Platform games

(Again as some research for the game I am making)

What platform games stand out from the rest? It can be any platform game, freeware or otherwise. Also, I am not thinking plot wise, I mean which platform engine stands out.

Edit> Oh and why (sorry :P)

Cheers :D

Mario?

this is all obviously in your opinion so yeah, sure :)

why mario though?

ta

Professor Fizwizzle.

why?

Turrican 1 and 2. They were clearly the best technologically and funwise when they came out on C64 and Amiga. Huge multi-way scrolling levels, cool guns and powerups, level graphics variations, the man could turn into a little spinny thing. Some of the levels you flew a spaceship etc. Oh and they had ace music. They were basically epic. If I ever make anything that good then I'll have achieved my ultimate game goal.

Abuse of course ;)
Aiming with the mouse, and moving around with the keyboard. That was a real great platformer.

Strider (Amiga) - the way your guy could walk up slopes and the moves he could do

Venus fly trap (Amiga) - walking on walls, ceilings etc.

Flood - just a hell of a good, playable platformer. Flooding levels and stupidly powerful grenades made it.

Rainbow Islands... It was addictive and frustrating at the same time.

Andy

Manic Miner.
Cos it was a new idea.
Non since have captured my attention. I wanted to like Odd (That thing with its mouth tied shut), cos it had nice videos, but I didnt.

Impossible Mission (C64)
Flashback (Amiga)

Both of those platformers initially made me go "wow" with the graphics and after the first 10 minutes of visual delight I was hooked inside the gameplay.

I'd say the blending of action/adventure and the puzzle element was the key to those two games.

I'm not sure you could call it a platformer (perhaps isometric platformer), then syndicate (Amiga) was superb.

The best shooter platformer was Turrican II (Amiga) but I think with that one I just loved the music.

*edit* other platformers that hooked me were Shadow of the Beast (Amiga) and Myth (Amiga) - Myth just had excellent atmosphere about it, a unique item you can't just give a game.

My favorite platformers.

Mario (any of them)

The original 2d Sonic games

Any of David Perry's platformers from the 16 bit era. Aladin, Cool Spot, Global Gladiators, Earthworm Jim.

Kid Chamelean

Flashback

I have different reasons for liking each, but all of these have very solid control, and that is key. There are other platformers with better graphics, but if the control is sloppy or unresponsive it ruins everything.

The David Perry games, for example. I knew exactly how they would play based on his past games, so I was always willing to shell out the money when a new one came along.

Flashback has amazing graphics, plot, the rotoscoped animation is amazingly fluid, yet still very responsive so it feels like YOU are in control of the character.

Putty, for obvious reasons.

Rygar was the bomb.

Mumba Boo

Going back a bit but Pitfall II on the C64
It was a no-brainer to play (no wrestling with the controls) , and required some degree of timing to pass or jump over the nasties.
I kept coming back to this game in an effort to collect all the gold bars in the map and get a perfect score.

I agree with the Flashback sentiments too.
If a game can keep me up util 5am then its a winner.
I loved the plot/story, animation, controls, and level design of the game. Game of the year for me.

yepo, I also agree with Flashback, Sonic, Flood, Mario, Rainbow Islans.

Also Jim Power, First Samurai, Gods, Rick Dangerous, Torvak the Warrior, Dizzy?, Chuck Rock, Rolling Thunder (arcade). Sorry no time for explanations...

Jet Set Willy.
For obvious reasons. :p

Rainbow Islands.
Just cute, addictive fun.

Wonderboy III: The Dragon's Trap.
A great mix of platform and RPG elements. Wonderboy in Monsterland defined the direction for later Wonderboy games, but Wonderboy III: The Dragon's Trap perfected it. One of my all-time favourite games, and I can still spend countless ours on it (and also on the superb sequels, Wonderboy in MonsterWorld and the final installment that was only released in Japan called "Monsterworld 4".

