A survey of games featuring jumping found that the games with the “best controls” all shared an important characteristic: when you hit the jump button, the character on screen spent almost exactly the same amount of time in the air.* Games with “bad controls” violated this unspoken assumption. I’m pretty sure that if we went looking, we’d find that good jumping games have been unscientifically adhering to this unspoken rule for a couple of decades, without ever noticing its existence.
