etc.
The article talks about 2D games like they were things of the past and no good ones existed today...
Because they were the firsts of their kind to be good enough.
Mario and Sonic are not great for me, because i was born too late. But they are good enough to be remembered as the best games of their kind.
I can think of a good list of reasons why 2D platform games were (and to an extent, still are) great.
Firstly, I'd say replayability. The best-looking game of the time was just another game once you finished it. Most games of the time opted for difficulty settings, which provided a sense of replayability without significant design challenges (adding more monsters is easy). I myself became burnt out on those, because they got repetitive and nothing was new beyond a plot twist at the end; I enjoy the lengthy, involving games.
Secondly, I'd say that the designers of the time cared about the human factor. Yes, they paid attention to precision control, which is something I miss these days. They made doing that instantaneous joystick yoga both fun and challenging! They also made it easy to understand the game mechanics. The KISS principle does work!
Thirdly, I'd say that the designers of the time enjoyed level creation. It was how you created the game to maximize the enjoyment and involvement of the player that mattered. Yes, better graphics matter, but when it comes at the expense of bettering that involvement, it becomes increasingly less excellent.
Fourthly, Gameplay designers (call them level designers, or UI designers, or whatever) should go back to using their little kids to test them on. I sincerely doubt that Pac-man was made by a jaded, mind-in-the-rut designer, just as I doubt that the Sid Meyer franchises (which I thoroughly enjoyed) was an exercise in doing the next "good enough" thing.
Fifthly, it wasn't the designers who disappointed us, it was us who disappointed the designers in accepting the stupid titles out there as "okay". Once it was lucrative to just manufacture the next good enough thing, the truly unique titles almost vanished. Perhaps we shrugged off those oldies in the name of "growing up", but isn't gaming about enjoying the kid in all of us?
The old designers created things that stood out. Perhaps the fact that there wasn't that much out there helped. Aside from that, though, they created things that you could put your mind to, and as a player become engaged in that world. Even if it wasn't quite as unique as the next title, it was still enjoyable. How many us have played Solitaire? It wasn't at all unique, but it was engaging and easy to sneak between tasks.
There are no perfect answers, only the right questions. More questions at http://foresightandhindsight.blogspot.com/
One of the things that make 2-D platformers stand out today is that you don't feel limited. When you played Super Mario World you don't think about the limitations of the SNES, there are no load times, rarely any lag, etc. Most 2-D platformers were abstract, you didn't think "Oh, Mario's mustache isn't moving realistically", you concentrated on the game. When you got to the SNES/Genesis era, it seemed like any limitation was banished forever for 2-D games, you got bright multi-colored visuals, music that was quite catchy, you had no load times (unlike CD based consoles), and with expansion chips such as the Super-FX the games really got more impressive as the system went on. When games started moving into 3-D and realistic 3-D, things started to get more realistic. They moved out of the abstract. You noticed that Mario was really blocky, round visuals were rendered as squarish, etc. They felt limited. While in a 2-D game you had total freedom within the course till the end, early 3-D games had to constrain you. Even though you could see hills as far as the eye could see, whenever you ran after them you were hit by an invisible wall. The hardware also felt limited, with the rise of CD/DVD based games you introduced loading times, this took you away from being totally immersed for 5 seconds and somewhat ruined the effect you were in another world.
Today things are starting to get better, 3-D seems less limiting then before, yet with the rise of HD TVs, faster CPUs, etc. I doubt that we can really get seemingly unlimited 3-D games until close to the next revolution, be it true 3-D, VR, or something different. The rise of flash memory, faster drives and HDs in game consoles have cut down on load times too. But still 3-D doesn't seem as limitless as 2-D platforming was.
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I always wonder how much of it was back then the newness of the concept, and now the nostalgia of the era. I've sat down an played older classic platformers, and with the rare exception of a few undoubtable great classics like Mario, Zelda, etc... most of the games I spent endless hours on as a kid now seem repetitive and so simple.
