Something I wonder about certain NES platformers

[King Aquamentus]

Okay, so a lot of people can tell you how much they hate the bats in CastleVania, or the birds in Ninja Gaiden, for knocking you off of narrow platforms. On one side of the token, their placement is enough to make it seem that their use is intentional difficulty. In other words, they were deliberately placed there because of the narrow footholds.

...But on the other token, they were clearly designed to move like real flying creatures (meaning they can chase you, and are not restricted by the laws of gravity), while your "knocked back"-itude is just a pre-programmed side effect that *doesn't* happen in real life (not with birds like that.) In other words, it could appear that they were just designed to be a flying, chasing enemy, without the foresight that your character can't conveniently kill them. (Mega Man, Ninja Gaiden, and CV on NES are all known for not being very... diagonal or upward with their attacks. Zelda II breaks it a little, but still...)

So, what I'm wondering is: were these "ledge bats", as gamers call them, designed and coded intentionally to make platform hopping difficult, or was that just an accidental discovery that the developers enjoyed enough to use over and over in different games?

[AtmaWeapon]

BATS. I HATE BATS.

I think it was an intentional design choice; it'd be too strange a coincidence for so many developers to just stumble upon the same favorite method of punishment. Ninja Gaiden is the game where I have the most experience with these kinds of enemies, and even though I never persevered enough to beat it I stuck with it long enough to notice there was definitely a pattern to all of the flying annoyances. If you go through the stage just the right way and don't dilly-dally, it's possible to bypass or kill most of them. Sometimes this requires memorizing that a bird will appear at some point and swinging to kill it before it's visible, but I just chalked that up to what it took to create difficulty in that day and age. Woe be to you if you screw up and break the pattern; odds are you're doomed. Especially in later levels.

But yeah, I think they're just there because the developers felt that making the platforms even more narrow wouldn't be sufficient to challenge players.

[MottZilla]

It's pretty simple really. Eventually just jumping across pits is going to be too easy. You have to add something to fuck the player up, make it more interesting. Honestly many games would really suck if they just had a bunch of pits to jump over with no other hazards to worry about. Sure they can be very frustrating particularly if the game is poorly designed or just designed to be brutal. But if done right it just adds challenge which is good.

[Anthus]

Well, at least Konami had the common courtesy to give those asshole bats a bright outline so you can maybe see them before they fuck you shit all kinds of up. I think however, it is a design choice, though it may have began as something unintentional. There were a lot of hardware, and technical restrictions, so maybe it was just too hard to program different enemy collision types.

[mrz84]

personally I just memorize which pits have and which ones don't and then move on to bigger fish (or in this case, vampires and other supernatural foes) :kitty:

[King Aquamentus]

The reason I ask is cause I was playing Ninja Gaiden II a few nights ago. I got up to area 7-2 ish, and I noticed how hard it was *just* to get to the other side of the area. In this game, birds never gave me trouble (up till now). It was the satyr/armadillo looking guys that did. And as I play it, I'm asking myself "If I was designing this stage, would I think to use the enemies like this?"

[MottZilla]

Ninja Gaiden and NG2 were very well designed in this manner to add challenge. And infact I found NG2 to probably be the easiest probably because of the Phantom Doubles increasing your fire power to 3 times normal making boss battles pretty pathetic if you have Chi. But since you are thinking about it, perhaps you'll appreciate that they didn't have boring levels with boring enemys that were all the same.

[King Aquamentus]

When flying dragon heads (Zelda 2) and Medusa heads (CastleVania) fly around like that, I can easily believe they were deliberate. I mean they're designed with one simple function: go left or right in a wave pattern. Plus, they're put in places that are full of narrow footholds, like some sort of Air Raid Force. Ground creatures like the armadillo dudes and homing creatures like the birds surprise me though.