I played so many old platformers this year and the main thing I realized with them is that sometimes you really don't know what you've got until it's gone.
Because of the Mario games, you take for granted that A button jumps and the B button attacks, and then you play Alex Kidd in Miracle World and keep on punching bottomless pits and jumping on top of bats.
Because of Mario you think it's just a simple obvious thing to make sure your mascot character for your whole console and company is as effortlessly appealing as they can be, and then you go and play one of the OTHER Alex Kidd games on the master system. Yeech!
Because of this game, you assume it's a no brainer to make your character jump and then be able to control the trajectory in midair so as to hit the platform you're aiming for, and then you play something like Strider for the genesis, where you can either accidentally jump straight in the air right into a spike trap, or remember to first tap forward before jumping and hope that, if you don't first accidentally just step into a pit, your predetermined jump arc lands you on the platform.
When you play Mario, you think to yourself ah, here's a momentum button that makes sense. Sometimes you need a little jump to get across a small gap, sometimes you need to hold that button if you want to make a bigger one, and then you go and play a game like Psycho Fox, with some weird shit where like you have to hold the button to make him accelerate like a car
When you play Mario, it's clear to you that you should be able to just pick up the controller and play, and he should be easy and fun to control, and just like the hero's journey, the levels should be a little easy and welcoming at first, then progressively harder. The GAME should be hard to play, not the CHARACTER hard to control. And then, sometime later, you get a game like Blaster Master, where it's a whole lot of fun right up until the last level where you have no choice but to keep an upgrade for your vehicle that makes you stick to platforms and roll right into spike pits and the developers just laugh at you and say we did it on purpose, get better at games dork.
Any time you play a retro game and it's not fun to play, you have no right to just shrug and say that's how games were back then, or even worse, "the stiff play control is just part of the charm for a game like that back then." Super Mario Bros was the first game ever, and it did everything right. What's your excuse?
Because of the Mario games, you take for granted that A button jumps and the B button attacks, and then you play Alex Kidd in Miracle World and keep on punching bottomless pits and jumping on top of bats.
Because of Mario you think it's just a simple obvious thing to make sure your mascot character for your whole console and company is as effortlessly appealing as they can be, and then you go and play one of the OTHER Alex Kidd games on the master system. Yeech!
Because of this game, you assume it's a no brainer to make your character jump and then be able to control the trajectory in midair so as to hit the platform you're aiming for, and then you play something like Strider for the genesis, where you can either accidentally jump straight in the air right into a spike trap, or remember to first tap forward before jumping and hope that, if you don't first accidentally just step into a pit, your predetermined jump arc lands you on the platform.
When you play Mario, you think to yourself ah, here's a momentum button that makes sense. Sometimes you need a little jump to get across a small gap, sometimes you need to hold that button if you want to make a bigger one, and then you go and play a game like Psycho Fox, with some weird shit where like you have to hold the button to make him accelerate like a car
When you play Mario, it's clear to you that you should be able to just pick up the controller and play, and he should be easy and fun to control, and just like the hero's journey, the levels should be a little easy and welcoming at first, then progressively harder. The GAME should be hard to play, not the CHARACTER hard to control. And then, sometime later, you get a game like Blaster Master, where it's a whole lot of fun right up until the last level where you have no choice but to keep an upgrade for your vehicle that makes you stick to platforms and roll right into spike pits and the developers just laugh at you and say we did it on purpose, get better at games dork.
Any time you play a retro game and it's not fun to play, you have no right to just shrug and say that's how games were back then, or even worse, "the stiff play control is just part of the charm for a game like that back then." Super Mario Bros was the first game ever, and it did everything right. What's your excuse?