Side-scrollers (platformer) shooting games (PC ONLY!)

[edit] misuse of quote function

Side note, I know a YT guy named Lingyan203 has done YouTube Let's Play videos for nearly every game mentioned here, even the less known ones (and numerous 3D ones too, he's doing Duke Nukem 3D right now!). They don't have commentary but I still thought I'd make a mention. Here's the channel link:

http://www.youtube.com/user/Lingyan203

I am stupid and I forgot to mention the best platform game ever.

mbrown said:

Namely, the fact that one hit of anything kills you AND you cannot save anywhere in the middle of a level.

I actually liked that, despite how annoying it can be.

Oh, did you ever play the very last level of Commander Keen 2? I don't know what in the name of Christ they were smoking when they made that, but easily the hardest thing I've seen in a Commander Keen game.

Jill of the Jungle: I think I've only played the last episode (Jill Saves the Prince) to date. I remember it was quite good though. I'm guessing I'd like the two prequels.

I only played the first. Kinda like a stripped down version of Xargon. Some very interesting gameplay modifiers, like transforming into one of the weak phoenix enemies.

Grain of Salt said:

I am stupid and I forgot to mention the best platform game ever.




I actually liked that, despite how annoying it can be.

Oh, did you ever play the very last level of Commander Keen 2? I don't know what in the name of Christ they were smoking when they made that, but easily the hardest thing I've seen in a Commander Keen game.


I only played the first. Kinda like a stripped down version of Xargon. Some very interesting gameplay modifiers, like transforming into one of the weak phoenix enemies.

I don't think I ever got to the last level in Keen 2 :(

Jill of the Jungle is sort of Xargon except stripped down some, mainly in graphics. It's by the same developers. The third episode is a little closer to Xargon than the first however, but still clearly not as crisp. It's for that reason why it's a mystery to me that Jill is quite known and respected, yet Xargon is comparitively much less mentioned. I think anyone who's played Xargon will see it clearly is better than Jill.

EDIT: Wikipedia on Xargon:

The game was reviewed in 1994 in Dragon #204 by Sandy Petersen in the "Eye of the Monitor" column. Petersen gave the game 2 out of 5 stars.

??!! And from someone behind Doom to boot.

Also Bio Menace I probably need to check that one out!

And I didn't know this but Xargon is actually freeware - so look at the Wikipedia article I pointed to in referencing the rating if you want the FULL game. Bio Menace is also freeware, along with Alien Carnage (already pointed to this in an earlier post).

I think I'm going to take a quick look and see if any others are freeware.

This thread hits me at the perfect time. I just reinstalled Jill of the Jungle and Jazz Jackrabbit, and Keen 4-6, and the Secret Sam demo. I have a great love for all of the above games on the list as I grew up with all of them (save for the user-made Keen episodes).

Xargon is probably my favorite side-scrolling shooter of all time, if not just for the music. I remember being stuck in the Labrynth level in episode 3 and having no clue how to find the exit. It seems so simple now, yet up until age 10 it perfectly confounded me.

One of my favorite tracks:

I used to play the shareware of Jazz Jackrabbit all of the time too. Now that I have the whole set installed I've been playing it again feverishly. I've actually been seriously considering doing a Jazz inspired 3-level mapset for Doom based off of Medivo, Tubelectric, and Orbitus (imagine giant rotating blue pillars of energy). Going to quote another favorite from this game:


EDIT: Just re-realized that Halloween Harry = Alien Carnage. I need to find me a full-version copy of that game too :P

I spent a shit ton of time playing Jill of the Jungle's 3 episodes over and over. It just never got old and somehow still retained playability for me over the years. Gonna cite another favorite track here:


A lot of the Apogee games came on a demo-disc they gave out/sold back in the '90s. Once I was old enough to figure out how to use it I could while away hours with something like the Crystal Caves demo. In fact, most of those demos were stockpiled with tons of levels to play. Makes me miss that era of gaming.

I have my Hocus Pocus CD around somewhere, god knows.

And why the hell isn't Monster Bash up here somewhere? That game was fun as hell.

mbrown said:

Also Bio Menace I probably need to check that one out!

Definitely check out the shareware. Bio-Menace is another one of those overlooked gems.

EDIT:

Gez said:

Cosmo's Cosmic Adventures

SO MUCH FUCKING FUN HOW DID I NOT REMEMBER THIS GAME

Kirby said:

This thread hits me at the perfect time. I just reinstalled Jill of the Jungle and Jazz Jackrabbit, and Keen 4-6, and the Secret Sam demo. I have a great love for all of the above games on the list as I grew up with all of them (save for the user-made Keen episodes).