But the good 2d games had some good points..
no odd lag, because it was dedicated. Crisp use of the monitor.
in Donkey-kong knowing when to acsend a ladder is critical.
in Battlezone (3d but extra-old).. using the blocks right was a monster.
in Super Mario.. knowing that you will land on ground was a trick.
oh.. and death was usually one mistake away..
"Pac-Man Fever" was only a song, not a medical diagnosis.
Now theyre not world of warcraft... but imagine WOW with oldschool latency.
----of course the quarter-usage might bankrupt people.
Storm
I find many modern 3D games have a low "button-press-per-minute" count. Whilst older games always had something going on almost every second, recent titles just get the player to sprawl around for hours. Give me an older title such Bank Panic or Smash TV (both arcade) over a modern 3D shooter any day.
For the games which aren't like that, then they're just too easy I find as well. I've recently bought great playing games such as World of Goo and Zombies Vs Plants, and although they are great fun while they last, it's over all too quickly - more proof that games today are geared towards the masses for 'throwaway' purchase like a McDonalds. It's pretty sad.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
IMHO most 2D games (not only platformers) were great because deveopers focused more in the gamming factor ( Fun + Gameplay ) instead of the graphics. In some part development was easier to the difference between most computers in those days were more about space and not raw performance. Things changed a LOT in game development. Mario , Contra , Sonic ...
Those were the days...
On the old games, they actually ended when you made 3 critical errors. The whole idea was to get better each time you played to get further into the game and possibly beat it.
Today all games are about experience gaining and gold hording. Play lousy for 6 months, get to level 90 so you can kill the creatures with one click. Oh, and the game only ends when you stop paying your monthly bill.
When people measure game performance they usually only measure framerate. Nobody measures control latency, so this encourages design choices that trade responsiveness for framerate. Things like alternative frame rendering in multi-GPU setups instead of split frame rendering, and triple or higher n-buffering. Even if it's not a conscious choice, people get away with lazy high latency design because by nobody mentions it in reviews, so by the time the buyer finds out it will be too late. In complicated engines with many layers of abstraction it's very easily to accidentally increase latency:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1942/programming_responsiveness.php?print=1
Latency is just as important as framerate for feeling of immersion.
So a good number of people have stated nostalgia, and out of those the majority have said that 2d platformers were mostly or all bad. Yet I've not seen any examples of how or why.
I call bullshit.
Platformers have continued to achieve success, and while they're far less common than they used to be, many of them have received rave reviews, and deservedly:
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night(1997)
Contra: Shattered Soldier(2002)
Neo Contra(2004)
Psychonauts(2005)
Bionic Commando Rearmed(2008)
Mega Man 9(2008)
And there's many more that I haven't listed. I think what made those games great back in the day is what makes them great now - simple to interact with, but challenging enemies and environments. Great soundtracks, great graphics, great fun.
For me, it's the total difference in attitude. Back then, I was a kid with no disposable income to spare. Your parents rented you some games from the video store for the weekend and you played the hell out of them. Very seldom did you get the exact games of your choice, so you learned to just deal with what you got. It didn't matter of they were clunky or poorly designed, or if the music was no better than 8-bit blips composed by someone totally tone-deaf who figured the NES's "noise" channel was a substitute for any instrumentation; you were on a holy mission to beat the game(s) within the rental period. Eventually, you even acquired a taste for some of the crappier ones that would later manifest as nostalgia. You'd give anything, any genre a chance. The information just wasn't available the way it is today. If Nintendo Power said it was awesome, you prayed to the greater gaming deities that it would show up in the ma and pa store that had a game rental shelf. If some kid on the playground said "Sega does what Nintendon't", you bashed his head in with a rock. It's just how it was.
Now I just find myself cherry-picking for the AAA titles, going for the well-reviewed games, or even following the PR hype train. Games with glitches like "all enemies inevitably randomly lose the will to live and walk into a wall before arbitrarily phasing out of existence" no longer have the chance to penetrate the market, or our nerd hearts.
The 2D games some of us remember were our foundation and our base comparison for today's games. Yes, there is a certain sense of nostalgia in our remembrances but overall the play style of the games was suited to the evolution of games.
