Game Pitch Research

Platforming games are games in which the player controls a character and they hop, skip and double jump across platforms, gaps and other obstacles to complete an objective, whether said objective is “collectathon” style like many of the historic N64 titles, or just getting from A to B trying to finish levels as quick as possible more like the 2D Mario games. While platformers may be few and far between nowadays they tend to bring me personally some of the most enjoyable and memorable experiences iv’e had in my life (and yes i am a Nintendo fanboy, could you tell?)

Platforming Games

Banjo Kazooie is a 3D platfomer the features bear and bird Banjo and Kazooie as they venture through the mountainside castle of witch Gruntilda in an attempt to save Banjos sister Tooty from being turned into a monster. Inside the castle, there are different worlds to explore with collectibles such as puzzle pieces, named Jiggies, musical notes and eggs scattered around them. New worlds are opened up by the puzzle pieces they must collect. Throughout the game, you will use a wide variety of moves. Running, jumping, back-flipping, these three are tropes of the genre by this point. There are more complex moves too however such as using kazooie as a rifle (what the eggs are used for), walking on kazooies legs to climb steep slopes and many more.

Moving on to Super Mario Odyssey, the game goes to show that once once defined the entire meaning of a platformer, can do it all again 21 years later.

Mario must save the princess, Peach, from evil king dinosaur thingy, Bowser. Standard for a Mario game by this point, but, this time hes not alone. His new fabric friend, Cappy, a ghost hat from the cap kingdom, joins him along his adventure allowing him to take over the body of his enemies (or just innocent frogs you know as you do). The pursuit of Bowser leads the duo across the globe, collecting Power Moons as they go to fuel their newly gained ship, the odyssey, by using the best move-set ever introduced in a Mario game as well as the powers of Cappy. Jump, double jump, triple jump, hat throw, dive or even a jump off of a thrown hat, i could go on and on about the many types of jumps the game allows.

Finally (because i decided afterwards i’d have rather talked about this game than Mario odyssey but hey iv’e typed it now) i would like to talk about a game called Sonic Adventure 2

The game includes 6 playable characters, 3 good and 3 bad, each of which have a different play style to their levels. First off, Sonic and Shadow, your classic sonic “reach the goal as fast as you can” style. Sonic can run (duh) jump, homing attack by pressing A and finally spin dash by holding B allowing him to reach max speed in record time. Moving onto Tails and Dr Eggman, their play style appears similar on the surface, just reach the goal, right? well yes but instead of running, the two pilot mech suits allowing them to shoot and hover, as well as giving them a health bar rather than the traditional ring health of the series. Last, Knuckles and Rouge have the most different of the three play styles, having to collect three pieces of the master emerald to complete each stage. The two can fly, dig and punch making them the most different by far. All in all through this game you play a level of each character (depending on hero or dark story) with boss battles sprinkled in between.

Also unrelated side-note but the soundtrack is actually unreal and i wanted to share that i thought that

Adventure Games

The Wolf Among Us is a dark fantasy adventure game following the usual more speech based approach that most telltale games follow, allowing the player to control where the story goes with speech and some decision making but doesn’t let the player overtly control the characters movement constantly. It takes you on an adventure rather than you leading the adventure like a lot of open world games would do. The story follows Bigby Wolf, Sheriff of Fable town, a community full of fairy-tale characters in 1980s New York. Bigby is the former big bad wolf, and after saving a prostitute from a furious woodcutter, he finds her beheaded outside of his apartment building and thethrilling murder mystery begins.

Gone Home is a suspenseful adventure game in which you, a young woman, returns to her family home to find it empty and her family absent, leaving the player to explore the house and find out where they could be.