Xargon is probably my favorite side-scrolling shooter of all time, if not just for the music. I remember being stuck in the Labrynth level in episode 3 and having no clue how to find the exit. It seems so simple now, yet up until age 10 it perfectly confounded me.

One of my favorite tracks:


I used to play the shareware of Jazz Jackrabbit all of the time too. Now that I have the whole set installed I've been playing it again feverishly. I've actually been seriously considering doing a Jazz inspired 3-level mapset for Doom based off of Medivo, Tubelectric, and Orbitus (imagine giant rotating blue pillars of energy). Going to quote another favorite from this game:


I spent a shit ton of time playing Jill of the Jungle's 3 episodes over and over. It just never got old and somehow still retained playability for me over the years. Gonna cite another favorite track here:


A lot of the Apogee games came on a demo-disc they gave out/sold back in the '90s. Once I was old enough to figure out how to use it I could while away hours with something like the Crystal Caves demo. In fact, most of those demos were stockpiled with tons of levels to play. Makes me miss that era of gaming.

I have my Hocus Pocus CD around somewhere, god knows.

And why the hell isn't Monster Bash up here somewhere? That game was fun as hell.



Definitely check out the shareware. Bio-Menace is another one of those overlooked gems.

Wow you sound just like me :) My rediscovery was on January 12th, when I was compelled to get Commander Keen back through Steam.

I have to agree Xargon probably has the best music. It is just always so nice and fitting. It's in my favorite sidescrollers for sure. I think back in the day I probably played it over and over more than any other game in the list besides Keen 4-6.

The first time I got Jazz Jackrabbit, it was just the shareware. Then I actually got the full of Jazz Jackrabbit 2 first. And then I still wanted even more so I got the whole Jazz Jackrabbit. And despite lacking some of the features of its sequel, it didn't dissapoint one bit. (One of the Jazz Jackrabbit 2 original episodes is actually a homage to parts of the first Jazz Jackrabbit. The episode name should give away which one it is. :) )

I think I need to catch up on some games like Monster Bash, Bio-Menace, Alien Carnage, etc. No need for shareware with Biomenace/Alien Carnage though, they are now official freeware per 3D Realms website.

I think this is a pretty complete list of the Dos side-scrolling games. (Oddly it's missing Keen 5 but it has Keen 4 though Keen 5 is in the same package.) Also there's no Jazz Jackrabbit 2, but that's because it's a Windows game. It way underrates the first Jazz Jackrabbit though. (A personal opinion of each game is included on this site.)

Also I remember someone much earlier on this thread mentioned Realms of Chaos. That's an RPG, not a shooter ;)

I just finished checking a list of games released as freeware on Wikipedia.

According to this list, the only full game in this poll that is now officially freeware - NOT abandonware (excluding the usermade Keens) is Xargon. It's very worth looking on Wikipedia to hunt it down though!

Of Apogee/3D Realms related games, the full versions of Biomenace and Alien Carnage are now officially freeware, but none of the others that have been mentioned thus far.

One other now-freeware 2D shooting title that hasn't yet been mentioned caught my eye: Tyrian. Is anyone familiar at all with this game?

If you're talking stricly x86/DOS...
platform style: Bio Menace, Blackthorne, Gods
overhead view: The Chaos Engine

I probably played everything on that list that had a shareware episode at least once. I think the only ones I finished were Commander Keen and Duke Nukem. And then I bought those two and never did finish the remaining episodes...

I ended up buying a bunch of other Apogee titles a few years ago; the one I keep going back to is Crystal Caves (it's pretty much at the top of the list of "things to run when installing a new version of DOSBox").

ITT: mbrown makes another poll of old well known PC games.

I urge everyone to play Bionic Commando Rearmed and Rochard, both recent 2D platformers that got PC releases. Awesome games.

Thanks to you guys, I somehow found this gem and wish I knew about it in 1995.

Its kinda like a cross between Jill of the Jungle and Xargon. I kinda like it.

Oh here's another one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_Worlds_(video_game)
http://sleepless.com/iw/title.html

I found the DOS v1.2 here (it's freeware now):
http://www.dosgames.com/g_side3.php

Played the shareware a bit back in the day but never got too far. Seems to run okay in dosbox with SB16 audio. Only bad thing is you can't reconfigure the keyboard bindings, which is a pity because there's many different action keys.

I couldn't get Inner Worlds to work with my GUS setup so I had to settle for SB16.

Awesome game.

I found out about Tokkyu Tenshi the other day. Pretty awesome, best described as side-scrolling Mario Kart.