I remember playing my first FPS and while I was blown away by being immersed in the game it was also difficult to remember the variety of commands needed to play the game. I was used to a very limited set of options or infinite options (text based RPG). Having to remember key combinations was frustrating until I got used to it.
I got out of playing computer and console games years ago. I was lucky enough to completely skip the MMORPG thing and instead spend my time making and doing things away from the computer. But yes, I also remember many games fondly and still play my favorites on my Atari 2600 console from time to time. They're still fun and that's all that matters to me.
Now get of my intarwebz you young whipppersnappers.
There just wasn't anything better at the time. My generation.. it's all about how great Quake/Doom/Duke Nukem and how nothing lives up to the gameplay they offered. The more immediate generations will proclaim how nothing before Halo was any good and very little after has come close.
20 years from now we'll have the same thing.
(personally, I think the games we have now are the best (playing/looking/story(not everything of course)/etc) we've ever had)
The speed of sonic, or mario jumping / ducking bullets or onto moving platforms - you could test your hand-eye skills without getting a headache. They should make a spectacularly good looking 3d platformer. I remember playing sonic 3d recently and returned it after an hour. It didn't take as much skill / speed I felt.
Also, dare I say it - the graphics are capable of looking better? They can look hand drawn animation, not like bulky blocks put together. Although this distinction is fading now.
Button presses per minute has somethign to do with it.
"You know you don't act like a scientist, you're more like a game show host." Dana Barret
If some kid on the playground said "Sega does what Nintendon't", you bashed his head in with a rock. It's just how it was.
Y'know, I'll admit to my fair share of 16-bit zealotry back in The Day(tm), as well as my then and current rampant dirty hippy Nintendo fanboyism, but that line makes me glad I didn't grow up in your playground.
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
I think that production costs make it impossible to make many games. Fewer games means less diversity. Less diversity means less chance that a game will get made that I really like.
I remember the wide variety of games that were out there when I was in my twenties. Now, there is so much sameness. Duke Nukem, Call of Duty, Doom, . .. they're all fundamentally the same.
Open source holds super-great potential, I think. A good project leader can develop a good object-oriented skeleton and developers can fill in the rest. Too bad that's not happening with wargames!
We played dodgeball with bricks. You get good, fast.
Maybe people here should actually read the article before commenting on it. The article isn't just your average list of top ten games from the '80s, or "boy, games sure suck right now" rant. The author actually lays out some decent guidelines for what makes a good sidescroller, given the benefit of experience.
So many of the posts seem to be parrotting the "nostalgia" line, while refusing to acknowledge that some of those games were just plain *good*. Super Mario Bros. 3 and Mega Man 2 are good games, and the existence of Pac Land doesn't make them any less good. The article does a pretty good job of explaining why.
I disagree, the 2d platformers (at least the post-SMB ones) tend to hold up very well even now. They're probably the genre with the least real evolution, you can play SMB1 without feeling it's missing much from the later games in the genre. Sure, that by itself could mean the genre as a whole is outdated but at least to me the games are still a lot of fun (at least the good ones).
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Well, first there's the time filter previously mentioned on /. - how many members of the general public can remember a playwright other than Shakespeare?
Second, the game designer has a better grasp of how the player will approach things due to a smaller number of states the player can be in - for example, just about everyone who plays Cave Story for the first time will die on the fourth spike.
Third, situational awareness. If something hits you, you know what it is, and if you die you know exactly the reason why. I believe Valve commented on this during the Sniper update.
nostalgia
No. For one, as my sibling has noted, that couldn't be it at the time. As a poster further down has eloquently noted, "button Fail! button button Succed! ENDORPHINS!!!"
I hold that over the last twenty years, computer games haven't been getting more fun to play. They've gotten better looking, better sounding and more imersive (it's cool how the B button on the wiimote feels kinda' like a trigger...).
But I think there's a limit to how far you can push the endorphin high. (Isn't it dopamine?)
If that's correct, I predict that over the next twenty years, computer games will not become substantially more fun to play. (yes, that's vague. I don't study media science, so do not sue me.)
