The nice thing about the jump button is that it's simple.  Hit button, get air time; that's all there is to it.  In some games it's a tiny little hop while in others you get several times the height of the character, but it doesn't take more than a few jumps to get a feel for things and be well on the way to mastery.  And then there's the tiny little sub-genre of platformers that dispenses with the jump button altogether in place of a different mechanic, like Bionic Commando or, more relevantly, Super Magnetic Neo.  Jumping is nice but there are more ways to take to the air than flexing bowling ball-sized calves, as in today's example of the pixelized platformer Super Magbot.

Super Magbot is a magnetic platformer where you've got two buttons to play with, one for red polarity and the other blue.  Red repels red while attracting blue, and of course blue is exactly the opposite.  The level is scattered with blue and red pads and the trick is to use the powers of magnetism to fling Magbot through the areas safely.  A big part of the controls comes down to aiming with the right stick, using the angle of the magnetic beam to control the direction of repel/attract.  Stand at the edge of a red pad on the floor and shoot a blue polarity beam in at an angle and Magbot will zip across the surface, while pointing straight down flings the bot into the air.  The trick, of course, is to get familiar enough with the controls that a series of red/blue pads over bottomless pits and past spikes and sawblades becomes a dance of angled beams and instinctive knowledge of which polarity does what.  The controller triggers fire the beam and an indicator on either side of the screen reinforces which one shoots which polarity, but it's amazingly easy to completely screw it up and get an insta-respawn back at the start of the bite-sized level, trying again to get to the goal and maybe take a risky detour to collect all the star fragments.

The demo for Super Magbot released today and I'm going to have to admit right here that I'm just amazingly terrible at it.  The pixel art is fantastic, the level design even in these early stages has a lot of variety, and the controls are quick and responsive.  Being able to divide up the attract/repel conditions between the two buttons, even with the game making sure to have it clearly on screen which one does what, is apparently more than my brain wants to wrap itself around.  If you're up for the challenge of completely rethinking how a platformer works, though, Super Magbot's demo plays great and comes with a surprising amount of content, starting with fifteen tutorial levels you can play as much as you'd like and tossing in a time-attack series of challenges showing off more advanced mechanics.  Head on over to Steam to give the Super Magbot demo a play, and if you end up feeling the need to crack your controller in half I'm right there with you.

https://www.anrdoezrs.net/links/3607085/type/dlg/sid/UUhgUeUpU12563/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0U8I4V6b6E