I haven't played many but the original Prince of Persia (I played it on an old PC many years ago) was done well, the player could run, walk and take individual steps. Also you could grab a ledge with your hand if you didn't jump far enough. You could also climb down ledges. The sword fighting was entertaining as well.

Re PoP: That game sure was fancy for it's time but it felt kinda unresponsive and slow.

Oooh some 8-bit ones: Ghosts'n'Goblins, Ghouls'n'Ghosts, PJ Elephant Antics um, that's it for now...

Anyone else remember Snokie ??
I liked Manic Miner too, that was really addictive !! :)
hold on .. was that Miner 2049er ... not sure of the name !!

Burger Time ? ...

Ah man how could I forget some of the classics...

Obviously Jet Set Willy with a name like 'Nomen Luni' - for the quirkiness, sense of humour and the sheer size of the Mansion.

Bubble Bobble for the simple and addictive gameplay.

Ghost n' Goblins for the fast paced action, atmos and a knight running around in his undies.

Castle Quest on the Beeb for the adventure and puzzle element.

I Always thought that JetSetWilly Ruined ManicManer, by tring to over extend the gameplay
(And I had one of those bugged versions, were you died when you entered the Hallway for the second time)

gunstar heros (second fav)
all the marios
magic pockets
new zealand story (my fav of all time)

New zealand story was just cool. The graphics were cute, gameplay was fun. There were so many neat elements to discover and try and overcome. The levels were tricky, so the game was a challenge. I was young when I first played it, and the little cut scenes really interested me. I liked the animations. I think super mario world 4 borrowed the idea perhaps, or at least they both borrowed the idea from somewhere else.

Gunstar heros, well best shoot-em-up platformer of all time. Even beats the likes of metal slug. Has to be one of the few games in my life I have played through and completed over and over and over and over and over again. It must have been the weapon combination, acrobatic style moves you could pull off and the gigantic frantic screen full of enemy boss sections.

You might be right about Jet Set Willy, but when I was a kid the mansion just seemed so vast. I loved the feel of exploring the place, knowing that there was always another fantastically surreal room for me to discover just around the corner (or so it seemed at the time).

Sometimes the fond memories we have exceed the gameplay experience when we revisit our favourite games, but that's to be expected when we look at them with our more experienced and jaded eyes.

Ta everyone :)

Skn! How goes it? :D

(O³ Raz)

maybe it has been already mentioned (read the thread quickly):

Metroid by Nintendo

Lo RAZ! you should pop into #apocalypticcoders sometime. Infact.. so should I haha. Life has been cool and mad. Got a job (crap job) and socializing more. So run out of time for game making. I am making more time now for it though, so have been buzzing around these forums a bit more. Posting instead of just lurking.

So did you start using blitzmax ;) ?

Heyooo, hehe nah, I figured I could do what I wanted in normal Blitz so Im gonna stick with that :)

I hear ya on the socializing front! Cant remember the last time I mucked around with game making! :o

Which irc server are you on these days?

Turrican 2, the most perfectly balanced game ever conceived :)

Nice graphics, great music, and lots of cute ideas made it a winner. Get an amiga emulator and try it out, if you don't know it already.

Also it had a middle point sidescrolling shoot-em-up, which although not spectacular, made a nice variation. At the time it was quite uncommon for a game to have variation :)

Chuckie Egg (BBC or Speccy, not the amiga clone).

Because it was easy to play but hard to beat. It was well scaled difficulty-wise.

And you could play it multiplayer.

irc.blitzed.org

same server #blitzbasic is on

With me, it would be a tie between Super Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog. Sonic's awesome in the way that playing a level is a lot like riding a roller coaster, IMHO. However, I also liked the original Duke Nukem series, nice music, nice interactivity, and everything else for that matter. Apogee (now 3D Realms) took platforming to a whole new level. Even tho it's a shooter, there are plenty of platform elements in the whole Duke Nukem series thus far (maybe not Duke 3D, but all the others were sidescrollers, and those are a great reason to enjoy PC platformers). A lot of different platformers have different influences. Just have to figure out which ones work best for you and your style.

