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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.
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.
Seriously
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..."
*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*.
Now, can we please stop seeing topics like this based entirely on nostalgia?
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
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.
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...
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.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
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.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
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.
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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.
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)
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).
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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
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.
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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.
Hey, Samah. Quick. What's that behind you?
Mario 64 terrible? It's critically acclaimed as one of the best games of all times.
If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a brick.
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.
And 4.6 Million people live in Alabama.
Doesn't mean they aren't all wrong.