VVVVVV

So tempted to make this entire post a string of V's...

Looks a little old, VVVVVV, doesn't it? It's meant to, being heavily inspired by Commodore 64 titles like Jet Set Willy. It's almost like the 1001 list has decided to remind us where video games came from, all those decades ago.

How far have we come? We've come all the way from brutally difficult platformers to... brutally difficult platformers built on nostalgia for brutally difficult platformers. Lovely. Well, let's hit 'run' on this one and see how quickly we end up face first in a spike trap.

Max & the Magic Marker

Scribble me this.

Source // Nintendo

Remember Crayon Physics? Would you be more interested in it if that kind of gameplay was found in a platformer, instead of a physics puzzler? Would you want to play more of it if you were guiding a kid through a level, dealing with monsters and trying to catch an escaped cartoon drawing?

If you do, it seems Max & the Magic Marker will be right up your street, because that's pretty much what it is. Crayon Physics crossed with a platformer, and you can already imagine the kind of things you'll get up to.

A Boy and His Blob

How long does this jelly bean fuel you, lil Blob?

Source // PlayStation

A Nintendo might as well be the home of the platformer. Sure, every other console, handheld, and computer under the sun has had platformers, but there's something about those that appear on Nintendo hardware that stands out.

Maybe it's because of Mario standing head and shoulders above the rest. Maybe it's because the generally weaker hardware has pushed developers to work within limitations and direct their creativity and skill towards only two dimensions.

A long time ago, the NES was the home to a small boy and a smaller blob, and two decades later, the Wii provides the platform for the puzzle-platformer A Boy and His Blob to stand out once more.

Grab yourself some jelly beans and put on your thinking caps. You're going to need both.

Mighty Flip Champs

Flipping hell.

The two-dimensional platformer can already provide a puzzling time for players even before you introduce gimmicks like time distortion or, in the case of Mighty Flip Champs!, multiple overlapping stages, accessible through a quick hop into another dimension, but some players want and seek out these brain-melting games.

Still feeling dumb after failing to make swift progress through Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, I'm about to tackle a 'simple little platform puzzler' that will inevitably begin to sprawl into something more monstrous in no time at all.

How far do I think I'll get? Not very, but I might surprise myself, right?

Shadow Complex

"At least the Vice President is safe."

Metroidvania. I have a better time with Metroid than Castlevania, but truth be told, I think I have a better time with games that are inspired by the two, rather than games that have their names attached.

I can remember playing CounterSpy on the PlayStation Vita, set in a fictional, James Bond-like Cold War that has you sneak around huge bases looking for nuclear weapons or something. I liked it because it reminded me of another similar game that I'd watched on YouTube, long before.

That game was Shadow Complex, a Metroidvania game brought to life through the Unreal Engine, starring yet another dark-haired white guy stumbling into the extraordinary, gun in hand but no desire to kill.

That'll probably change in no time...

Trine

Working together to solve a common problem? What a novel idea.

Side-scrolling adventures with ultra-high production values were a rarity in 2009, says the 1001 list as it introduces us to side-scrolling action-platformer physics-puzzler Trine.

I don't know where I picked Trine up, and definitely don't know why Trine 3 is in my Steam library either, because I haven't got a clue what this game is about, and the title isn't spilling any secrets either. It looks like the kind of game you'd only know existed if you were the exact target audience it was aiming for.

If that's the case, I don't think I'm that target audience...

Scribblenauts

Write Anything, Solve Everything.

Source // Nintendo

They always say the pen is mightier than the sword, don't they? How can we best put that to the test? Pen vs Sword fight? Probably not that. What about the Nintendo DS game, Scribblenauts?

Maxwell's a clever chap with an out-of-the-box imagination - or he could have, depending on who is playing - and armed with a notebook that can summon anything into existence to help solve his problems, just like that.

That's quite a powerful pen to wield. I suppose it could even create a sword out of thin air, too. Can a sword do that?

Rolando 2: Quest for the Golden Orchid

Keep rolling, rolling, rolling, rolling.

Source // Apple

The iPhone, iPod Touch, and later iPad did absolute wonders not just for mobile gaming, but for new ways of playing games using accelerometers and touchpads. While you could thoroughly enjoy playing LocoRoco on the PlayStation Portable, nudging shoulder buttons to rotate the planet you're playing on just isn't the same as rotating an entire device to solve a puzzle involving similarly circular childlike blobs in Rolando 2: Quest for the Golden Orchid.

The Kingdom of Rolando has been infected by the Kilgorean Flu, and only the Golden Orchid can save the day. Enter Sir Richard and his skilled underlings, and you, some sort of overlord that manipulates the world around them so that they can platform their way to success.

Have you got what it takes to help Rolando out?

LostWinds 2: Winter of the Melodias

The space is still lost from the middle of the title.

Not too long ago, I was moaning about how both Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 were both included on this list, despite being far too similar to each other, and the latter clearly putting on the better show. It's not the first time I've grumbled at such a thing, and thanks you LostWinds: Winter of the Melodias, it won't be the last.

Remember the first LostWinds, a downloadable Wii title that had you control gusts of winds to help out a little kid on whatever journey he was on? Well, if you wanted more of the same, but a bit smarter, you've come to the right place.

For everyone else - myself included - you need to look for something else to entertain yourselves with.

Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure

Good show!

The Nintendo DS has two screens, so players could play two games at once, right? Something going on up top and something else going on down below. I mean, kids these days are smart enough for that, aren't they?

I'm fairly sure such a line of thought wasn't what spurred the development of Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure, but that's sort of what's going on, with the thankfully added benefit of pausing between both games, a platformer up top and a puzzler down below.

