Jumping

one of the things i like about Smash Bros is the ability to perform a jump in midair, blatantly contradicting even the game's own questionable laws of physics.

bad jumping a-gogo in FPS of course but is worst in the first turok for the N64 which I think might have been the first console FPS to include jumping; god I wasted so much time in that game because of bad jumping (not to mention bad fogging too)

Also jumping in RPGs, when it exists, is usually pretty terrible. The system in FF X-2 where you needed to stand on very specific hotspots to trigger jumping capability was particularly bad.

By contrast, man, do I love jumping around with a leaf or a feather in the Mario games. It allows you to be so elegant in your movement and explore so much more freely. Fuck fire flowers.

totally... that really adds so much dimension to the game. truly classic jumping!

this is OTM. nothing promotes team unity more than elite bunny hopping en masse

http://homepage.mac.com/knarley/iblog/B1286550043/C1156448781/E64027672/Media/pitfall.gif

yeah James Pond II jumping was great, I'll second that vote.

S/D: controllers for jumping... fuck a sticky-buttoned x-box

that also reminds me of a game called Farenheit 3000 (a jsw/miner clone) where you could bounce off walls in mid jump. Also the jump was stupidly long.

S/D: controllers for jumping... fuck a sticky-buttoned x-box

I was thinking that when I wrote it actually, it's just the Gameboy version of Ducktales had that horrible bit in the African Mines where you had to bounce off the heads of all those water-gremlins. On the NES version you just got shot over there in a cannon, or something equally as easy.

Fuck an aged MegaDrive too, those controllers are such a pain when they start to get dodgy. Search them when they're good though, the buttons are huge!

no: hit a wall, you fall. IIRC.

Totally agree, though having to press down and B while in midair was always kind of awkward. Ducktales 2 improved on that much, despite the watery graphics and slapdash feel of a lot of late NES games.

God I'm a dork.

Destroy

Play control SO FLUID

Even though it was one of my favorite games, I never got past this one level.

Can I just say that I usually really despite the jumping in first-person shooters, where you get less of a sense of a "jump" and more of a sense of, umm, the screen just moving up a bit for a second? Which is my way of prefacing a shout-out to the first Halo, where the jumps could be kind of amazing -- they had a weird hanging/sliding quality, like you were on a track, and if you were running at someone, and you both jumped at the same time, it seemed like there was a bizarrely long amount of time in there to engage in mid-air combat.

This is my first post to I Love Games. Dorks.

ONE OF US
ONE OF US

your character can do amazing tricks, violate the laws of physics, do insanely powerful jumps...but you can't climb up a platform that's only two feet high. i HATE the "can't grab & pull yourself up" thing in most FPS.

I'm playing Tron 2.0 right now, and it's really pissing me off.

They do have some bits where you do things like grab a rope and cut it and fly up onto buildings - but it's all done in fucking cut scenes!

gah!

If I ever release a solo record, it's gonna be called Unique Jumps. I'm a sucker for that sudden third-person movie mode.

Peach in Mario 2 is sweet because you never fall into waterfall pithole DOOOM if you misjump, she just floats on like whatever.

But then you get to those desert bits where you have to dig down through sand and she's almost as bad as Luigi. (Make Luigi jump once to avoid a tiny little snake and he does his big-butt shuffly pinwheel liftoff halfway back up the level.)

Also pretty illustrative of the gap between 1983 and 1986? I don't remember people jumping around much on the Atari.

http://img234.imageshack.us/img234/5664/donkeykongjr28arcadegame29pz0.png
donkey kong jr - '82 arcade/atari

xpost!

http://img234.imageshack.us/img234/6857/64jumpmanzq9.gif

you know what i really hate? when you can't move at all in midjump! give me midair control!

yes

Laws of physics to thread.

Also, acrobats and martial artists can control midair movement.

I know, I'm just bustin yer chops.

> Also, acrobats and martial artists can control midair movement.

To a degree limited by Newton's rules of motion. Certainly there's no reversing course in midair. Except from up to down.

http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=8980870&publicUserId=5379721

this article is an awesome meditation on jumping

Definitely a good one.

i like in fps where you can jump and then fire a rocket at the ground and youll jump even higher

One of the cool things in the level commentary in Team Fortress 2 is how explicitly they designed the stages to take advantage of the Soldier's rocket-jumping ability and the Demoman's bomb-jumping - there are roofs and ledges no other character can get to that provide a tactical advantage.

Good article, though I think it's wrong about Wonder Boy which I'd always found intuitive even though it didn't follow the Mario model.

dudes i think the first ever jumping platformer for a home computer may have been "ladder" for the cpm operating system, which i played the hell out of on my grandfather's kaypro ii - there's a SLIGHTLY less satisfying java version of it that you can play here:

http://ostermiller.org/ladder/

i loved this game; my grandfather would yell at me not to hit the keys on his keyboard so hard - i used to slam fuck out of the space bar to jump

you could change the direction of the jump in mid-air as well

I believe fps-jumping should be limited, too much jumping takes me out of the story. Half-Life 2 is a good example, his jumps are so poor you might as well run.

I've never seen this thread and I think it is cool.

Cactus made a cool game about jumping called Precision. This sometime Poppenkast dude QOG made a neat game called Runjump in which you can pretty much only control the moment you jump while you constantly move to the right toward the goal.

loving yoshi island ds still, it's almost the perfect platformy-jumping game i've ever played.

i'm currently writing a simple platform game and in my haste to make the collision work my player sprite can actually hang onto walls and jump, if timed correctly, again to climb further. i think i'll clean it up and keep it in, perhaps for certain walls only though.

also i'd never given much thought about fps games not having a 'grab the platform above' method. Has this been incorporated these days? (not fps'd in a looong while)

Nah, it's still all ladders. I guess toting a dozen guns makes platform grabbing tricky.

Aside from "Mirror's Edge" (stretching a point to call it an FPS) I haven't seen any. It's a pity, because it would add variety if you had to holster your gun every so often to climb up/over something.

I would like to see a thread about all the innovative things that still can be added to fps along the lines of grabbing a platform, wall jumps (which should cause a 180 spin in camera angle), platforming type stuff

too bad there's no way to make that happen :(

Q*Bert moved upwards too, of course it was jumping!

I remember enjoying how precise the jumping in the original Prince of Persia seemed. One millimetre off and no way wuz you gonna catch that platform!

the disney prince of persia movie coming out would be cooler if they had based it on the first couple

in Manic Miner and JSW it was actually slower to jump than it was to walk, but only by a pixel or two - the last tiny bit of a jump had you coming down vertically with no horizontal movement at all.

thats true, i really hated that whole 'getting killed for falling too far' in jsw games.

the disney prince of persia movie coming out would be cooler if they had based it on the first couple

― stop assuming I assumed something LOL (CaptainLorax), Saturday, January 30, 2010 2:49 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i dont think the world is ready for an barack/michelle ancient persian adventure yet tbh

Screw the world, I'm ready! While I was playing Sands of Time, I actually did think to myself that it would make a fun adventure movie, it hit the right beats. Too bad the casting looks terrible...