Another poster has claimed it was the lack of alternatives. I think there's a bit of truth to that: I think people will be unhappy when they get a good deal if they know they could have gotten a better deal. So once newer, better alternatives to our current games come up, we will (broadly speaking) want the better games rather than the perfectly fine but not-quite-as-good games. This desire may not be strong enough to overpower nostalgia, though.
Some 2D games provided non-linearity. You could take many routes and finish the game how you wanted. In some games like Commander Keen you could go around picking the maps you want first. Today's Prince of Persia is similiar to this in a way but the length of exploration puts you off. Those games had a variety of environments with different characteristics which changed quite easily. Partly because the designers thought it would be cool to have a lava or snow level. Dungeon Siege I brought in elements from this and is partly a reason why I enjoyed that particular game. 2D platform games didnt provide repetitive, mundane, exploratory tasks. Many games had nice challenges in every segment of the level. But partly some segments were really hard to play and if they didn't have a save feature, you'd be put off by them. Some people however like this feature and say that it gives you a sense of achievement when you finish them. 2D games provided different, weird characters. Not weird like the scary creatures in Quake 4, but funny, entertaining and weird. They weren't like Quake where you had to gnash one monster after another. You wouldn't be too involved in trying to kill an imp that would jump out from nowhere. The level characters are easy to play. Not like Quake where you have to keep firing at a creature and not get nuked by it. This makes 2D games unrealistic but somewhat easier to play. The bosses were hard to play. And you had to think how to hit the boss. Mostly today's bosses just have a huge amount of health points. That sucks. 2D games had level physics which you could enjoy, experience while jumping, flying or swimming. It doesnt feel the same way in 3D games. The games were bright and lively. Not sophisticated lighting in dark rooms. It had a feel good factor to it. For example, many people might prefer Quake 4 to Doom 3. 2D games were small, didn't demand too many things. They were and are fun to make. Nobody needs to spend a fortune creating the characters or textures or environments in a 2D game. Nobody needs to spend involve themselves in advanced graphics techniques which involve shaders and lighting and what not. It's not something many programmers would like to handle. Even the most advanced 2D games are simpler to program. Today, an individual with MS Paint (or the more advanced GIMP) and a free compiler (C/C++/C#/Pascal or whatever) can create a simple 2D game which he can play, share with his friends and distribute. This isn't possible with a professional 3D game anymore. Today, 3D games with a lot of realistic visuals always compromise on realistic physics for playability. Which brings me to the point that 2D games defined how 3D games must be played. The amount of complexity needed in rendering a 3D game doesnt justify its' playability.2D games were always about playability.
-Karthik
Not so. My son (who is 5) enjoys 2D Mario games on the Nintendo better than he does Mario 64 on the N64 (the first of the genre to have full 3D, IIRC). And he enjoys the "mini-game" Donkey Kong throwback in SMB3 better than those.
Hell, when I was a kid of 10-13 I remember spending quite a few hours playing old Atari games when I had newer stuff available to me. The games had to be better because the graphics didn't compensate for a poor game experience by 'distracting' the player.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Normally, I would agree with you except for the incredible sales figures of New Super Mario Bros and the fact young gamers are still playing the older 2D games. I don't think there's a secret to their popularity--they're fast to get into and require no prologues or tutorial missions. You can stop playing at any time and easily jump back into it later. It's simple fun.
They were the best games AT THAT TIME. Ther was almost nothing else but 2d, so companies made the best they were able to do.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Nostalgia is a failure of memory.
Most of those games were built when space was a luxury on a chip, and processing power was a luxury on the console. To make a decent game, it just had to have kick ass gameplay. Also, the games were just as expensive as now, so with inflation they were even more... to get people to buy a game, it had to be even more incredible to play. Finally, The gaming market was much smaller, so the appeal of games had to be better to keep people engaged in getting new games. Today's video game market is completely different -- space and processing power are commodities, and so games just occupy an insane amount of both in an attempt to capture someone's attention long enough to get them to make the purchase. The game doesn't have to be any good, because the mfg will come out with another "new" game in 2 weeks since they cost almost nothing to make now.
