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.'"

Comments

The fact that you were younger and less jaded then

[LittleJedi]

The fact that you were younger and less jaded then.

One word.

[boarder8925]

What Made Those Old, 2D Platformers So Great?

One word: nostalgia.

Re:One word.

[boarder8925]

What Made Those Old, 2D Platformers So Great?

One word: nostalgia.

Not at the time, of course.

Re:One word.

[gyrogeerloose]

One word: nostalgia.

That, plus the fact that you didn't need to memorize 150 different keyboard commands to play one of those old games. Most of the newer games became too much like work for me to ever really enjoy them.

Re:One word.

[boarder8925]

Old games in general, really. We mainly remember the good games from Ye Olden Days and forget the plethora of shitty ones that were available as well--and as we wade through the current muck we look back to the golden oldies and bemoan the current state of things. Of course this doesn't apply only to video games, but also movies, music, etc. We remember the good and throw out most of the bad.

Re:One word.

[Aminion]

Nostalgia, indeed. I would, however, like to suggest that by lacking in the graphics department, old games were more immersive because you had to use your own imagination more and not rely on the developers' extended imagination. It's basically one of the main points that Scott Mccloud emphasizes in Understanding Comics and I think the idea translated well to computer games. On the other hand, modern games usually have superior audio and graphics design, and more sophisticated storytelling, all key elements of great games.

Re:One word.

[Rary]

What Made Those Old, 2D Platformers So Great?

One word: nostalgia.

What about limited alternatives?

When the first video game was made, it was the best video game in the world. When there were a dozen titles, more than 80% of games were in the top ten.

Today, we've all seen a gajillion games in our lifetime, so anything new that comes out has some serious competition to even be considered "okay".

Re:One word.

[moosesocks]

Survivorship Bias: We tend to only remember the good ones.

That all said, the signal-to-noise ratio does seem to have decreased in recent years, with most successful titles being part of already-established franchises.

(Offtopic: I haven't played a good RPG in ages. Any suggestions? Doesn't matter how old (or new) it is.)

Re:One word.

[meringuoid]

Not quite. I'd say two words: Shigeru Miyamoto.

Go download a NES emulator and a collection of ROMs. Play through a representative sample of 2D platformers of the late eighties and early nineties. My God, most of them suck so very, very hard. How did anybody ever enjoy this utter rubbish?

Now play Super Mario Bros. 3.

There, you see the difference? Exactly. This isn't nostalgia taking games that were never very good and inflating them to become unwarranted classics. This is time acting as a filter. All those awful games have sunk into richly deserved obscurity. So when somebody publishes a 2D platformer today, we don't compare it against the whole genre: we compare it against Mario at his absolute best. We're going to see some kid's band he's formed with his mates, and we listen critically, and flame them for not being anywhere near as good as the Beatles.

A small number of truly great games, that's what we remember. We've forgotten the crap.

Re:One word.

[Jurily]

On the other hand, modern games usually have superior audio and graphics design, and more sophisticated storytelling, all key elements of great games.

I beg to differ. They can add to a game, but they don't make one. Just contrast Civilization and Spore. Not to mention D&D.

The thing you're talking about is Photoshop or Movie Maker, not a game.

Re:One word.

[BikeHelmet]

The devs back then had to spend a lot of time on the level layouts. When you can't rely on gfx or sfx to make your game a success, you have to spend a lot of time ensuring every aspect of the game is high quality.

That means reasonably good graphics/sound effects(even if "bleeps and bloops" are the best possible), good level design, difficulty level which ramps up over time, etc.

Far too many modern games have poor level design, or difficulty fluctuates randomly, or the input scheme is awful. It can be quite irritating.

Re:One word.

[DMUTPeregrine]

Nethack has turns, and you can use the command reference if you forget. You don't have to memorize everything. Realtime games with just as many commands are much harder to play.

Re:One word.

[fractoid]

The devs back then had to spend a lot of time on the level layouts. When you can't rely on gfx or sfx to make your game a success, you have to spend a lot of time ensuring every aspect of the game is high quality.

I'd turn that around on you, and say that when you don't have to spend most of your development budget on graphics and sound effects, you can spend a lot of time on level layouts, gameplay, etc.

This is one of the things that REALLY killed indie game development as a serious contender (although I'll grant it's coming back with casual and mobile gaming, huzzah!). Back in the 8-bit era, a programmer could create a near-commercial-quality sprite sheet in an afternoon. For a larger game, you'd have an artist and a coder.

Now you need a team of 10 just to make a single high-rez model with all of its various material map components, shaders, animation rigging, etc. A simple courtyard scene will have over 100mb of textures where before it'd just need a few happy snaps of the bricks and plants outside the office. There's just so much work that goes into building and displaying a near-photorealistic environment that there's not time to really polish the 'real' stuff that makes a game a game.

Re:One word.

[ais523]

I have won NetHack without exploiting bugs. So have many other people. Nowadays, it's reached a point where it's debatable whether most of the commonly-abused things in the game (such as pudding farming) are genuine bugs or not. (Also, most abuses are either sufficiently minor that they aren't worth it, or sufficiently boring that they aren't worth it.) There are a few genuinely abusable bugs (such as Astral Call - attempting to rename one of the priests on the final level and determining information you aren't meant to know from the error message), but they tend to be fixed on public servers. If you can't solve NetHack without cheating, obviously you need to read more spoilers... (It is too difficult to really be able to solve unspoilt, without spending several months working out all the mechanics of the game by experiment.)

