Timothy here — and I need to get something off my chest immediately. When I was first looking into retro gaming a few years ago, everybody would tell me I needed to play the original Mega Man games. “They’re classics,” they’d say. “You gotta play the Mega Man series.” Well, I did, and honestly, they were like doing homework. Stiff controls, crazy difficult spikes, and graphics that seemed ancient even to me. I was about…

Sam has been arguing for months that the original Rayman should be taken seriously in platformer discussions. And I think he may be right after playing Ubisoft’s debut PlayStation exclusive, which took around two dozen hours to complete. It was released in the United States on 7 September 1995 via Wikipedia. Although originally intended as a quirky character design, Rayman turned out to be the first genuinely good platformer for PlayStation, showing the potential of…

Tim is mistaken when he says that Jak and Daxter was just “another mascot platformer.” Joe is closer to correct that it was the last great traditional 3D platformer before all of them turned into open world. However, Joe is missing the technical innovations that made it possible. Technical innovation enabled both the artistic vision and the engineering excellence necessary to make Jak and Daxter a great platformer. The GOAL programming language, the seamless world…