[chongli]

I’m familiar with all of those games. They’re few enough in number that I see the same small set brought up every time I make this point.

I think they’re the exception that proves the rule. There are fewer of them (noteworthy ones anyway, I’m sure there’s a long tail of obscure ones) than there were popular games of this kind on the original NES. I think Derek Yu’s release of UFO-50 is indicative of his similar need to scratch that itch!

[vunderba]

I think noteworthy is the key. Others with tight controls and timing that I can think of (that are less known) are Downwell, Caveblazers, Celeste, Super House of Dead Ninjas, Tiny Barbarian DX, VVVVVV.

And these are just ones that I've personally played.

[chongli]

I have heard of Celeste and I have played through VVVVVV. I will check out the others.

Celeste is kind of an example of what I was talking about though. The game gives you a ton of movement options and "floaty" air control with a lot of maneuverability. NES games never did that. The controls were simple and highly responsive, but generally very "committal."

The only recent game I know of with controls that really felt like a NES game was La Mulana. That game did not allow you to reverse directions in the air after a jump. Once you jumped forward you were fully committed to the arc of that jump.

[vunderba]

I see what you're going for. We're sort of struggling to come up with a common nomenclature . For me when I hear floaty controls I think of games where the physics are loose (SMB) as opposed to tight controls (Megaman).

Personally, I really hate being forced to commit to a jump direction like you would in Castlevania.

But there are quite a few NES games that give you control in the air: Megaman, Ninja Gaiden, SMB2 as Peach, Contra, etc.

Different strokes for different folks.

[chongli]

I do like games with air control, I just also like the old school non-air-control games.

Modern platformer devs seem to be very much heavily biased to the air control side, where characters can maneuver in both directions at high speed to a far greater distance than their jump height. I really don't like that level of control, as it leads to the need to make level designs based on large amounts of horizontal movement in the air. It's a style of gameplay that came out of Super Mario World's infamous cape powerup, which severely undermines the challenge of that game.

[vunderba]

To be fair: The mario games (outside of perhaps the Lost Levels) were never particularly challenging games in the first place.

SMB3 introduced us to Raccoon Mario which lets you also cheese large sections of trickier levels.