It doesn't sound wrong, this is the best way to attain a game were controls and movements feel great. This is my big problem with the new Counter Strike : Global Offensive that a lot of new comers don't see. It doesn't feel as good as old 1.6 or quake 3 or uT... It feels like developers didn't really care about great movements and focused on other things in the game.

I can't agree more with SMB's daddy, movements are the most important thing in the game. It's the core.

Haven't tried CS:GO, but do you think it's related to being on console + PC?

Coming from HL/HL2/CS, the controls are very very tight, but over the last few years it seems like most games are always xbox+ps3+pc and they never seem to be that great for PC. Either consoles get away with a lot worse controls, or the ports/PC-versions are just worse quality :(

P.S. I will say an example for me wasn't CS:GO, but some of the newer Call of Duties. Which is ironic because the first Call of Duty back on PC was actually one of the few games that could contend with Valve-quality FPS controls (I felt).

Source engine games all feel like you are ice skating. HL1 and CoD1 have one thing in common: they are both based closely on engines by id, whose movement and guns feel really "solid"

Why does it sound wrong, is there a tradition of using actual physics in side-scroller interactions?

I think it could sound wrong to the naive because novices generally want things to be simple. They want a few rules, a simple formula, a way to reduce an unknown problem to a known one.

This comes up a lot. The most pithy version I've seen is from Mencken: "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." But the same lesson is in the [1] Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, and also in the shu-ha-ri model [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_model_of_skill_acquisit... [2] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ShuHaRi

It's too bad he didn't think 120+ FPS was important enough to support. Being constrained by consoles is unfortunate.

What does 120 fps get you, especially with a game like meat boy?

The opposite of what you would lose by playing SMB at 30 FPS [1].

http://www.testufo.com/#test=framerates

Smoothness, feeling of fluidity and responsiveness. Being very timing-sensitive and twitch-skill-based, SMB would gain a lot more from 120 Hz than a slower paced game would.

[1] Of course, the gains of going from 60 to 120 fps are much smaller compared to 30 to 60, but still. People have PCs and monitors capable of running SMB at 120 fps, so being bottlenecked by the software is frustrating.

The fact is that when it comes to SMB the physics are a make it or break it kind of deal. If he hadn't spent that time tweaking them, SMB wouldn't have had a chance to succeed. And I'm not saying that the physics are the key to its success, but they definitely were a requirement.