Oh yeah! Anyone remember Rastan? One of my all time favorites.

Oh, I just remembered the Commander Keen games - they were great too!

Chroma: yeah it was cool in the arcade and the C64 version had cool/weird music.

Oh yeah how could I forget Sonic 1-4!

Also pseudo 3D was Pandemonium on PS1, and some bits of Crash Bandicoot were platformer.

Hello.

FRAK!!

Goodbye.

Montezuma's Revenge on the C64.

Very atmospheric and addictive.

Black Thorne?

black tiger

Sonic the Hedgehog, the 2d games, (1 and 2 mainly, never played 3) were good, mainly because there was a lot that you could do - the engine was very fast, had lots of movement, multiple parallax and playfields, character could interact well with lots of stuff and had lots of versatility, great tunes, and pretty good collision detection to be able to run upside down twirly loop-the-loop inside-out and all the rest.

Zool on the Amiga was also good, since it was pretty fast moving also, had some originality, and again the main character could do a lot of unique moves based on particular features in the environment. It was bright and colorful and intuitive.

Magic Pockets was pretty interesting, a different angle and unique tornado weapons. Kinda cutesy.

Of course Shadow of the Beast 1 & 2 were cool, graphics were very polished, great atmosphere and music, very artistic really makes it feel like you're in another world. The main character didn't have much versatility though.

James Pond and James Pond: Robocod were really fun, also very fast, cute, bright and cheerful, very catchy music (that I still have memorized), and lots of exploration. Also Robocod 2/3 could walk upside down and stuff.

There are so many more that were great. Assassin, Rick Dangerous2, Turrican, Astro Marine Corps, Robocop, etc..

I think to make a good platformer you have to have:

a) A well animated and very versatile main character, and its personality generally needs to be very appealing given the type of game it is, he/she needs to be able to move well and fluidly interact with the environment. The more variety the better.

b) The environment engine needs to be fast with lots of parallax levels, moving stuff, well-drawn game art, and preferably NOT the old `blocky tile` look (the downfall of many many many many tile-engine-based games). You gotta have a unique graphical angle. The scolling must be smooth, although 25/30fps is still playable. These days the screen rendering is easier than back in the day with limited processing power.

c) Great sound effects and music.

d) Lots of action and activity.

e) Interesting levels.

f) Usually some kind of goal/story thing.

Midnight Resistance. Wasn't very long but it was pretty cool.

Right Platform Game team, are you taking notes from this thread and Angeldaniel?

thanks everyone

especially AngelDaniel, really good post :)

When you speak of blocky tiles, do you mean as in, you can clearly see where individual tiles are?

I think he means, say every tile is 32x32 then everything in the game is spaced like that so it's really obvious. In fact Tomb Raider was like this! Just in 3D. I made a platformer (Iron Fist - unfinshed), checkout http://www.greyaliengames.com . One thing I made sure was I didn't use "tiles", I used "objects" that can be positioned anywhere meaning interesting levels could be designed, although in reality you still end up using standard spacing a lot, but it's good for rubble and stuff like that.

haha, I have to admit, I have been mucking around with a 32x32 tile based level editor.

Im thinking its easiest for filling large solid areas, however thinking about it, the way I have chucked the level editor together, it would be easy to add layers that render objects, both as background material and obstacles.

hmmmm, needs some more thought!

yeah you need tiles to be placed at any coords (then you can make them move too!) and have a layer, so like, background (behind player), current (same layer as player), and foreground. I have these in Iron Fist. Have layers means you can use a 32x32 tile map for the background and then just place platforms and foreground objects at any coords which rocks imho! ;-)

Currently I have an editor that allows...

Back1 (as in, in the distance)
Back2 (passive tiles)
Obstacle1 (obstacle tiles)
Fore1 (passive tiles but rendered in forground)
Active (Special layer for handling active objects)

I can easily alter that to allow as many layers as possible as well as defining certain layers as tiled or absolute.