I replayed Jill Saves the Prince (Jill of the Jungle Episode 3) last evening. Pretty good as I recall it being from >10 years ago, although there were a few things I didn't remember from before:

-You can save midlevel. Can't do that in Xargon.
-If you die and respawn, the level remains in the state of it when you died, meaning you have unlimited tries!? I certainly didn't remember this and would call it a poor design decision because if you use the feature, you really can just die as much as you want. It's almost like some modern games. This came as a shock to me and I almost wonder if I have a bad version of the game or something. Personally I just didn't allow myself to use this feature (if I died I loaded my save, which in many cases I challenged myself by saving only at the level start).
-Level 12. Don't get me started on how f*****g tedious this level is. The entire level is nonstop platform to platform jumping and there are instant death spikes EVERYWHERE. I'm practically shocked I didn't remember this level from before. This is how NOT to make a level in a platforming game - what were the guys at Epic thinking? If this game had a Xargon setup (you can't save in the middle of levels and have to do the whole level again if you die), I suspect there would be blood in the streets.

Overall - it was a fun couple hours as I remember it, although it just as much proves my earlier thinking that I believe Xargon is far superior, making it all the more surprising as to why this former series is the more well known one. And there's no level in Xargon (not even the labyrinth, the one level in the game I don't like very much) that even approaches the Level 12 I mentioned above. Jill good, Xargon FTW!

Not PC exclusives, but games I played on PC anyway:

Another World (also known as Out of this World for US export)
Flashback
Prince of Persia (the old one, which I never managed to finish because I always took too much time)

Another World in particular is truly a work of art.

Gez said:
Another World in particular is truly a work of art.

Yeah, sorta. I bought the 15th anniversary edition of that game. I don't think the gameplay has held up as well as the visuals - it's mainly rote memorization, especially in the later levels where you keep getting insta-zapped moving to new screens.

Restricting this genre of games to "PC only" is like asking to restrict a thread about flight simulators for the Atari 2600. That being said...I can say I enjoyed the shareware versions of various Keen games, and of course Jazz Jackrabbit (the closest you can ever say the PC got to a console-quality platformer).

I also liked Aladdin (hey, it was also released on PC!) and for a certain period I played a certain platform game with a raygun astronaut type of hero going through a very complex array of worlds (can't remember the exact name) and shareware stuff like Electro Body or Monster Bash.

Among the weirder ones must be some colgate and kellog's promo games....(yeah, these were actual DOS games).



Truth be said though, if you were used to arcade or console quality, PC platformers usually lagged behind the curve in many aspects. Not even smooth parallax scrolling could be considered a given on 1994 PCs. There were exceptions though, like an amazingly well done (but rare) port of Turrican 2 to the PC, released in 1996...a bit too late for this kind of game.



Speaking of Amiga-derived games, Superfrog was also pretty decent, if somewhat simple. Even if some people maligned the PC version for its controls, an autofiring joypad made it much more enjoyable ;-)

There were also some games that couldn't really be called "platformers" but they definitively had shooting and scrolling, like Zone 66, Tubular Worlds, Traffic Department 2192 and Cyberdogs (with REAL Doom sound rips ;-)

Abuse was and is the most enjoyable platform/side scrolling shooter game. Others are a bit too much about precision jumping than about having fun with shooting stuff.

Alien Rampage was quite fun too, but then in some later level I got into an annoying precision jumping part, which I wasn't able to survive, or if I did, I died soon after and the save point was before this jumping part.

I played Jazz Jackrabbit shareware episode through, but later on when I tried the full version, it just didn't seem so interesting. I prefer beating up Jazz Jackrabbit and his girlfriend in One Must Fall 2097.

I also tried Jazz Jackrabbit 2, but same thing as the first one, not so interesting.

Prince of Persia I can't get much further than half of the second level. Sword fighting was nicely done, but all the puzzle jumping between was not so nice.

I think I've tried all official Commander Keen games, probably finished the 4th game. Now I prefer seeing them hanged in some shiny metallic place.

Megaman was nice, though the bosses were too difficult, which required too much precision jumping. I was able to play through Megaman 2 with an emulator on PC and with easy skill... now why didn't other Megaman games have that easy skill?

PC platformers give me the impression that they were less evolved (graphics and music) than SNES equivalents of that time.

