[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.