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a tale of two platformers
Jan. 18th, 2016 10:42 pmA little parlor-question I've been turning over in my head the past few days: would you rather be known for creating the first notable piece of art in a particular genre (or particular form, or particular style, or whatever), or the best piece of art in a particular genre (form, style, etc)?
Like all questions of this sort, it's deliberately fuzzy/ill-defined, and how you answer depends on how you define it. But.
It came to mind because I've spent the past couple days playing through Yoshi's Island, which I believe is a truly exemplary platformer. I remember loving it more than about any other video game as a kid, and I wasn't even worried that I'd been seeing it with kid-goggles, as I am sometimes when revisiting beloved games/books/etc from my childhood—I was thoroughly confident it would be as good as I remembered. (And it is.) I've been playing with the boy, who'd never played the game before at all, and he's glowingly positive about it.
But you can't have Yoshi's Island without having a mature body of 2D platformers that came before it. You just can't. Comparing it against, say, the original Super Mario Brothers, you realize how much of Yoshi's Island consists of optimizing and improving the hell out of those core mechanics. Jumping in Mario was fine, but the flutter-jumping in Yoshi's Island feels bouncier, more forgiving, more exciting. Stomping on enemies in Mario is good, but Yoshi's Island gives you a variety of ways to attack enemies—not too many, not too few—that are fun to discover and exciting to execute, and so on. Yoshi's Island is genius, in how well it draws from what came before it, but it's not revolutionary in the way that the very first 2D platformers could be.
If the original Mario Brothers were to come out as some kickstarted indie platformer today, people would probably say it feels stale. Unnatural. Overly unforgiving, a little tedious, a little repetitive. Yoshi's Island, though, could probably garner some decent attention and praise.
You can do the same comparison for other mediums, I think. Film seems like the obvious comparison, but my understanding of film history is a little fuzzy beyond, I know it took a while for film to break away from the conventions of live theater, and I find older films a little hard to watch in the same way that I find older video games hard to play. The novel, too, as it's defined in Western canon, is a relatively young art form. (Though, as a possibly-related aside, when I read The Tale of Genji a few years ago, I found it amusing how very much the plot reminded me of any number of classical soap opera formulas, and thought how good Lady Murakami would've been as lead writer for some Gossip Girl-esque show if she'd been born in modern times.)
Anyway. It's also been an interesting memory-lane walk in terms of, wow, how old video games are getting—Yoshi's Island was over a decade ago, and it feels so much nicer than any number of critical-darling artsy platformers I've played in the past few years. It's so nice to discover that five-year-old you had such fine taste.
Like all questions of this sort, it's deliberately fuzzy/ill-defined, and how you answer depends on how you define it. But.
It came to mind because I've spent the past couple days playing through Yoshi's Island, which I believe is a truly exemplary platformer. I remember loving it more than about any other video game as a kid, and I wasn't even worried that I'd been seeing it with kid-goggles, as I am sometimes when revisiting beloved games/books/etc from my childhood—I was thoroughly confident it would be as good as I remembered. (And it is.) I've been playing with the boy, who'd never played the game before at all, and he's glowingly positive about it.
But you can't have Yoshi's Island without having a mature body of 2D platformers that came before it. You just can't. Comparing it against, say, the original Super Mario Brothers, you realize how much of Yoshi's Island consists of optimizing and improving the hell out of those core mechanics. Jumping in Mario was fine, but the flutter-jumping in Yoshi's Island feels bouncier, more forgiving, more exciting. Stomping on enemies in Mario is good, but Yoshi's Island gives you a variety of ways to attack enemies—not too many, not too few—that are fun to discover and exciting to execute, and so on. Yoshi's Island is genius, in how well it draws from what came before it, but it's not revolutionary in the way that the very first 2D platformers could be.
If the original Mario Brothers were to come out as some kickstarted indie platformer today, people would probably say it feels stale. Unnatural. Overly unforgiving, a little tedious, a little repetitive. Yoshi's Island, though, could probably garner some decent attention and praise.
You can do the same comparison for other mediums, I think. Film seems like the obvious comparison, but my understanding of film history is a little fuzzy beyond, I know it took a while for film to break away from the conventions of live theater, and I find older films a little hard to watch in the same way that I find older video games hard to play. The novel, too, as it's defined in Western canon, is a relatively young art form. (Though, as a possibly-related aside, when I read The Tale of Genji a few years ago, I found it amusing how very much the plot reminded me of any number of classical soap opera formulas, and thought how good Lady Murakami would've been as lead writer for some Gossip Girl-esque show if she'd been born in modern times.)
Anyway. It's also been an interesting memory-lane walk in terms of, wow, how old video games are getting—Yoshi's Island was over a decade ago, and it feels so much nicer than any number of critical-darling artsy platformers I've played in the past few years. It's so nice to discover that five-year-old you had such fine taste.
