So Crash Bandicoot is back! The mad orange marsupial is all over our screens once more and it got us thinking, Which platformers are the best? Which games oh jumping and stamping on things set up or formative gaming years?
Ooo this is a good one for me! I blow really hot and cold when it comes to platforming titles, having missed every MetroidVania as a youngun – I can’t come in here with some cool platformer from my childhood.
What I can unequivocally state to you though is that Shovel Knight is my favourite platformer of all time. I picked up and played all of this game in one sitting and I had a blast playing through it until the wee hours of the morning. When the DLC dropped, I caught myself doing the exact same thing with this and smashed through it.
Bouncing on the heads of my enemies with my badman shovel is my favourite platforming memory and it came to me as late as 2014!
Unlike Luke above, My entire early years of gaming were filled with platformers, Babies first video games, but my absolute favourite didn’t come around till the PS2 era.
Ratchet & Clank 2, or Going Commando to our American chums. Was a massive and exciting follow up to the first title. Bringing a massive arsenal of new weapons and gadgets easily topping the 8 or so in the first game. Running about as the plucky orange Lombax stoving in the heads of whatever bad guy came my way and vaporizing those who had a little more health was immensely satisfying.
This was also the first game I ever had a desire to 100% so I sunk hour after hour in just to unlock the assortment of health and weapon upgrades! Worth every second…
My favourite platformer of all time has to go to Conker’s Bad Fur Day, it’s a game i play and complete at least once a year since it came out. I bought the remake day of release I have a demo disc for it too and I still have the original cart and the complete box. Its rude its crude and so funny (yeah ok some jokes do not land any more)…I mean you play as a red squirrel who goes on a bender and forgets how to get home, then wakes up in a place he doesn’t recognise all the while a panther king wants him to prop u a table for him using him as the table leg and a mad scientist creates the Teddy bear equivalent to the Nazis as an excuse for Rare to do a parody of Saving Private Ryan…on top of this the controls are tight everything looks cute as all hell and if you’re a certain age you’ll love playing it…Best way is on original hardware but the rare replay is such good value and worth the price for this game alone.
So I’m gonna have to go real classic here, back to those who got me into gaming as a whole. Of course I love crash and spyro but nothing beats my memories of super Mario 2 and the original sonic games. They were hard, pretty much impossible to beat as a kid, but they kept entertained for hours as I tried to complete them in one day as there were no save files.
If I was to go more modern I’d need to give super Mario odyssey a huge shout as it’s one of the best platformers I’d played as an adult and one of the best of recent times. Unfortunately the crash and spyro remasters didn’t fully grab my attention but I’m looking forward to getting to grips with crash 4 for sure.