But first, football ;)

ta grey.

Contra !
Two player fast paced platformer action. Loved it.

@Chroma ... when you mentioned Rastan it got mer thinking of 'Rasputin' on the Speccy... an Isometric frustrating / challenging game... did anyone ever beat it ?

Yeah you get the idea.

A tile map is just a form of compression. The whole point of it is to cut down how much memory is needed to store large play areas/levels, which typically in the past would've been quite limited based on how much graphics memory or main memory was available.

Usually without a tilemap the whole level would have to be held in main memory as a `superbitmap` at once. This tended to limit how big it could be, like on the Amiga where you only eventually had 2MB graphics memory (and originally 512k), this might mean only a few screens for a level.

So the idea with a tile-based engine, or even an object-based engine which is just a more flexible extension of the idea, is to try to represent what looks like an authentic large environment out of re-useable pieces, working within the constraints of memory. Tilemaps are a pretty popular way to go about it, but when you think about it, you're just trying to compress graphics data to use less memory - so really any other compression technique would be useful as well if you're trying to cut down the memory requirements. All you're doing is looking for repeated sequences of pixels and representing them by a single copy of that sequence, which is pretty standard compression technique. Just because you are starting out with those single-copy sequences (tilesets) and building your level from there, is irrelevant - although if you started out with a hand-drawn level and tried to find the repetition in it, you might be harder pressed ;-D That's why people start with making the tileset first - they're building a catalog of compressable parts, and then `de-compressing` it into a level.

That said, the idea of trying to compress *anything* is born out of the idea that there is a limitation on how much you can store `as is` in memory. In the old days you had to be more careful to use your memory space wisely, but these days with 16, 32, 64 or more megabytes of video ram, you aren't quite so limited. Not only can your resolution go up but also the size of your `superbitmap` world. So there isn't so much of a need to use a tilemap, if your game world can fit in memory as an `uncompressed` level.

The other benefit of tilemaps of course is reuseability, meaning you can build whole levels faster since you don't have to draw every single pixel from scratch. So there's a treadoff in time spent.

What I was referring to in regards to blocky tiles is, yes, there is a tradeoff between how re-useable a tile is, and how much memory space it's saving you. Lots of people have made these platform games where you can clearly see that there's only so many unique tiles and they all have a definite `boundary` between them, which allows them to be put next to each other in random arrangements without looking bad. But then in games with more graphics production time, you'll start seeing larger tiles like Shadow of the Beast had 128x64 tiles I think, so each tile would be like a whole chunk of landscape hand-drawn. While designed with `tileability` in mind - so it matches up with other tiles and gives you some combinations to work with, also made the game look like it mostly wasn't tile based. You didn't see so much repetition.

Then beyond that there are games where they clearly have plenty of time/room for lots of tile variety, but have actually avoided `thinking` in terms of tiles being joined together to create pleasing combinations, because they still keep drawing everything as square tile-sized units. It's the old `binary` syndrome - divide things up and then find it hard to break free, artistically, from those divisions.

So if you're going to use tiles, it's better to make it looks like tiles are not being used even though they are. The more it looks like it's not a tile-based engine, but actually is, the better. That would be considered the same thing as increasing your `compression ratio`. If you can represent a seemingly realistic and highly locally unique graphical environment, so it looks like every part is unique, but actually behind the scenes you're doing some clever compression to save memory and make it easier/faster to assemble things, then good for you.

OR...... you could deliberately make all your tiles autonomous-looking so the whole screen looks like a big pile of squares. :-) Bomberman springs to mind.

OR...... you could do away with the whole idea of `lack` on which all tile engines and compression is based, and just go with high resolution RAW hand-drawn or computer-generated superbitmap levels ... which I predict will be ultimately the purity that everyone will return to simply because it is the truest and most flexible way of doing it.

Of course, these days there are other ways of doing levels, like with polygons, which is a whole other ball game.

