Some things best consigned to gaming history...
While I love a good 'ol romp through many of gaming's past triumphs and tribulations, there are undeniably some things that are an ever present menace to enjoyment. They are things that were once - for whatever reason - the mainstay of ancient video gaming, but have now thankfully been consigned to the eternal Bin of Rubbish Design™.
Of what do I speak? A classic example of one such annoyance is the once mandatory use of up as the jump button in platform games. Since the advent of the multi-button controller this has become a thing of past, but some systems (namely computers such as the Amiga) had games that used this technique well into the 90's. It should have died a sorry death, as many players do when using this god-awful control method, with the introduction of Nintendo's two button NES controller. Although the technique was gradually phased out over time, Mortal Kombat Mythologies on the N64 briefly and irritatingly brought it back, only to be bludgeoned to death with bad reviews.
This was a mere blip on the landscape, though. I bring this up because I've recently been playing Fantasy World Dizzy on the Amiga. It's a good game - a great game, even - but it was forced, by the fact that only single button joysticks were available for the Amiga, to use the up-button technique. Dizzy also has two other incredibly annoying traits of old games, and more specifically old platform games.
The first of these goes hand in hand with up-button to provide maximum annoyance. Pixel perfect platform jumping. This requires the player to jump at the last possible nano seccond to reach a platform, or face one of two options - falling to your death or falling to the floor several hundred times before accomplishing this slight task. This is not fun. Never was, never will be. Many platform games of the 2D era emplyed this. It should quite rightly be forgotten.
The second fatal design floor wasn't so common, but still appeared across the generations several times too many. It is the dying-by-touching-a-flame tequnique (or other seemingly innocuous objects). I'm not talking about falling into a flaming volcano, here. Oh no. In Dizzy's world, merely jumping past a torch on the castle wall fries you. In this case I suppose it's just about justified by the fact that the main character is an egg. But only just. What makes it all the more annoying is the pixel precise collision detection that allows death to occur if Dizzy's hat touches a flame, which is just a little ridiculous.
Put all of these things together in one game and you have a smelting pot of potentially exhasperating gaming. The only place the up-button jump is used nowadays is in 2D fighters, and in this instance it works well, largely because you won't end up falling down a bottomless pit if you slip on the controller.
2D platformers tend to live on now only on handheld devices or the odd web browser game. Which I have to say I think is a shame. While there were plenty of rubbish design priciples, there were many excellent moments to be had exploring a side scrolling landscape.
So, there you have it. 2D platform games, while being all well and good and perhaps an underused genre in todays gaming landscape, had their fair share of shoddy design principles. All in all, then, it's a good job these things are gone for good.
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