At least to me, DOS games were not only solid, but served as good examples of programming know-how in action. The platformers especially ended up very memorable, and it seemed a lot of thought was given to coding the controls to be on par with any controller.

Anyway, I'm really enthusiastic about retro games like Jazz, so I wanted to share that aspect with a community like this. It's not to rag on controllers (What else would I want to use to play on my PS2?), just that I love how nonrestrictive some of these older games handle.

Maybe I could get some feedback on my JJR video here? Listed second on that list. Turns out finding Jazz at a young age built up some muscle memories and not just rosy ones.

I agree Jazz Jackrabbit 2 is a great game to use with a keyboard. It's probably one of my personal favorite platformers as well.

Well, assuming you mean the way DOS platformers like Jazz translated a controller layout to a keyboard, it's only logical to use the arrow keys for movement and the big Ctrl, Alt, and Space as action buttons. And yes the keyboard was and still is a great input source for many genres of games.

Even in newer games like Awesomenauts I like to stick with full-keyboard play even though you're at a disadvantage without mouse aiming. Same goes for JJ2+ (though I join in with mouse aiming during special JDC events and SP levels made for it).

It depends for me which keyboard layout I end up using. For driving games where you don't need to manually aim a weapon or for simpler platformers, numpad is my go-to for comfort, as can be seen in my video playlist. One of the newer platformers, Risk of Rain, I was fairly excited to find out my classic setup of 8 4 6 2 for directions, with center 5 as Jump, was perfectly compatible. Then I just used z,x,c,v for my abilities. Comparatively, I use WASD and space in Terraria, as I have to aim with the mouse. Not to mention quick access to the toolbox hotkeys.

Platformers tend to be pretty reliant on fine control, so I don't see why you'd ever want anything besides a keyboard.

I can't even play any platformers with gamepad. Either Keyboard or Keyboard/Mouse.

Unless I need a mouse, I prefer gamepads; I find thumbs allow for much more precise control than fingers.

In case I use gamepads, I use the direction pad instead of analogue sticks. D-pad kinda feels good to me and somewhat close to keyboard.