(Also just want to give Superfrog a mention, that's a good platformer).

Hard Hat Mack - Apple II - colourfull graphics, frantic gameplay)
Saboteur 1 and 2 - C64 - (err.. well.. it's my baby)
Impossible Mission - C64 - (a classic)
Dan Dare - C64 (excellent atmosphere and story)
Prince of Persia - PC - (pixel perfect graphics and gameplay)

Barney

SuperFrog :)

How quickly this has faded from memory:
http://www.gameflaws.com/cavestory/

CAVE STORY

yeah cave story rocks. I guess I was thinking in terms of commercial games.

Tilemap or object based games are much quicker than drawing each levels pixels by hand, shat a chore that would be!

But you could produce lovely, lush bscenery by painting the backgrounds and storing them as a huge bitmaps. It'd be lots of work but well worth it, I think. Sort of like a platformer with oil/watercolour backgrounds (or using a tablet and digital techniques to simulate these painterly effects.)

Turrican 3 on the Amiga. It had some really subtle graphical effects going on that it made it look as good as a SNES game even though it was on a 32 colour palette. Very underrated.

The Lost Vikings, also on Amiga. One of the only platform games to keep me completely engrossed from start to finish. Not something I can say about the Mario games. An excellent original idea that didn't grate as the puzzles got harder.

Yoshi's Island. Widely accepted as the best SNES platformer. Attention to detail was almost psycopathic in its application. Even Yoshi's Story on N64 was not quite as good, despite the graphical improvements.

I didn't like Sonic on megadrive because there was too much guesswork. There was no real logical progression to the game. It was maze-navigation and nothing more.

The SEGA master system versions of Sonic and Sonic 2 were reasonably appealing. They were necessarily slower than the megadrive versions and seemed to have a bit more thought put into them.

Leander on Amiga. Excellent graphics and reasonably good gameplay. It was let down by repetitiveness in the end though.

Brian the Lion on Amiga. Again, some of the best graphics and effects (realtime rotation of bitmaps, woo!) but not enough thought gone into the gameplay.

Fire and Ice. Good concept, good character, bit too hard.

Creatures and Creatures 2 on C64. They did push the 64 to its limits in the day and the sub games really did make it all worthwhile.


No platformer would be complete without a couple of original sub games. They help break up the monotony and gives the player a chance to associate more with the in-game character. This is assuming that the game designer doesn't make the mistake of excluding the in-game character from sub-games!

Things to avoid:
Slippy slidey ice levels.
Leaps of faith (having to jump/fall into a part of the level with no chance to forsee the outcome).
Making the player trawl back through previously visited parts of the level.
Unfairness (there should always be a predictable way of overcoming an enemy or obstacle).
Forgetting to include an in-game 'music on/off' option. Seriously.

Jazz Jackrabbit 2 on PC. Very nice, despite 32x32 tiles :)

Vinyl:
Nice one, I picked up on the leap of faith business with a game I researched, so its nice to see someone else mention it. the other points are really good too.

I gave Cavestory a go, there is something really satisfying about it :) On face value it doesn't look too impressive but it really is fun.

AngelDaniel or anyone really:
The whole superbitmap thing I had considered but not in anyway regarding using tiles or not. My consideration was mapping the level to an image and then doing one check (or a few for above, below, left and right) for collisions. I dont really have a clue about memory or anything, is it realistically possible to store the whole level as one image (or a few, considering layers).

Thanks

You could store it all as a single image but it could only be so large, and you'd have to break it down into separate textures because there are limits to texture sizes. You'd need enough memory to load the whole thing in at once. With a 32 mb graphics card you could do for example a 2560x2560 32-bit superbitmap thing. --- about 26 megabytes.
If you're running at 640x480 that's about 4 x 5.3 screens of play area (about 21 screens worth). Typical platform game levels could with tilemaps are usually quite a bit larger than that. With 64 megs of graphics mem you could get up to around 40 screens. If you're talking about layers you're going to have to think about either much smaller game worlds or using tiling for at least part of it.

