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Platformer

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Platform game, or platformer, is a video game genre characterized by the character having to climb up and down, or jump from and to, platforms and ledges, while fighting enemies and collecting objects required to complete the game.

Often, the player has the ability to gain powers or weapons, called power-ups. Generally, platform games, due to their unrealistic nature, have cartoon-like graphics. Characters in platform games are usually based on legendary creatures (e.g. dragons and goblins) or anthropomorphic animals (e.g. a gorilla who throws barrels).

Platform games originated in the early 1980s and made the transition to 3D in the mid-1990s. Sometime after the genre's inception, the term came to describe games where jumping on platforms, as opposed to shooting, was the main gameplay focus. However, many platform games feature projectile weapons, including the Mario, Metroid, and Castlevania franchises.

History

A screenshot of the milestone Super Mario Bros, the best selling video game of all time.

The 2D era

Platform games appeared in the early 1980s, when video game consoles were not yet powerful enough to render 3D images or video. They were confined to static environments fitted to the screens, with the playable character viewed from a profile angle. The protagonist climbed up and down ladders or jumped from platform to platform, often while combating foes and collecting power-ups. The first games of this kind were Space Panic and Apple Panic. They were followed by Donkey Kong, an arcade game created by Nintendo, released in 1981. Soon level advancement changed from being mainly vertical to largely horizontal, as well as introducing multiple screen-width spanning scrolling environments. Pitfall!, released by Activision for the Atari 2600 in 1982, is considered by many to have started the trend. Manic Miner (1983) and its sequel Jet Set Willy (1984) were among the most popular platformers on home computers.

Nintendo's platform game Super Mario Bros., released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985, became one of the best selling games of all time, and this popularity caused many more platform games to be produced for the video game market. The popularity of platform games continued into the 1990s, with many titles being released for the handheld Game Boy and Game Gear, and the 16-bit Mega Drive/Genesis and Super Nintendo. In 1991, Sega released Sonic the Hedgehog and its revolutionary style is often cited as the reason for the Mega Drive's popularity in the 16bit console market. Other notable platform games include Earthworm Jim, Zool, Bubsy, and Rocket Knight Adventures. Frequently, games based upon licensed films, TV show, and comic book franchises would be platformers, such as those based on Aladdin, Jurassic Park, Batman, James Bond, and Mickey Mouse.

Although the number of 2D platform games created has declined since the mid-1990s, when the Mega Drive and Super Nintendo began to be abandoned in favor of systems with stronger 3D capabilities, the genre has enjoyed continued success on handheld devices such as the Game Boy Advance, as well as on next-generation consoles using 3D techniques to create special effects as per games like Viewtiful Joe. In 2006, New Super Mario Bros. was released, a 2d platformer on the Nintendo DS, which was a huge succes.

The 3D era

File:N64 Super Mario 64 shifting sand land.jpg
Super Mario 64 replaced the linear obstacle courses of traditional platform games with vast worlds.

The term "3D platformer" may refer to a gameplay involving all three dimensions, a use of real-time 3D polygons in levels and characters, or both of these. The advent of 3D platformers brought a change in the goals of some platformers. In most 2D platformers, the player only had to reach a single goal to complete a level, but in many 3D platformers, each level had to be combed for collectible items such as puzzle pieces (Banjo-Kazooie) or stars (Super Mario 64). This allowed for more efficient use of large 3D areas and rewarded the player for thorough exploration. However, not all 3D platformers were like this. Crash Bandicoot for example was less innovative, remaining true to the 2D tradition of using fairly linear levels each with a goal at the end.

