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]

I'm not saying that there's a lack or nonexistence of good or great 2D platformers, I'm simply saying that the greatness of 2D platformers in general has been greatly hyped and overestimated.

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.

[anss123]

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.

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 :-)

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]

That was amazing! I need to try splitting my insightful posts in two.

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.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nethack is one of those extremely misunderstood games. It has nothing to do with obtaining the Amulet of Yendor, killing monsters, or acquiring items. The sole purpose of each revision of the game is to find and exploit bugs in the game. For example, back when it was Rogue (I'm talking circa 1985) there was a bug where you could heal up without monsters getting a turn by hitting the space-bar. More recently you could get unlimited wands of wishing by killing the respawning elemental on the castle level. There are thousands of other exploits that have been used over the years.

My father still plays Nethack occasionally and will use od and a hex-editor to modify save files.

It's not about winning. It's about the "hacking" to win.

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.

[hairyfeet]

Exactly. While I'm sure plenty of folks fire up Stella for a game of Yar's Revenge, I kinda doubt they are playing ET or Chase the Chuckwagon. With time everyone remembers all the good and nobody remembers how many real stinkbombs there were. Load up a list of ANY console from the height of its popularity and you will find stinker after stinker. Remember how many real stinkbombs there were for PS1, especially during the first two years?

Because with time we forget how many times we got burned buying a truly horrid game, and instead fondly latch onto the ones we played to death because they were fun. And it makes sense. After all, who wants to remember playing Chase the Chuckwagon or Custer's Revenge?

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.)

Nostalgia

[Blakey Rat]

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?

Re:Nostalgia

[nomadic]

Now, can we please stop seeing topics like this based entirely on nostalgia?

But if they stop posting topics like this, in a few years we'll start reminiscing about them. "Remember those old topics based entirely on nostalgia? Weren't those great? I miss those days..."

Re:Nostalgia

[mickwd]

Now, can we please stop seeing topics like this based entirely on nostalgia?

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

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

[Stormwatch]

I think I saw that video. The nerd complained that the moonwalk move is useless - which is incorrect. In the last stage you can use it to walk on conveyors without losing speed.

Re:Nostalgia

[grumbel]

They seem to filter out or forget all off the crappy ones

Well, yeah, because there where enough good ones so that we didn't have to play the crappy ones. Look at the adventure genre, LucasArts had a new title ready every year and each of those was awesome. How often do high quality adventures released today? Not much at all, most are rather mediocre. And that is ignoring all the non-LucasArts adventure games from back in the day, some of them where pretty awesome too. And now don't let me start on the flightsim genre, as that is pretty much dead and burried today and the amount of good flightsim is close to zero.

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

[Mad Merlin]

It's in a similar vein, but another thing I find really annoying is when games draw their own cursor instead of using a hardware accelerated cursor. It instantly makes me not want to play the game ever, as the mouse is incredibly choppy in comparison, no matter how fast your system is.

For example, yesterday I had a hankering to play Heroes of Might and Magic 3, which is a game that was released in 1999 and required a Pentium 133 to run. While it's still as fun as it always was, the cursor is still choppy, even on a modern system. I'm pretty sure the entire game runs at a fixed 30 FPS or so, including the mouse. In this case, it's not as annoying, because it's entirely turn based, but it'd be a much better game with a proper mouse cursor.

New games are still making this mistake and it baffles me how it doesn't infuriate the developers enough to fix it.

I certainly design with (input) snappiness in mind, if you have a peek at Game! you'll notice that everything is very fast. Pages are small and load fast, AJAX is sprinkled about heavily to improve response time (though only where it makes sense), etc. It's not difficult to do really, you just have to keep it in mind.

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.

The delusion of the 3D silver bullet

[4D6963]

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)

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*.

Complexity of input instead of gameplay

[Kjella]

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.

Re:Complexity of input instead of gameplay

[Malorion]

3D *can* improve a game, but if that's what you're relying on to make a better game, your design needs a whole truck load of work. KB:TL is a better looking game and better than the older HOMM games but, IMO, that's because there's more detail all round. 3D makes it look prettier, it does not alter the base game. I recently played through Rick Dangerous via WinUAE and I can't imagine a 3D version that I would prefer more. Indie developers that make 2D platformers and adventures in "the old style" are proving that you don't need flashy graphics to make a good game. Look at Spelunky, Cave Story, Seiklus and Iji. All fantastic games and would be right at home on an old 16 or even 8 bit machine. I fail to see how any of these require 3D to make them fun.

pixel perfect synched scrolling

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:pixel perfect synched scrolling

[Joce640k]

3D games can also have perfect sync (and many of them do, especially on consoles...)

There's still new 2D games that are good

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

It wasn't just the designers!

[Celeste R]

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.

No limits

[Darkness404]

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.

Re:Lifestyle investment

[ouimetch]

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.

These guys beg to differ.

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.

Shenanigans

[yerktoader]

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.

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

[James Skarzinskas]

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.

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.

Re:2D vs. 3D platforming - why not both?

[Homburg]

Did we really need to wait for Mirror's Edge to find out that 3D platforming can work? I figure Mario 64 and Tomb Raider established that pretty well in 1996.

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

[Captain Spam]

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.

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

[James Skarzinskas]

We played dodgeball with bricks. You get good, fast.

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

[CAIMLAS]

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.

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.

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:2D vs. 3D platforming - why not both?

[Draek]

Not only that but even games like Rayman 2, Jak 3, the entire Prince of Persia series and even (if it can be considered one) Assassin's Creed have done brilliant things that truly take advantage of 3D to create an experience far beyond what would be possible with just 2D.

Of course, the opposite is also true as every 3D Castlevania is a lamentable testament to. So yeah, why choose one or the other? both have their advantages, and while I *would* like 2D platformers to have a bigger emphasis in today's "OMG shinies!" gaming, I wouldn't want 3D platformers to go away entirely either.

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

[James Skarzinskas]

Hey, Samah. Quick. What's that behind you?

Simplicity of Gameplay/Wii

[geoffrobinson]

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.

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.

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

[hal2814]

If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a brick.

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.

Re:simple, simple, simple

[freedom_india]

Exactly. Well Said.
The reason Wii became such a monstrous success is because of its simplicity. Its graphics isn't that great.
I took one look at XBox 360 controller and did not buy it because it looked "so alien".
I need a controller that goes with the flow. Like a joystick and one button.
Or two buttons max.
The key to earlier games being so good is because these guys knew human psychology and physiological limitations. Plus add to the constraints of those era.
The human brain can at most do 3-4 tasks parallelly with two hands.
The earlier CPUs can handle only so much on-screen painting. So the designers had to be clever to make use of psychology as much as CPU power.
The iPhone enforces that simplicity today forcing developers to use their brains instead of LoC.
The Wii does the same thing. No wonder EA hates it.
KISS. Its a principle that is universal.

Re:without reading TFA, I'll tell you.

[silent_artichoke]

That's cool and all, but does it run on Linux?

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

[Frogbert]

And 4.6 Million people live in Alabama.

Doesn't mean they aren't all wrong.