Henry Hatsworth is on the hunt for a dapper gold suit, but the adventure to get it will be unlike anything you've played before. Tea time's over, gentlemen. Onwards!

Mega Man 9

"Be careful out there! You haven't done this in a while."

Source // MobyGames

Mega Man. You'd have thought that at least one of his six NES games would have made it to the 1001 list, but no, apparently not. It must be tougher to get into this highly acclaimed selection of games than we initially believed.

Mega Man 7 on the SNES wasn't good enough to make it. Mega Man 8 on the PlayStation wasn't good enough. It took until Mega Man 9 on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii before a main game in the series was deemed good enough to make it to this 1001 list.

Why? As you can tell, it wasn't because of the graphical power (two of) these consoles had. No, it made it to the list because of nostalgia for the Mega Man games that didn't make it to the list. Let's explain that a little more.

Edge

a.k.a. Edgy

We're in a run of mobile games in the 1001 list as they keep coming, with the latest being a Marble Madness/Devil Dice looking puzzler by the name of Edge, or sometimes Edgy, thanks to a certain trademark owner.

In Edge, you pilot a cube around a level full of spatial challenges to negotiate and a giant void to avoid tumbling into, gobbling up style points for balancing like an absolute legend.

That won't make any sense until you've seen Edge in action, or better yet, play it.

LittleBigPlanet

"An ethereal dreamscape of adventure and possibilities ... and you can go there now."

Source // Media Molecule

Some games are aimed at kids. Many more are aimed at adults. A few of them are aimed at big kids, and little kids, and weird kids, and creative kids, and LittleBigPlanet is one of those few. A platformer and a platform for, it gave the world the seemingly infinitely customizable Sackboy, a delightful avatar for all kinds of hand-crafted physics-based entertainment.

Surely I was too old for a game like this in 2008, right? Never.

LostWinds

Yes, even the space between those two words is lost.

We've been having a torrid time with the Internet this month, though "without the Internet" is probably a better choice of words. Do you know what you can't do without the Internet? Download video games. Do you know what you definitely can't do, even with the Internet? Download WiiWare platformer LostWinds, an artsy little game about the wind, I imagine.

Luckily, it's been ported to the PC in the decade since that original release, and it's small enough to not require hours and hours of a stable Internet connection to download. Oh, what I'd give for a stable Internet connection...

Until then, let's see if we can chill out in this game I know nothing about.

LocoRoco 2

Required listening: https://youtu.be/n2nvk9c1AyU

Back when we played Patapon, I mentioned that the PlayStation Portable had two cutesy and musical platformers and that it was the other of the two that I was more familiar with, LocoRoco. A couple of years later, the bouncy yellow blobs were back for LocoRoco 2.

While I played more LocoRoco than Patapon, I've played little of either - another error to correct at some nebulous point in the future. I get the impression the storyline won't be the important part of LocoRoco 2, though. Who needs a story when everything looks so damn adorable?

Let's get rolling and bouncing through what must be the happiest game on the PSP.

Spelunky

We're going deeper underground.

"Death is fun", says the developer of Spelunky, a freeware Rogue-like platformer where a mysterious cave network constantly shifts beneath your feet, daring you to dive deeper underground in search of treasure, pushing your luck against spike traps, snakes, and many more ways to find yourself lacking any life.

Each time you fail - and you will fail - your entire story is dug out of the Earth, the levels replaced by something just as familiar, just as challenging, but just not the same. Do you have the persistence to learn from your mistakes and make progress into the dark unknown, or are you destined to die in the mines before your adventure really even begins?

I have a hunch on what my answer to that is, but let's find out for sure.

Echochrome

Impossible, I say.

Source // PlayStation

Nothing says "classy minimalism" quite like a string quartet and a wobbly man. But you can't just have a wobbly man chilling on stage in front of a string quartet. No, that's not classy enough. That's not minimalist enough.

You need to drop the wobbly man into an Oscar Reutersvärd-inspired impossible geometry platform puzzle, where he'll casually walk around his environment as best he can to the laid back sounds of a string quartet, contrasting with your frantically working brain as you try to work out how to manipulate the perspective in Echochrome.

This was a sight to see on the PlayStation 3, and one I'm finally giving a proper look towards.

de Blob

No mono anymore, I want them to turn red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple...

Colour. It's everywhere. Sometimes it isn't very apparent, though, looking a little drab, a bit bland, and generally miserable to look at. A bright and colourful space, if done correctly, can bring new life to the area, sparking positivity and creativity and good vibes all around.

So when an evil corporation takes over your town and saps the colourful life out of every single thing in sight, and you happen to be a watery blob capable of absorbing paint pigments and splattering them upon every surface imaginable, you know what to do, don't you?

Nintendo Wii title de Blob puts you in such a circumstance. Obviously, otherwise, this would be an absolute waste of an introduction. Let's paint the town.

N+

Good night?

2D platformers often require a degree of precision that no other games do. To miss a jump is to die. To breathe on a threat is to die. In N+, to not even get through the stage in time is to die, so you better get a grip on the physics of being a minimalist gold-hunting ninja pretty sharpish.

Braid

Tock follows tick?

The two-dimensional platformer is a solid starting point for independent video game developers. It's a safe idea, as it's a genre that has been around since, effectively, the dawn of video gaming, and has been shown to work in a variety of situations.

When technology advanced enough to add a third dimension, platformers adapted well and spread out into yet more environments, challenging players to use what they've known for perhaps years already but in another axis of direction.

What if the third dimension that platformers found wasn't a dimension of space, but of time? It's not a question often asked, because the answer is Braid. Braid is what happens when 2D skips 3D and enters 4D.

Do you think you're ready for it?