Games then were incredible AND games now are not as incredible. 2D games bring tiny hand-drawn cartoons to life. 3D games rely largely on computer-generated stuff. Like tubes vs. solid state, there will always be fans of either, but you can't argue with the effectiveness of the original product. Jet planes are awesome, but not as awesome relative to their environment as the first planes were. It's that simple.
stuff |
The fact that you were younger and less jaded then.
Plus, we're older and nostalgic now.
Okay, SNES Super Metroid rocks too.
Not so. My son (who is 5) enjoys 2D Mario games on the Nintendo better than he does Mario 64 on the N64 (the first of the genre to have full 3D, IIRC).
To be fair, those early 3D implementations of traditionally platformer titles were pretty terrible.
I was the first kid in my school to complete Super Mario Bros. 3. Damn, I was proud... I was also a nerd, so this achievement was kept quiet for fear of beatings... Anyway, the thing that made me play and play and play was the same reason that mountain climbers give - because it's there. I wanted to beat my score, to be better, to beat the machine. It was a challenge. I've not RTFA yet... but if you ask me modern games are great, but they're a totally different a paradigm. Normally you play a game to the end, watch the FMV and say "cool". Rarely do you play the entire game again, there's no replay value in most of them. I'd say that MMOs and games like guitar hero are the closest to those old 2D platformers - you play the same game over and over to be better, just for the shear hell of it and nothing more.
If some kid on the playground said "Sega does what Nintendon't", you bashed his head in with a rock. It's just how it was.
Too true. Back at school, the only thing any of my class cared about was playing marbles, and debating Sega vs. Nintendo (sometimes physically).
Sega 4 Lyf. <3
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
Its the playability of them how easy they were to play and to compete. Take Pong for instance, (the 4 player version). This was a game me and my friends would play for hours. For the non two player games, like KaBoom, it was how easy the game was to play, we would take turns seeing who could get the highest score, also Games like duck hunt, Nintendo added the gun, (KaBoom, and Pong, also had the paddles which offered the user a alternate tool to use, and the fact that they worked well made the games worth playing, as Nintendo had the Power Glove which was cool, and we wanted it to work but the reality of it was it did not work very well and thus ended up collecting dust. So there are a few factors on what makes a game fun, One is replay value, (how much fun the game is to play after beating or playing for a few hours). Most two/four player verses games automatically have this factor. Then there is the Ease of play factor, How easy it is to grab the controller and rank against someone who has been playing for years. and lastly the controller factor, how well the controller responds to user input, to do exactly what the user intended it to do. Say going up or down while playing pac-man. Last but not least would fall under the controller, How much the controller HURTS after several hours of intense game play.
Left-Right-Forward-Back-point-your-gun-at-the-bad-guys-and-SHOOT!!
Combine that and a few basic rules of gameplay - "No, if you let your ship get captured, you can shoot the ship that captured it, then you'll have TWO ships firing" - and you have a game you can enjoy even if you do get your ass kicked the first few times. This was very important when quarters were at stake.
I actually fell out of gaming when Mortal Kombat-style games came to dominate. I couldn't be arsed to climb the learning curve. ("No you gotta jump and kick at the same time" "I am dammit!, Aw, fuck this...")
NGOML!
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Hey, Samah. Quick. What's that behind you?
Check it out: I'm programing this new awesome game... it's bound to become a classic. It only runs on the latest equipment - You'll need about 8000 GHz of Processing power, a 9000 TB graphics card, 20,000 TB of RAM, and a hard drive with twice the storage capacity of the entire library of congress. You'll probably need to daisy chain about 400 super computers together in order to meet the system requirements, though I've had success with running the whole thing on a beowulf cluster of quantum computers, recovered from a flying saucer crash. The game sucks up power real fast, so be sure to clear the software with your local power company, as playing the game for more than 5 minutes may cause your entire state to black out. But don't worry - each copy of the game comes with a 20% off coupon for a personal nuclear reactor (game totally off the grid!).
