In shooters, you tend to play as people. In sports games, you tend to play as people. Fighting games, RPGs, and survival games? Buff people, pointy-eared people, and dirty people. But in platformers you can be anything. A gecko, a bandicoot, a dragon, an earthworm, a kid dressed like a rooster rolling a giant egg around, a puppet with dynamite for a head, and a pizza with legs — it's all fair game. This is not a genre where realism matters one bit. Theಞ main thing is a 🍌fun skill set and a recognizable silhouette.
With all the variety inherent in the genre's presentation, it can be easy to miss that a lot of these games are basically doing the same thing. Rayman and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Astro Bot don't look anything alike. But focusing on limbless noodle guy vs. Sony-obsessed robot, or 2D vs. 3D, obscures the fact that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Rayman Legends and ൲Astro Bot are incredibly similar games o⭕n a mechanical level.
Playing Astro♍ Bot With My Nieces Made Me Love It All Over Again
The old is new again when you play a favorite game with someone who barely knows how to hol🧜d a controller.
Rooms Within Rooms, Worlds Within Worlds
When I first played Rayman Legends years ago, I was put off by how it was structured. It's a Ubisoft game, and it feels like the mega-developer took its approach to open-world action and multiplayer and applied it to what is, on a gameplay level, a very simple platformer. Rayman Legends is set in a museum gallery and, as you beat levels and rescue Teensies, you unlock more paintings that you can jump into, Mario 64-style. Unlike Mario 64, though, the hub for Ra𒀰yman Legends doesn't feel like a real space. It feels like the lobby you might run around while waiting for a multiplayer game to start. There's no feeling that one room leads into another, like the foyer of Peach's lobby that has multiple staircases leading to portrait rooms. No, running through the rooms feels like opening and closing folders on your desktop.
Astro Bot makes a similar approach work better by setting the game in space and spreading levels across multiple galaxies. You begin in the cosmos, enter a galaxy, then fly to planets within that galaxy. It has the same Matryoshka Doll structure, with each layer hiding a smaller one within. It looks different because it's in space, but what is a galaxy if not a cosmic desktop for storing folders containing items like "Planets," "Asteroids," and "Robots Dressed Like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Solid Snake."
The Nitty Gritty
You might be thinking, "But lots of platformers are structured like that." And you're not wrong. But Rayman Legends and Astro Bot share mꦑore granular similarities, too. Both games are focused on rescuing characters who are stranded within the levels. In Rayman's case, it's blue dudes, and in Astro's case, it's robots dressed up as iconic Sony characters. But in both, they're stuck somewhere — either in a cage or held ransom by an enemy or tied to a stake or midway up a tree — and you need to punch them to get them out. In both Astro Bot and Rayman, success is measured by how many of these blue dudes you save. And in both games, some are more important than others.
Astro marks the ranks with costumed bots and non-costumed bots, while in Rayman, the important Teensies wear Pope hats and are usually hidden in a more challenging part of the level. 🍸Lots of games have difficult-to-reach collectibles, but few use characters as the thing you're collecting.
Their move sets are similar, too. ꧃Astro can run, jump, punch, and hover on laser beams. Rayman can run, jump, punch, and hover using his floppy hair.
On an even more granular level, these boys both die the same. When Astro gets hit, he swells up like a balloon, then explodes. Ditto Rayman. What am I to make of this? I don't know. Is this because it's less upsetting for kids to see their he♔ro pop than die in a more realistic way? I don't know the answer to that either.
Ultimately, Astro and Rayman are just two platformer heroes trying to make it in a tough world. Though one is chrome and the ot🎀her is grain (yes, I'm still committed to the idea that Rayman is a noodle), they share a similar need to run, jump, and rescue their friends. 🔯And that's what platforming is all about.
