By Dessa Bayrock (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: May 8, 2013
There is something incredibly comforting about side-scrollers.
I’ve always preferred the side-scrolling style to first-person, shunning the latter category almost completely. Until now, I’ve pegged it as a peculiar and inexplicable preference of mine, the same way I won’t eat beets or like it when doors are painted red.
Side-scrollers belong with other relaxing memories grounded firmly in childhood, like the colour of Hardy Boys’ bindings, or the weight of Monopoly pieces, or the smell of coffee or freshly-cut grass.
There’s an element of nostalgia for sure – but on the other hand, the draw I feel to side-scrollers is something more than that. The love started with a healthy helping of Mario Brothers (including my very favourite spin-off, Wario World), continued with the early Zelda games, but also translated into contemporary games like Super Meat Boy and Limbo.
So I started thinking about it on another level (no pun intended): why is it that I prefer a two-dimensional world to a three-dimensional world? Why is it that I ultimately favour a flat pane of gameplay, like some kind of colourful ant farm, to a more realistic world like Skyrim or even Halo? There’s less to do, less to explore, and only one direction to go.
Then again, maybe that’s the point. I like the flattened worlds of side-scrollers because they are less complicated. With the exception of the underwater levels in Donkey Kong, you always know the way forward – an element that is sorely lacking in real life. I know I’m oversimplifying the situation when I say it, but somewhere inside me I guess I still feel it: why play a first-person style game when life is already first-person?
I know you can do a lot in a three-dimensional world, like play as a hammerhead shark wielding a lava-spewing hammer as a weapon, but I think I’ll stick to my side-scrollers. I don’t want to have to put more brainpower into navigating than I have to, and if I can get away with it I’ll do without an extra dimension every time.
If you need me, you can find me building a kick-ass and two-dimensional house in Terraria, because I tried Minecraft and I only got lost.
