All those people sneering at the thought of playing fighting games with a single-button joystick probably have never tried one which has been originally designed for it. Admittedly, many genre entries don't play all that well that way. Though those are usually ports of successful arcade cabinets or from game consoles equipped with multi-button gamepads. "Reducing" an existing control scheme well is a sometimes impossible task. Elfmania has been designed from scratch for a simpler control scheme, on the other hand.
Successful games like Zelda, Ultima, Baldur's Gate and others dazzle us with an atmospheric fantasy world, challenge by fighting against hostile forces and offer a lot of experience for further survival. The top-down perspective – i.e. moving on a kind of world map – is a striking common feature of the aforementioned classics. The player has a top-down view of the environment and his avatar, but without taking over the avatar's field of vision and thus his role – as is usual in 3D shooters. In this kind of flight over the actual scene, the player is a bit further away from the action and gets a more abstract picture of the game's progress. The mentioned game titles nevertheless manage to captivate the player without much effort and integrate him into the story. This is achieved by the perfection of the well-known technical elements like graphics, music, game mechanics and also the psychological incentives, which reward a fight with progress in the story and increase the experience points.
Imagine the beginning of a great adventure: You are standing in a forest. The sky is blue, the sun is shining and the wildlife is wandering about. There is a guy named Jack, Steve or Brat next to you, who will turn out to be an invaluable source of information, for he is The Guide. With great foresight you brought a set of tools along, so you can start right away. What will it be? Do you want to start digging, to search for valuable ores and treasure caves? Or do you want to attack that slime creature that is coming closer, in the hope that it will drop some valuables? Or how about building a base, maybe a log cabin, first? All of this is possible in Terraria, an open-world 2D platformer, that combines the fun of exploration, fighting and building in one game.