The game's sound effects have been carefully assembled by hand using a telharmonium, and the sounds are recorded so crystal clear, they contain frequencies not even a flea can hear. To get the full effect, you'll need a 28 channel surround sound system with at least 4000 Watts of juice.
The game natively runs in a resolution so high, the pixels are sub-atomic. No display available on the market today can totally reproduce the clarity of this game, so it's best to have the images beamed directly into your brain, using the virtual reality device from "The Matrix".
And gameplay? Well it's basically a clone of pong. But while your playing it, you feel totally immersed!
With 3D (and starting with Mortal Kombat fighters) things started to get horribly complicated, as another poster pointed out. You threw the ball, you were the ball, you were the football player catching the ball.
But none of this made the game better long-term.
I think the Wii solved this by making the controller much more intuitive. Right now, I'm having a ton of fun on the iPhone with a game called iFighter. It's a ton of fun. And 2D. But 2D with the accelerometer.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Mario 64 terrible? It's critically acclaimed as one of the best games of all times.
You can immediately get into games like Super Mario World. You press left, and your guy goes left. Press right and your guy goes right. You don't need to look at a manual to figure out what key does what, and figure out how to manipulate the camera to see what you need to see. You just play, and the guy responds just how you want him to.
Most of the older 2d games had an actual story! More effort was spent on writing a good story for the game, than was put into grafx and sound.
As time has gone on, fewer and fewer games have a really engaging story. They instead rely on explosions and fast paced action to keep people's attention.
Games like Kings Quest, Secret of Monkey Island, Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest, Loom, are few and far between. There are the occasional games that have a well written story (Halo) But most are just hack and slash.
Now it is all about how realistic the game looks, not how engaging the story is.
It seems to me that as technology advances, many titles focus on looking and sounding amazing, never mind the total lack of gameplay or even fun. I know it's not a platformer, but I have more fun playing Zelda 3 for SNES than pretty much any modern game. The same goes for most of the mario titles, sonic, mega man, castlevania. Even older RPGs are still a lot of fun, like phantasy star 2+ for genesis, FF1, dragon warrior, etc. I think that nowadays so much more time is spent on the graphics and sound, something which had its limit and was fixed back in the day, more time was made available for make a game technically well made, responsive, fun to play.
My comment is in both the subject and text area
What bugs me nowadays is that every game has this huge video introduction, then some more between levels, then some more between bosses... I mean, wtf is this? This sucks. I really do not care about the story, I just want it to be fun. Oh, and take sonic, for example. One of the latest sonic games for the wii... sonic unleashed? It had these amazing 2D parts. Why the hell didn't they just make the whole game like that?
If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a brick.
To be fair, those early 3D implementations of traditionally platformer titles were pretty terrible.
Hey! I enjoy Jumping Flash! very much!
People say it's "nostalgia." I don't think so. Those old video games were simpler.
Controllers now are like Space Shuttle controllers or something. Too many buttons, too complicated. I must have given up on the modern console games around the time of Madden for the Nintendo 64. The N64 controller had a whole bunch of buttons (maybe 15?!) and Madden used them all. I could not keep them all straight.
Now these games try to be so realistic that all they end up doing is reminding you how pathetic you are that you are sitting in front of a TV, controlling these little virtual men, rather than going out in a field and tossing a ball or coaching some kids or something.
These high-end console games have just gotten too complicated. Some people have figured this out, though, and are cashing in:
* Wii. People on Slashdot love to make fun of it. I guess they're the same type of folks who thought iPod was lame compared to some junk from Creative Labs. But Wii is simple. You don't have to sit around for hours just learning how to work the thing.
* iPhone apps. Simple, simple games. Cheap to develop, they sell for cheap, and I heard a story about how a guy who wrote one of those things cashed in big. Similarly my girlfriend was sitting around for hours playing Brick Breaker on the BlackBerry.
* Online games. No I do not mean WoW kind of stuff. I mean Yahoo Games kind of stuff, like Text Twist. Simple games.