I think the bitmap background could really work for the right type of game. If you design it right you dont need millions of screens. One of the faves I mentioned, Castle Quest, was widely acknowledged as just about the best damn adventure platformer on the bbc, and it only had 9 screens you could wonder around.... of course people expect a bit more these days : )

[gasp] I just remembered one of my all time favorites was "Crash Bandicoot!" [/gasp]

How could I forget about THAT game? That, to me, was the precursor to true 3D platform gaming. I mean, that came out around the same time as Super Mario 64, if I'm not mistaken...

Also, even tho Descent was a flight game, would it be somewhat considered a platform game as well? I never knew how to classify the Interplay classic...

I certainly wouldn't call Descent a platform game in any shape form or fashion ;-)

Also I made an assumption that the post only wanted 2D platform games. If 3D were to be included, I've got tons of REALLY good ones PS2 and Gamecube.

Hehe I did actually forget to say that it could be 2d or 3d. Saying that, this thread has exceeded my expectations and I have already got loads of decent material to go through. If I were to branch into 3d, that would at least double it!

Oh by the way grey, I gave your platform game a go. How long did it take ya?

Chris: Hope you liked it. Of course it's nowhere near finished and tons of stuff is missing but I liked what was there. OK I logged 240 hours making it BUT I didn't log about another 40-50 hours of research (playing old platformers and modern shareware) and some code. Bear in mind during this time I was also learning BlitzPlus. I could do it a lot quicker now, especially with my BlitzMax game framework. Those 280ish hours were spread over 6 months (from Dec04 to May05) because I was doing them as a hobby before I started full-time on games. In June05 I realised that the game was going to take AGES to finish and that perhaps the target market was too small and that I should have tried making something easier with greater appeal if I wanted to sell it. So I made a Tetris clone as practice, including menus, ini file, windowed mode etc. This took 2 weeks. Then I made some other mini games and started my match-3 engine which eventually turned into Xmas Bonus and Easter Bonus. I'm making another Match-3 now in BlitzMax (all those other games were BlitzPlus) and then I'm going to think carefully about what to do next because I really want to make action games not puzzle games and hopefully I'm building my skills/knowledge up so that I can make a viable go of it...

Yeah, I really liked when Pac-Man was converted into a platformer with that Pac-Man World series of late. Still can't get over the old Atari version of Pac-Man that just tanked, and crashed the whole industry in the past... If only Atari would've kept the old Namco version intact (if Atari had that type of technology). IMHO, the classic arcade version should've been in Mattel's hands for the Intellivision, NOT Atari's... That would've been interesting. Ahh well, can't reminisce in hindsight too much. Welcome to 2006, and there are more platformers to consider as originals. I'm certain that there'll be something good out there somewhere.

Yeah i was impressed grey :) At some point Id be interested in hearing how you went about handling the collisions etc because that is something I haven't given much thought yet

You could do an non-regular tile map. You could use variously sized bitmap elements to build a map. Nothing says you have to use 32x32 or other regular sizes.

Would use more RAM than 32x32 tiles but less RAM than a super-sized bitmap.

OR you could have objects in 3D that are rendered with realtime raytracing ;-D ... or short of that, a polygon-based system.

What's wrong with you people? :P

A thread this long and no one mentioned OddWorld: Abe's Odyssey or Abe's Exodus? Those are awesome games, borrowing much from Flashback and Another World - which are still king of the hill for me - but they added so much more.

At least a couple of people mentioned Rick Dangerous. I loved that. I think it was the sequel I loved, actually, but who can forget the waaaaaaaaaaah when you died? :)

and the double sized sprite. It was quite a hard game too wasn't it?

Yeah my platform game editor let you position freely or snap to grid and the grid could be like any size (adjust in the editor dynamically) 4x4, 8x8, 16x16 etc.

how would you go about handling images of different sizes though? (as in an animimage uses the same size for each frame).

