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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

Those may be some amazing games you listed but none of them scratch the itch that some folks have for twitchy NES games. For some reason, modern indie developers never try to emulate the tight, twitchy, highly responsive controls of NES games. Instead, they go for floaty, slow acceleration-based, more forgiving controls.

The puzzle games in your list have no equal though. The NES is pretty light on puzzle / adventure games, though it did receive really nice ports of the MacVenture games (Deja Vu, Uninvited, Shadowgate) as well as Maniac Mansion, and it has a couple of unique ones with Nightshade and Solstice that blend in a bit of action while remaining primarily adventure games.

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A large part of this is because the latency on modern TVs can be anywhere between 4.7ms and 150ms so games have to allow for a lot of slack in their input.

The NES and SNES had 1-3 frames of latency depending on the game.

Don't modern TV's come with a game mode to reduce this latency (turns off any kinds of image processing)?

I have a 12 year old Samsung LCD monitor that is advertised as 2.5ms

Yes. I get about 5 ms latency on my 2024 LG OLED (a bit more at 120 Hz, a bit less at 144 Hz).

But there are other sources of latency that stack.

Yes but like all non-default settings, a large portion of the player base doesn't have it enabled. Games have to be designed for a large market, not just high end OLED buyers.

Even then, most VA/IPS/LED displays have something more like 20ms of latency in game mode due to slow LCD refresh rates. Controllers are also randomly delayed by 2.4GHz interference.

This 8bitdo Pro 2 on my desk has 18ms latency all the time. It actually kind of sucks and it's one of the faster wireless controllers.

The Dual Shock 5(wired) and Dual Shock 4(wireless) were some of the best controller where it comes to latency. https://rpubs.com/misteraddons/inputlatency

Edit:// those 8bitdo controllers are pretty terrible looking at that list, Wow.

Oh they absolutely do - you just might be unfamiliar with them. I grew up playing Ninja Gaiden, Megaman, etc. There's definitely an audience for 2D games with extremely tight controls. Off the top of my head:

- Shovel Knight

- Spelunky 1/2

- Rogue Legacy

- Cuphead

I’m familiar with all of those games. They’re few enough in number that I see the same small set brought up every time I make this point.

I think they’re the exception that proves the rule. There are fewer of them (noteworthy ones anyway, I’m sure there’s a long tail of obscure ones) than there were popular games of this kind on the original NES. I think Derek Yu’s release of UFO-50 is indicative of his similar need to scratch that itch!

I think noteworthy is the key. Others with tight controls and timing that I can think of (that are less known) are Downwell, Caveblazers, Celeste, Super House of Dead Ninjas, Tiny Barbarian DX, VVVVVV.

And these are just ones that I've personally played.

I have heard of Celeste and I have played through VVVVVV. I will check out the others.

Celeste is kind of an example of what I was talking about though. The game gives you a ton of movement options and "floaty" air control with a lot of maneuverability. NES games never did that. The controls were simple and highly responsive, but generally very "committal."

The only recent game I know of with controls that really felt like a NES game was La Mulana. That game did not allow you to reverse directions in the air after a jump. Once you jumped forward you were fully committed to the arc of that jump.

I see what you're going for. We're sort of struggling to come up with a common nomenclature . For me when I hear floaty controls I think of games where the physics are loose (SMB) as opposed to tight controls (Megaman).

Personally, I really hate being forced to commit to a jump direction like you would in Castlevania.

But there are quite a few NES games that give you control in the air: Megaman, Ninja Gaiden, SMB2 as Peach, Contra, etc.

Different strokes for different folks.

I do like games with air control, I just also like the old school non-air-control games.

Modern platformer devs seem to be very much heavily biased to the air control side, where characters can maneuver in both directions at high speed to a far greater distance than their jump height. I really don't like that level of control, as it leads to the need to make level designs based on large amounts of horizontal movement in the air. It's a style of gameplay that came out of Super Mario World's infamous cape powerup, which severely undermines the challenge of that game.

To be fair: The mario games (outside of perhaps the Lost Levels) were never particularly challenging games in the first place.

SMB3 introduced us to Raccoon Mario which lets you also cheese large sections of trickier levels.

NES games are pretty darn slow and not very twitchy at all compared to something like Super Meat Boy. I’m not into the genre too much but I know there are quite a few more of them. And Street Fighter still requires very exact frame execution if you want to take it to the extreme.

I’m as nostalgic as anyone, but games today are just so much better in every way.

Dark Souls and Hollow Knight were among the listed titles, come on.

Those may be difficult games but they don't have the twitchiness of a game like Super Mario Bros. They're on the order of 1/4s to 1/2s maneuvering (with great anticipation) whereas SMB is loaded with 1 frame tricks (1/60s). It's an order of magnitude difference.

Huh? 1 frame tricks are the top shelf of speedrunning moves, definitely breaking how the games are designed to be played by orders of magnitudes.

Speedrunners use 1 frame tricks in more modern games as well. It is considered extremely hard even amongst the already insane speedrunning community, no matter whether the game is SMB, Odyssey, or anything recent.

Of course it's extremely hard but you can't do it at all on modern games with unresponsive displays. The point is that when you press the button in SMB, the action happens on the screen an order of magnitude faster than a modern game. Modern games have slow, floaty, laggy controls.

It's not just games though. Computers have done the same thing [1]. Modern PCs are an order of magnitude slower, latency-wise, than an Apple II.

[1] https://danluu.com/input-lag/

This is why on Rock Band, you had to “calibrate your TV” because of input and audio lag from when the game generated it.

As a game dev, this is true. Old hardware input was very fast whereas today it’s software and it’s 50ms give or take. Add more milliseconds for your TV to refresh. It was common to see 150-250ms lag.

This still feels like a lack of knowledge on the medium, and a bit of faffery around the meaning of "twitchiness". There are still a ton of momentum platformers being made, UFO 50 alone has like 5 included. Even ones with full on mechanical restrictions, such as Yelow Taxi Goes Vroom, which tried hard to go the opposite way, and has has no conventional jump button to preserve momentum with, it's almost entirely about precision setup and aerial readjustment.

Have you tried UFO 50?

I haven't. I'm a huge fan of Derek Yu though, so I need to!

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