Noticeable lag, even if framerates are OK

[VMaN]

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.

Re:Noticeable lag, even if framerates are OK

[KlausBreuer]

While I do agree with you, it has certain advantages: when I buy this game for real cheap in two years, my PC is powerful enough to set it to max/max/max.
Then I have a nice game with good graphics for a low price.

What, you think I'd buy a brand-new game? Full of bugs? Idiotic copy protections? Ridiculously high prices? Needing much more CPU/GPU power than my high-end PC offers?
You must be joking.

Re:Noticeable lag, even if framerates are OK

[Razalhague]

...and that, ladies and gentlemen, is why developers go bankrupt even if they make good games.

There was nothing better at the time...

[Karganeth]

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".

Re:There was nothing better at the time...

[pizzach]

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".

Some of my first games were on an Atari. None of those games endeared to me. I have a number of NES and SNES games that I will never forget. Explain.

I think people with that kind of opinion are generally pigeon holing games in that they have to be a specific thing.

Re:There was nothing better at the time...

[Draconix]

Bullshit. I never owned an SNES, and I never even played Super Metroid until around 2002, and it's still an amazing game.

An even better example, Cave Story, is one of the finest games I've ever played, and it was released in 2004. The only "nostalgia" factor that could be argued is the Metroid-esque format and pixel graphics, which is pretty moot. People don't love it because it reminds them of older games, they love it because it's a fun, challenging, beautiful game that Pixel obviously put a lot into.

I think TFA makes some great points. A big problem with most of these Flash platformers is that they're all pretty art with little substance gameplay-wise. I've played Scary Girl, which is beautiful, but it's not that fun to play.

Lifestyle investment

[MillionthMonkey]

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.

Lack of options

[AnonChef]

Seriously

The same thing that makes any game good

[Zerth]

*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*.

Re:Nostalgia

[Dusthead Jr.]

One of the things that kill me about people who say stuff like "games where better back in the day" is that they only talk about all the good (and popular) games. They seem to filter out or forget all off the crappy ones. They will talk about how games were more unique back then, never mind all of the Mario clones, the countless shoot-em-up, and beat-em-ups, and the RPGs. Don't forget the movie tie ins and the other licensed crap that was invented back the. These are not some new recent ideas. There are folks out there that make a living on dissing old games like the Angry Videogame Nerd and Seanbaby. I'm just saying for every criticism about new games you can come up with can easily be applied to a game from 20 years ago. History has reruns.

Re:Nostalgia

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you get jerkwads who want to argue that if you like anything that wasn't created yesterday it's "nostalgia" and it couldn't possibly have been good ever at all and can't currently good for sure. Heaven knows that that Beethoven guy was just a major hack and the only reason why people like him is due to nostalgia. Same goes for that Poe guy and that Rembrant guy. Damn hacks, all of them.

Re:They weren't great

[SirLurksAlot]

Warning: This may turn into a "Get off my lawn!" post.

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.

I grew up in the 80's and 90's and I don't remember a lot of platformers being awful, but I do remember a lot of them being extremely difficult. TMNT and Battletoads for the NES are two examples that come to mind. I don't know how many times I had to replay the underwater stage in Turtles before I got fast enough to beat it, or how many times I had to replay the racing stage in Battletoads before I didn't get creamed by an obstacle. Awful games for me were the ones that had confusing controls or puzzles that just did NOT want to be solved, but really there weren't a lot of those that I can recall. For the most part games had a good (read "simple") set of controls, straight-forward goals and were at least somewhat forgiving of mistakes (You died? Guess what, you have two more mans!)

I honestly think that games back then had better gameplay for the most part. They were less complicated and more focused on just having fun. Games today are all about shiny glitz and how many polygons are being handled at once. Games were also a lot cheaper back then, and there was a lot less marketing and hype involved, so even if a game wasn't all that great it's not like you were out $50-60 and crestfallen because it didn't live up to your hopes.

Button presses per minute

[Twinbee]

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.

Game Over

[Haxx]

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.

They weren't great.

[log0n]

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)

Re:They weren't great.

[jonaskoelker]

There just wasn't anything better at the time.

On my Wii, I have Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (a made-for-the-Wii first-person shooter) and the shareware versions of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake.

Sure, MP3:C has some neato cutscenes and the environment has more polygons. But all three ID shooters are quite viable competitors to MP3:C, because they're great fun (and I really suck at Wolfenstein...).

Now, it should be said that MP3:C have few and quite easy monsters. In a sense it feels more like a first person action adventure than a shooter (but maybe I should play at the Veteran difficulty level?), whereas the ID games have lots of moving stuff that should be shot at (with progressively more powerful weapons), and that's about it.

(I'm slightly disappointed by MP3:C because I expected it to be something it's not: a frag fest. It's quite good, and it isn't worse for being what it is rather than what I expected, just a step sideways. There's my bias).

It's not just that there wasn't anything better at the time. It's that they are actually quite good games. Modern games look nicer, sound nicer, and some even have a story ;) but I hold that games, through time, haven't actually become more fun to play.

RTFA anyone?

[Froobly]

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.

Re:The fact that you were younger and less jaded t

[KDR_11k]

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).

Re:The fact that you were younger and less jaded t

[bonch]

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.

Re:The fact that you were younger and less jaded t

[centuren]

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.

Re:The fact that you were younger and less jaded t

[Khashishi]

Mario 64 terrible? It's critically acclaimed as one of the best games of all times.

simple, simple, simple

[massysett]

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.