So really I would say that the old 2D games are still around. They are just a lot cheaper and more plentiful now. Now they are cell phones, iPhones, and Yahoo Games and the like. I am willing to bet that between Wii, iPhone apps, and simple online games, there is cumulatively much more time spent on simple games than on this hyped up console stuff that takes hours worth of training to get anywhere on.
A Slashdot fallacy I see all the time is conflating "gaming" with "several hundred dollar consoles" and "fifty-dollar games," which is why people say "there aren't any games on Linux." There are plenty of simple games on Linux, and there are plenty of old 2D style games still being played now. It's only a relative few people who are obsessed with these expensive, all-consuming games.
Penny - plain text accounting
That's cool and all, but does it run on Linux?
= Imagination!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDAM5lSPCwk
Scroll forward to 1:10 or so and watch pong in action!
Back in the day, there were only so many things that the hardware could do. The lack of 3D environments meant that there were no camera angles to fuck up. Graphical limitations meant that the developers had to focus on the gameplay itself rather than trying to hide a shitty game behind pretty graphics and cutscenes. Memory limitations meant that level design had to be well thought out and the developers had to keep things simple and to the point.
However, perhaps the biggest change between now and then is that back then games were actually hard to beat. There was no sense of entitlement in games. Levels had time limits, you had limited lives, continues were almost unheard of, and if save points even existed they were few and far between. You didn't spend twenty hours playing through a game once because it was just a collection of cutscenes strung together with painfully easy gameplay. You spent weeks playing levels over and over until you actually master the game. Keep missing that jump in the fourth level of world eight? Well, by the time you can master it you can finish the other seven worlds in your sleep. These days it's pretty much impossible to not finish a game unless you just get bored and stop playing.
For me, it's the total difference in attitude. Back then, I was a kid with no disposable income to spare. Your parents rented you some games from the video store for the weekend and you played the hell out of them. Very seldom did you get the exact games of your choice, so you learned to just deal with what you got. It didn't matter of they were clunky or poorly designed, or if the music was no better than 8-bit blips composed by someone totally tone-deaf who figured the NES's "noise" channel was a substitute for any instrumentation; you were on a holy mission to beat the game(s) within the rental period. Eventually, you even acquired a taste for some of the crappier ones that would later manifest as nostalgia. You'd give anything, any genre a chance.
Dude. its so true. The weekend mission was to beat the game before you brought it back. Ahh those were the good days. can you even rent games anymore?
Mario 64 is probably one of the best 3d platformers made. Not that I think 3d platformers work at all, but that one at least had simple, enjoyable gameplay and looked nice.
TFA points:, old games were good because A. controls, B. lvl design, C. something about interacting with everything else.
isn't that like saying old movies were good because of the acting, direction, and the rest? Or Books are good because of the A. Characters, B. Setting, and C. plot?
Couldn't you say the same thing about good 3d games? 'Deus Ex is awesome because of A.: Swesome moveset that was clearly grasped, responsive, and just limited enough. B. Awesome lvl design. and C. The interaction of the rest'?
God I hate how the media makes stories about nothing that go nowhere that people just eat up.
It's true, at least that's what I think. Game making was like alchemy, back in the day, very few people were brave enough to do them. Normal people usually just get a normal job, game makers were like meh who cares.
Nobody knew who Carmack was, even now, only us in here know who he is. And that was good. Because we're not chasing after the "gods" blindly; we played and praised the games based on how good they were. Since there aren't that many peeps making them and there were no "internet", there weren't a media effect and we judged the game for what it was.
NOW, if you go on the street and ask anyone who Carmack is, I bet you nobody would know either. But not for the same reason as before. Now, nobody knows him because there're too many peeps like him (well not exactly like him hehe). Game makers I mean. And the quality is just watered down to a point, with internet marketing, blog influencing and stuff, that a game can't just be good, but has to be good in the scores and reviews too. That's just superficial. Bruce Lee never had a score and he can kick your ass.
Well we can draw parallel of the less maker vs more maker from here on other stuff.. And you'll see.
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Sega 4 Lyf. <3
I think I speak for all when I say "FUCK YOU!!!!"