Do you just individually load lots of images?

Snes: Donkey Kong Country
Great game characters, scenery, music, sound effects, and controls.
My particular favourite parts being the mine cart ride and underwater areas (nice ambient music).

No I had a giant bitmap and each tile had coordinates and size parameters so that it could be read from the giant bitmap. All my tiles parameters were stored in a special text file and include other things like if they wre rectangular, solid, masked etc.

Yeah, Miyamoto-san wasn't too thrilled with Rare's versions of DKC at all, if I recall... Now that Rare's under MS's power, don't expect DK games from Rare anytime soon...

Grey: ahh got ya. Ill have to look into that, sounds useful

abe's odysee

Agreed. I remember reading somewhere that Treasure was making a sequel or follow up to it on one of the hand-held consoles (DS maybe?)

> Agreed. I remember reading somewhere that Treasure
> was making a sequel or follow up to it on one of
> the hand-held consoles (DS maybe?)

There's a new one on GBA but it's not really as fun (It's GBA for gods sake)

Don't forget Treasure's next game after Gunstar Heroes. Dynamite Headdy, in a way, even better than Gunstar Heroes (shame it's only 1 player though)

I remember Dynamite Headdy!
(In particular, the faggy "thank yOU!".

Way better than their Ronald McDonald game.

DS lets you play GBA titles right?

> DS lets you play GBA titles right?

Yep, and where have you been hiding all this time Rocketgnome? :) For shooting platform games I'd also have to vote Contra ALien Rebels on Megadrive and especially Contra 3 on the SNES, BEST SNES game of all time. Flawless!

Everytime I play metal slug I curse "LET ME FIRE DIAGONALLY"

It's nice and cool under this rock. Bad Wifi coverage though.

remembered a great megadrive one: Earthworm Jim

Oh MAN the memories. :) Seriously, I wasn't sure what was so great about this game.

Mario 3 had four way interaction, you could interact with enemies in different ways, multiple ways to finish a level, there's never been a game like it IMO.

Prince of Persia got me hooked, though I never did get past level 11 without the Levset+<CTRL+L> cheat. It was just so smooth and had a wide range of animation frames- It was just a fantastic game for it's time.

Oh and LOST VIKINGS! Excelent 2D platform puzzler, I loved it. Wish I had a copy now :-) Three funny looking characters, wierd little interactions, extremely strange levels. *sigh* I wish there was a new one :-)

Oh gee I can't believe I didn't say this a lot earlier, but Kingdom Hearts.

Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles on the Amiga was possibly one of the worst platform games ever - it had a terribly slow framerate (like 4 fps) and no gameplay.

Whew... This thread's getting waaay too hot to handle now. That's the one reason why I have the GameCube for platforming, and the X360 for driving and third-person games. IMHO, most of your good platformers are on the GameCube, probably on par to the PS2, if not better. Spider-Man 2 just turned out to be one of my favorites, assuming that's an action platformer of the best quality. Just love swinging around on webs, and scaling those tall skyscrapers. If only more platformers would take it that far to the extreme.

As far as 3D console platformers go I'd recommend:

Jak and Daxter (+sequal)
Rachet & Clank (+sequals)
Maximo (+sequal)
Viewtiful Joe (haven't played sequal)
Rayman (2 and 3 I think)

plus some more I'm sure but they are all great...

It seems like the "Oh, and Why?" of the original question has been overlooked a lot in this thread, since it's turned into a `whats your favorite platformer` thread rather than `what makes a good platform game` thread. Maybe we need a new thread with a proper intention.

Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles- Whats different between this and the turtles of the Ninja kind?

I thought the "Hero" thing was because "Ninja" was deemed too violent in the UK or something.

Hero was a US thing, Ninja was a Euro thing.

The game AD actually referred to (I believe) was Ninja Turtles... Hero Turtles was a beatemup if I remember correctly.

I loved the Ninja Turtles game. I played it again recently... it doesn't have the same appeal anymore =]