Anatomy Of 2D Side-Scroller Lecturer Picks Favorites

Thanks to GameSpy for its column discussing some of the choicest 2D side-scrolling games of all time, as discussed in a lecture at the recent Game Developer's Conference in San Jose. Some of the "ten games from the past that have something to teach the aspiring platform game designer" listed included "Batman (1989, NES): Best wall jump ever (and game over music, he noted)", as well as "Ghouls 'n Ghosts (1988, AC/Gen/etc.): 'If your game is harder than this, you're in trouble.'", and even "Super Mario All-Stars (1993, SNES): Everything you need to know in one cart." What are your favorite 2D side-scrolling platformers of all time?

Psygnosis...

[IDigUNIX]

...The Killing Gameshow, a great game w/awesome soundtrack.
...Shadow of the Beast, merely a fun game, but the soundtrack was quite erie and cool. One of the few games where I think the soundtrack would make a good standalone audio CD.
P.S.: I'm talking about these games on the Amiga. I cannot address, nor condone, any PC ports that might have taken place.

Megaman

[HoneyBunchesOfGoats]

The Megaman series, especially 2, and Megaman X series. They took up so many hours in my childhood...

Sonic the Hedgehog

[Anonymous Coward]

What about sonic? Sonic is at least worth a mention. This was one of the only reasons I was jelous of my friends who had Segas.

For my money

[dancingmad]

The best 2D platformer, in my humble opinion has been Yoshi's Island 2, for the Super Nintendo. The game changed the Mario formula, by having you place as Yoshi, carrying a baby Mario on his back. When you got hit, instead of dying, baby Mario would fly off and if you didn't catch him within 10 seconds or so, he'd be captured by enemies.

The game itself was gorgeous, the first SNES that really had a really different art style (outside the crappy Donkey Kong country games), as it sported this pastel/children's story book look. The puzzles were classic Miyamoto (read: subtle yet fun) and the game had the charm of Mario 3 and Super Mario World. It had the great aspects of the Mario series, but added a new twist to the whole affair. It was probably the one of the last great games for the SNES - unfortunately it came out at the same time as Donkey Kong Country 2 and it didn't get noticed much. I ended up renting it and wishing I had bought YI2 instead of DK2. The joke's on Rare now though; YI2's on the GBA and a whole new generation of gamers are enjoying it - DK2's not on the gba (I heard some talk of a port) and Rare's with Microsoft.

There have been some other great 2D games (Castlevania, Metroid, though they're not really platformers in the truest sense), but to me, Yoshi's Island 2 has been the pinnacle.

I would argue MegaMan is important.

[Inoshiro]

MegaMan was the first game to give you the "Have it your way" gameplay coupled with much faster action than SMB typically had. With the exception of the warp-zones in SMB, no other game had the majority of its gameplay in a non-linear fashion. You could do the bosses in any order you wanted (although some orders were easier than others). A lot of the fun of a new MegaMan game was exploring a robot's world and seeing if you could take out the boss.

Castlevania 2 would be the other one worthy of mention because of its excellent action/RPG elements. I don't recall there being another 2D action RPG that was sidescrolling that was as fun. Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link was very close, but had a completely different feel because of the sword vs. whip and different universe.

Mario Allstars?

[miyako]

As much as I love the mario games, I'm not really sure that the deserve to be mentioned.
Super Mario Bros and The Lost Levels (Super Mario 2 in Japan) were fine games, but AFAIK did nothing all that revolutionary.
Mario 2 (US) was not originally a mario game, but was a different game in japan that was reskinned with mario characters and sold outside of japan as Mario 2 because they thought the lost levels would be too hard.
The game which became Mario 2 in the US (I can't remember the name of it, anyone else know?) was certainly revolutionary, although it wasn't untill Klona and Klona2 that I saw another game use a similar formula.
Mario 3 was, in my opinion, the best 2D mario game ever, though it was deffinitely more evolutionary than revolutionary. The overworld that it introduced was a first for mario games, but had been done before in a number of games (Bionic Commando sticks out in my mind), and the 357 or however-many powerups were nice, but just taking the concept farther than the series had taken it before. Even the idea of selectiong powerups before entering a stage and the semi-linnear level design (choices between going to stage 3 or 4 for example) had been done in previous games.
In fact, the first mario game that I can think of that had any real huge and lasting effect on the rest of the industry was the first forey into the world of 3D with Mario 64, which I think is one of the best games ever made.
I don't think anyone would argue that the NES/SNES mario games were fun, but their fun came from good level design, and very refined play, though they were never more than evoultionary.

The stills were good but the blitting was terrible

[cgenman]

Sunsoft decided to push the NES further by drawing directly to the screen. This meant that any time an enemy fired a barrage of explosive balls, or the player passed near another moving object, the two would overlap and flicker. The effect is most pronounced in the 1st area, where flying bombers are everywhere and sprite overlap is near constant. They'd use the same trick along with some of the same sprites on their next, less successful game, Festers Quest.

Sun took a shortcut that caused a terrible, constant graphical glitch, in exchange for a whole lot more going on the screen at one time. I'm not saying the graphics were terrible, I'm saying that they made a conscious decision that lowered the overall graphics fidelity in order to have a better playing game, and it shows in both departments.

One of the best looking NES games, Crystalis, made the same tradeoff, but because of the nature of the action RPG it wasn't as much of a problem. It also, amusingly enough, stole sprites from Blaster Master.

Re:Viewtiful Joe

[FreeForm Response]

Jumping into his tornado and doing a diving kick (with Zoom) will often hit him right out, and almost always gets in a few hits with the splash damage. Holding Slow during the dive will allow you to dodge in the event that he is swinging at the level you happen to be at, at the time you happen to be there.

This method is slow as molasses, but easy to repeat once you've had a little practice, and it works just fine for me to defeat Fire Leo.