And 4.6 Million people live in Alabama.
Doesn't mean they aren't all wrong.
I've never felt that new music is worse than old music. Old music is stuff I've heard so many times that I no longer get that feeling when you hear a good tune for the first time, so new music will always be better than old music :-)
You mean the sinking feeling that you'll never be able to write a tune like that for the rest of your life, on pain of being sued for subconscious copying like George Harrison was?
I think Jumping Flash did it well, and it may have been before Mario 64.
I want to add that another factor is that the information displayed is to the point. The same happened with 2D point-and-click: what you got visually was there to inform. No 3D crap with camera angles that get in the way and that are totally unnecesary.
Platformers were like that: you needed to know the dynamics of the sprite and that was all; no second guessing were the terrain ended or started; what was traversable or not, etc.
Some titles manage to go 3D losing minimally from their 2D masters, but usually you end with some unplayable mess were movements are slow, go behind control, you don't know where your feet are and so on...
Arguably, Al-Qaeda's power, and therefore the war on terror, comes from us hiring Afghans to fight the Soviets.
So, preventing one war by preparing for it started another.
There wasn't anything better yet.
comes from us hiring Afghans to fight the Soviets.
Do you really think that????
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Though I don't go to the local video rental places often, they do stock the latest console games. Also, there is Gamefly, which is sort of like Netflix for games.
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."
I actually first played Jumping Flash! for the first time about 18 months ago when it was released on the PSN. While the graphics don't hold up, I think the game play is pretty solid. Here's hoping someday for a PSN or PSP remake.
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."
Mario 64 is a crappy platformer, at least compared to the PSone Spyro games. Part of it is the camera, being an early 3D platformer they hadn't really figured out what to do with the camera yet. I also blame Miyamoto in part, that whole "garden" aesthetic of his doesn't necessarily translate to good games.
Which led to the vast majority of good 32bit and last generation platformers being PSone and PS2 games and not the Gamecube.
Well I always played Mario with friends. With Mario64 you couldn't do this, and I found it kind of sucky because of that.
Mario Bros 3 was excellent, Super Mario World on snes was excellent, Mario 64 was something different. It showed 3d games could work and be fun, but I'd of preferred to see the same 2d scroller built with 3d graphics at the time.
I remember when I was looking foward to Diablo 2 coming out and I found a preview website which said something like "Diablo 2 comes out next month! And now here's a picture of the final boss!".
I think that's why newer games aren't as exciting as the older ones were. Back then reaching a new level, meeting a new boss, getting a new skill or unlocking something was exciting and like discovering something for yourself. You might be playing a game you'd never even heard of before seeing it in the shop.
Now days you've probably read previews and reviews, seen screenshots and gameplay movies before you ever see an actual copy of the game. All the exposure sucks the out the joy of discovery.
(Or maybe I'm just an old fart and no longer have my youthful enthusiasm.)
I share a similar opinion in that being younger meant you were more tolerable even if that game was not so great. I will add to that saying that I used to feel that if I was doing badly at the game no matter what (e.g. if I was playing a game like Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde or Kid Kook), then it was "me" and not the game. There was no internet to check reviews or whether others were having similar playing difficulties. Therefore, I would just try harder until I could play reasonably well. Today, a gamer would just give up if that happened dismissing the game as "bad" and moving on. It's easier to be more pickier than before. In terms of rentals though back then, I at least got to choose what I wanted except when my parents got me one they thought I liked (Beatlejuice for the NES and if I were to describe it in one word, that would be LJN). I ended up liking it though surprisingly.
I know I'm coming late to the party, but I didn't like Mario 64 either. In the end it was the guesswork in finding the stars. I like Mario Games to be pure platforming goodness, and having to guess what to do was too much. When I looked up a star and saw that it was hidden in a wall I had to shoot myself into, I gave up. Mario Galaxy doesn't have this problem, it gives you a pretty clear hint and just lets you explore to find it. Anyhow, my two cents, if it is your favorite game of all time, by all means, enjoy. Chrono Trigger is mine.