
Later games have continuous scrolling in all cases, but keep the flip scrolling for the hallway just prior to the boss for the nostalgia factor.
In Mega Man (Classic), horizontal scrolling is generally continuous (doors and gates aside), while vertical scrolling occurs in full-screen intervals. The Oracle games also use it on the overworld map, but added rooms bigger than the screen in dungeons. note And a glitch in the former can be exploited for Sequence Breaking for the DX release they wised up and fixed most of the bugs surrounding the scrolling. The first Game Boy title, Link's Awakening, has exclusively "flip" scrolling in both the above-view and platforming sections. A Link to the Past has map areas about twice as big as the screen, giving it both a smooth scrolling within a map area and a "flip" scrolling from one area to the next. Dungeon maps were explicitly divided into a grid of discrete rooms, but the overworld map was not. The original The Legend of Zelda scrolls in full-screen intervals, both horizontally and vertically. However, it has a fun unit where an enemy appears just against the side you flipped in from. Cybernoid (originally for the Amstrad CPC) flips from screen to screen when you reach the edge. The game version of Below The Root encourage the "edge of the screen" trick to avoid hostile NPCs. Moving towards a compass direction to the next room becomes walking off the edge of the screen. When adventure games get graphics, this trope was carried over. Early text adventures typically divide the world into a grid, with a name and description for each square "room". Sierra's Quest for Glory series, however, allow wandering monsters to pursue the player from one screen to the next. Many classic Adventure Games, including those made by Sierra use discrete 'screens' with no transition effect between them, with NPCs and monsters (generally) limited to the screen they resided on. More recent games featuring Retraux themes may purposefully invoke this. Even the Nintendo Entertainment System only had enough video RAM for scrolling in one direction (though extra VRAM could be put on cartridges), so it wasn't uncommon for NES games to use some flip screen transitions just to avoid the programming complexities of scrolling vertically and horizontally in the same area. It can also lead to the Player Tic of performing some action (like jumping) near the edge of the screen to see if it persists across the transition.Ĭommon in games designed for old computers like the MSX and Apple ][ which had no special video hardware for scrolling. It can become a cause of Trial-and-Error Gameplay, by preventing the player in a Platform Game to evaluate whether or not that gap before them is a Bottomless Pit or if there is a screen below it to land safely on. Sometimes justified (or at least Hand Waved) by placing actual barriers (walls or doors) at the edge of a screen to provide a logical separation. Some of these games made things more interesting by giving every screen a title and displaying these titles prominently, perhaps next to the Status Line. Is there a hungry wolf bearing down on your Sir Graham? Simply run off the edge of the screen to the next, and it'll forget all about you. Travelling off one side of the screen caused the game to scroll by an entire screen at a time to reveal the next area - or, if the hardware couldn't afford actual scrolling - simply "flip" to the next screen with no transitional effect.Ī curious side effect of this is that, just as the game couldn't afford the memory to provide continuous scrolling, it couldn't afford the memory to keep track of whatever was offscreen, either the screen edges essentially became borders to NPCs, monsters, attacks and projectiles alike, and only the player was able to cross from one screen to the next. Loz screen wrap series#
The world was thus divided into a series of "screens", analogous to rooms with fixed camera positions.
However, if we add the divisor, 2, we get the positive result.In the early days of video games, memory was limited and quite expensive, and some games simply could not afford the CPU cycles to present a continuous, smoothly scrolling game world. However, the Java language specification specifies that it will match the sign of the dividend, making -5 % 2 be -1. This gets a bit tricky with negative numbers, as -5 % 2 could either be -1 or 1, since -5 = -4 + -1 or -6 + 1. This is because 5 goes into 2 twice, with remainder 1. The modulus operator returns the remainder from a division. This situation calls for a modulus operator.