Sure, the PC isn't the system known most for platformers/side-scrollers, as in it doesn't have a Castlevania, Final Fantasy, Donkey Kong, Super Mario, Legend of Zelda, etc. But owning nothing but a PC, I still think it can be safely said that there are a handful, or even a couple handfulls, of PC platformers that are genuinely worth playing or at least looking at. That's what this thread is for, after all we don't need another thread praising Donkey Kong or Super Mario, etc. There are plenty of those elsewhere on the web. ;)

Other than the games/series highlighted in the poll, other titles I've thought of for the PC that seem to me that they are at least worth mentioning/discussing would be Inner Worlds, Bio-Menace, Alien Carnage (these first three are freeware games now to boot!), Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, and Realms of Chaos. Maybe Earthworm Jin also?, but I'm so unfamiliar with it (haven't even loaded up a shareware) that there's really no conclusion I can come to there.

Oh and let's not forget Sonic the Hedgehog. It is a platformer with PC support, after all! I own the first three (including Knuckles) of the series bought from Steam; they run on some sort of Sega Genesis classic emulator, if I'm not mistaken. Also I have the recent revamp of Sonic CD. Bought these all fairly recently though, and haven't played them a whole lot yet - and only very vague memories from these games when I was younger.

mbrown said:

Oh and let's not forget Sonic the Hedgehog. It is a platformer with PC support, after all! I own the first three (including Knuckles) of the series bought from Steam; they run on some sort of Sega Genesis classic emulator, if I'm not mistaken. Also I have the recent revamp of Sonic CD. Bought these all fairly recently though, and haven't played them a whole lot yet - and only very vague memories from these games when I was younger.

Well if we're going to talk about platformers that don't involve shooting, there's the Trine-series.

Jodwin said:

Well if we're going to talk about platformers that don't involve shooting, there's the Trine-series.

It need not involve shooting, but it must involve killing enemies/be action oriented.

In Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, you end up killing without shooting a lot too (although there are bombs).

Jimi said:

Alien Rampage was quite fun too, but then in some later level I got into an annoying precision jumping part, which I wasn't able to survive, or if I did, I died soon after and the save point was before this jumping part.

Precision jumping in a game where you have a jetpack?

Maes said:

Truth be said though, if you were used to arcade or console quality, PC platformers usually lagged behind the curve in many aspects. Not even smooth parallax scrolling could be considered a given on 1994 PCs. There were exceptions though, like an amazingly well done (but rare) port of Turrican 2 to the PC, released in 1996...a bit too late for this kind of game.

Yeah, that was the problem with Inner Worlds. It was an advanced 2D engine with 24 layers of parallax scrolling, but wasn't released until 1996. Ironically it would have probably fared better on the Amiga, because the development time would likely have been much quicker and there wouldn't have been so much competition from the FPS market.

hex11 said:

Yeah, that was the problem with Inner Worlds. It was an advanced 2D engine with 24 layers of parallax scrolling, but wasn't released until 1996. Ironically it would have probably fared better on the Amiga, because the development time would likely have been much quicker and there wouldn't have been so much competition from the FPS market.

Regardless of release, is Inner Worlds even worth playing (as a platformer fan)?

I wasn't really intending to consider year of release in this thread either...except for any rare case of an unusually old very good platformer (unusually old = before Commander Keen).

mbrown said:

Precision jumping in a game where you have a jetpack?

Alien Rampage != Alien Carnage

Another interesting game I forgot (albeit one from a few years after the era of Jill/Xargon/Jazz/etc) is Lurid Land.

It's a puzzle-based platformer where you play a blue wizard who can't jump, and who is hunted by scary undead knights. It's made up of simple puzzle mechanics like freezing/unfreezing, death from falling, redirecting pipelines, and NPCs who can activate switches. The most reliable mechanic is your basic spell, which can be cast any time (but not anywhere) and which temporarily removes the floor in front of you, letting you fall through (or just trap things).

Later on, the simple mechanics combine to create something pretty mind-melting. There are dozens of levels, but I only ever finished a handful.

david_a said:

Yeah, sorta. I bought the 15th anniversary edition of that game. I don't think the gameplay has held up as well as the visuals - it's mainly rote memorization, especially in the later levels where you keep getting insta-zapped moving to new screens.

It's a gameplay type that has fallen kinda out of favor (though the critical success of IWBTG shows there are still people who like that). But even then, it had its good points in that it was constantly changing. Sure, there was a core gameplay that was present in most areas (run, jump, shoot), but it was interspersed with passages playing differently, without it feeling forced or gimmicky (contrarily to minigames).

printz said:

PC platformers give me the impression that they were less evolved (graphics and music) than SNES equivalents of that time.

Game consoles and competing computers of the era (Amiga, Atari, Amstrad...) had dedicated hardware acceleration for sprite-based 2D games. Id software exists solely because Carmack found a way to obtain fast and smooth 2D scrolling on PCs.