Quote:
Originally Posted by wanderer
There was always something very natural about pushing Up to jump - you are moving upwards, after all. It makes perfect sense to me and never liked the addition of an extra button for such a natural movement.
For complex games with extra weapons etc. obviously extra buttons are great, but just for the jump? I can't recall a single platformer that caused me trouble for jumping and climbing ladders for example with one button alone.
(I might have already written all this in previous pages, this thread is a bit like a David Lynch film).
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Just having the joystick+1 button limits the number of things you can do in the game, and the increasing number of buttons is what made increasingly more interesting and fun platformers possible on consoles.
Some Amiga platformers had fine-tuned gameplay requiring accurate moves on the part of the player. One requirement for many games was to hit diagonals correctly every time, and that is quite hard to do on a joystick. If you didn't you could fall off a moving platform, catch a bullet, land on an enemy instead of jumping over him, etc.
Joysticks are made for flying planes or spaceships. Thumb + A + B button is perfect for platformers because it moves the most important control in a platformer to a separate button.
Amiga supports multiple buttons, but few Amiga-enabled joysticks were made. So almost all the game developers made the games for single button joysticks and mapped jump to "up".
A gamepad really makes the difference where you have to time the jumps, try the suggested gamepad mod with f.ex. Bubble Bobble and you'll notice you don't curse anymore