Some of the earliest 3D platform games were released on the Sega Saturn: Clockwork Knight was released in December 1994 as a launch title in Japan (and subsequently as a launch game in the U.S.) While the game featured levels and boss characters rendered in 3D, it could be considered "2.5D" due to its 2D gameplay and the use of prerendered 2D sprites for regular characters, similar to Donkey Kong Country (the sequel improved upon this with some 3D effects such as hopping between the foreground and background, or the camera panning and curving around a corner). Bug!, another Saturn game that was released in 1996, used 3D level designs but restricted the player to set paths (which often went left-to-right more than front-to-back). Its characters were sprite-based (while the developer claimed that all characters were "rendered in glorious 3D"[1], a less misleading word would be "prerendered"). Another 3D platfomer was on the PlayStation - Jumping Flash!, released in April 1995, was one of the earliest games for the system, and predated Super Mario 64 by over a year. The game used mostly 3D polygons and featured a first-person perspective.

Though Super Mario 64, released for the Nintendo 64 in Japan in June 1996, was not the first 3D platformer, it redefined the genre and became the landmark game which set the rules for following titles of the type. The gameplay was innovative in allowing the player to explore large 3D environments in all dimensions at will. Nintendo's newly introduced analog control stick, allowing for 360 degrees of movement, was another strong factor in its success. Moreover, while most 2D titles had previously consisted of a fairly linear path through the game, progressing from easy to difficult levels, Super Mario 64 used a central hub for access to levels, which became the predominant design.

In 2002, Super Mario Sunshine, the second 3D Mario game, was released. Although not as revolutionary as its predecessor, it featured difficult platform areas that were similar to some levels from Super Mario 64.

A notable use of characters in the sixth generation era is the characters being paired or grouped together, pioneered by Banjo-Kazooie in 1998. Jak and Daxter, Ratchet & Clank, and Sonic Heroes are examples of these types of paired games. The derivation of the platform genre can also be seen by the genre being mixed with action, tactical, and other genres: Blinx, Maximo, and Sly Cooper are good examples.

The complaints over lack of innovation carried over with the transition from 2D to 3D, but new criticisms sprang up as well. The most major largely focused on the difficulty of creating a consistently unobtrusive in-game camera system. 2D platformers were not susceptible to the problems of judging jumps through 3D environments on a 2D screen with little more than a tiny shadow on the ground to guide the player to the correct landing spot (problems which were even more obvious when the player was jumping "towards the screen"). Worse still was cameras getting "stuck" behind objects in the gameworld, obscuring the action at critical moments. Developers have attempted to alleviate these problems in various ways: making objects between the camera and the player's avatar semi-transparent; introducing "free cameras" which increased flexibility but required input from the player to control the camera as well as their character; Tomb Raider used grid-like layouts for platforms so that the experienced player could tell whether they could "make" a jump as long as they used the correct button press; the more recent Galleon attempted to unify character and camera control. To this date, arguably no platform game has been completely free from this type of criticism: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was praised for flexible and spectacular camera angles during exploration sequences, but suffered during combat sections.

Isometric games

File:Knight lore 4.gif
Knight Lore represented the pinnacle of isometric platform games during the 1980s, providing 3D gameplay on low end hardware.

Arguably a subgenre of both 3d and 2d platformers, isometric platformers present a three dimensional scene by compositing two dimensional graphics that display the world with a fixed camera orientation and without perspective. Although not the first isometric games, the earliest examples of isometric platform games are 1983's Congo Bongo in the arcade and 3D Ant Attack for the ZX Spectrum, ported to the Commodore 64 the following year.

Due to the way these games operate, they proved generally quite hard to implement properly on second generation console-style tile/sprite hardware such as the NES and Commodore 64. Although producing an isometric backdrop could be achieved easily, interaction between sprites and the backdrop was hard to get right. Several popular isometric games, such as Snake Rattle 'n' Roll, just limit the opportunities for the player to travel behind scenery. Although later games such as Head Over Heels were able to get this aspect technically right, the raised bar meant that isometric games were much more prolific on framebuffer based hardware such as the ZX Spectrum where the technique was perfected early on by Ultimate Play The Game's Knight Lore and then repeated endlessly without any significant gameplay advances.

Chronology of significant platform games

Game title (developer, year of release):

1980s

Lode Runner (and sequels) - computer game allowed new screens to be designed and saved and played by ordinary users.

1990s

2000s

See also

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