what’s the first platformer to animate turning around?
edit: like with a middle frame where the character is facing the camera or whatever
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I really wish we were in a big room around a table surrounded by white boards so we could draw up, debate, discredit, etc. a number of systems for classification in real-time with lots of shouting.
A big thing seems to be figuring out where generic lines hinge on mechanical or structural features.
I mean, what even is a platformer?
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i think the first major division would be games where you kill by jumping on top of enemies, games where you can stand on the head of an enemy you jump on, and games where jumping on top of enemies kills you
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Okay I’ll start with the safest definition: A Platformer is a game in which the main mechanical hook is navigating a space, with gravity, in the x and y dimension (and z in some cases).
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Another major division: Purely navigational-based vs. purely conflict-based.
In other words, does the game world have obstacles to overcome or is the world itself the obstacle?
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Yes this is a good point. I was thinking about things a little backwards here.
A class of it’s own is right! Drill Dozer is fantastic.
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with gravity
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An incredibly important distinction.
edit-Updated.
that really great sgt. frog inticreates game on ds is like if a klonoa game had a bunch of different characters all with different abilities.
the ds also has a really great great giana sisters game.
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Very hard to rule out precursors in such questions but it might be Prince of Persia (1989)? I checked videos of earlier clunkily-controlling platformers like Dark Castle and NES Metroid and they turn instantly. (They both have a camera-facing sprite but they only use it for doors/elevators.)
In the 80s games were coded more simply so an in-between frame like this would come with a frame of control lag. Also it’s probably hard to do it in such a way that it doesn’t simply make things look worse without rotoscoping, and PoP is well-known as the first platformer with rotoscoped art.
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Tosses Mirror’s Edge, The Floor is Jelly and Glum Buster into the topic and sneaks away
…Skate and Tony Hawk Pro Skater games are platformers and you can’t convince me otherwise.
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An interesting question for me is why did DOS games usually end up with “huge-ass wackness” from a bunch of different developers all ostensibly aiming to clone Mario? Did their process start with a giant level editor or poster-sized graph paper? Did they have too much RAM to work with? Was it unconsciously remembered Pitfall influence?
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to clarify, it needs to be a front-face? 'cause I think if not, Mario Bros. may be first with its skid
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This is an interesting question and I wish I knew the answer! Part of me wonders if it’s because they could. From what I’ve read, it was difficult to make NES games scroll both horizontally and vertically freely, as far as platformers went anyway (I read something once about how wild doing even the forced-camera diagonal levels in Mario 3 was). Whereas whatever the id folks cooked up to make their Mario 3 port demo that became the first 3 Keens came ready to have huge open spaces freely navigable in two directions, for whatever technical reason, likely having to do, yeah I’d imagine, with memory. A lot of what followed came from their innovation, so whether it’s just what was possible with their tools or Keen’s example inspired its successors in that way, who knows. Actually, who knows about any of this. It’s conjecture. But since it seems to have been technically easier, it was one thing that set games apart from what was happening on the world’s most popular 8-bit console.
Another thought is that until the Advent of Keen or whatever, DOS platformers were stuck in single-screen mode and games like Monuments of Mars (not a super great example 'cause it was 1990 but) had gotten good at densely packing screens with items, nooks, rooms within rooms, etc. This speculation is even more baseless than the first.
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Oh yeah that is such a cool detail! It adds so much character
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more jump, less thump.
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we must. Dissect this dissection. Physician, heal thyself!.
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