What's Your Favorite Platformer? - Bing Bing Wahoo

Mario and Sonic are legends, but the Commodore Amiga also had some really good platform games circa 1990:

Rod Land
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New Zealand Story:
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Rainbow Islands:
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Flashback:
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Mirrors Edge. Its still a beautiful game to this day. Used to play the tf2 parkour mod with friends based off it too.
 
Silhouette Mirage, probably the single most unknown Treasure game. It's midway between Ikaruga and Mischief Makers and the US localization is a perfect time capsule of horribly bad but funny localization. This is a game filled with blatant biblical imagery that flew over the localizer's heads to the point that there are characters named Priday, Cavitas and Grattoni.

The game itself is the end result of the Gunstar Heroes team being thrown at the Sega Saturn hardware and modifying the genesis Gunstar engine to take full advantage of it instead of attempting anything in 3D, and the end result stands comparable to most modern 2D sidescrollers, even 20 years later.

If you're going to play it, grab the PSX iso and look up gameshark codes for it. The loading screens are programmed to take 20 seconds at minimum (iirc) because of the shittiness of the PS1 optical drive, and GS can get rid of this.
 
Crash Bandicoot 2 is not only my favorite Crash game, but my favorite platformer of all time. It may have it's issues and be hard as balls some times, but damn did it make good use of the PS1's hardware. In my opinion, the game is still visually pleasing to this day, and there were some things that the remaster wasn't able to recapture visually.
 
Donkey Kong Country 2 would be my favorite 2d platformer, and Banjo-Kazooie my favorite 3d one, i guess i'm kind of a basic bitch, maybe i should play more platformers outside of Nintendo consoles.
 
Super Mario Bros. 3, of course.

But my favorite one that hasn't been mentioned yet is Spelunky.
 
Donkey Kong Country 2 is my personal favorite platformer. The mechanics feel smooth and are timeless, as well the varied play-styles between Diddy and Dixie make the game super enjoyable. Collectibles actually pertain to relevance, soundtrack is one of my personal favorites on the Super Nintendo, boss fights are awesome, characters are memorable, and it's a graphics are excellent for that time period. The game was also sizable and the game mechanics with in the levels had tons of variety and creativity. It really pushed the limit of what the Super Nintendo could do and was one of those game changing sequels to an already awesome predecessor. Some could classify the entire trilogy, which personally if I had to pick only one, I would pick the second one. For the three dimensional platformers it would have to be Mario 64 and this is for many of the same reasons as I listed DKC2. The 90's was the era of the platformer, I do not know how beyond the new millennium we have not had anything like those games in the platformer department.
 
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All the classic ones I love have already been mentioned so I'm gonna list a few more "recent" ones I feel are up there with the very best:

Rayman Legends - sick visuals/animation, excellent controls and a good challenge all rounded out by a pleasing soundtrack, what more does a man need?

Super Mario 3D World - This one felt like a return to what made Mario special initially, especially since I played it after the (in my opinion) very disappointing Odyssey. Also I love the stupid 'meows' the characters make (even though the cat suit itself is kind of broken).

Donkey Kong Country Returns/Tropical Freeze - I'm clumping these together since the sequel just feels like such a natural evolution of the first one. These have the best controls and level design I've seen in years and the challenge of getting all the DK letters is a very organic way of giving the player agency in choosing their preferred level of challenge. Controlling a great ape that gallops like a horse and jumps off a roll mid-air just feels so good that it makes me question why other platformers even bother with added mechanical complexity, since such a basic two button moveset is sufficient (Fine you have to use a third button to grab, but grabbing by squeezing a trigger feels so natural that I don't count it).
 
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