a few months ago i was complaining that the shooter is trapped in a death spiral: because shooters are designed strictly for players who are already good at them, they are becoming harder and harder to the point of being unplayable to anyone who isn’t already knee-deep in the games. fortunately, some designers are trying to address this by recontextualizing player death in the shooter.
in leave home, the player can “die” as many times as she can manage and still see the whole game: a play of leave home lasts about five minutes regardless of the player’s performance. that doesn’t mean that death is meaningless: the game’s handful of scenes are generated anew each play, and the player’s performance affects how threatening they are. dying makes the game easier, perservering makes it more frantic. in this way it rewards performing well without shutting players out for underperforming.
and there’s shoot 1up, a game in which each extra ship the player earns is a literal extra ship in her armada: the player steers every “life” she has at the same time. nathan fouts has essentially reinvented the euroshmup, a degenerate shooter that gives the player a lifebar to compensate for the sheer unavoidability of objects on the screen. here, the player’s lifebar isn’t an abstraction but a more meaningful conceit: each hit destroys one of the player’s ships, and each one-up gives her one more ship to shoot with.
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Yeah man, the fans of the genre like the games one way, but I say fuck this, it’s not like they enjoy these games or something. The games must be made the opposite way to appeal to people who don’t care and will probably never play the games as more than a novelty.
>dying makes the game easier, perservering makes it more frantic. in this way it rewards performing well without shutting players out for underperforming.
It rewards players who perform well by making them less likely to perform well for the remainder of the run? I’m only an intermediate player at shooting games. There’s a very specific point in each game where the bullet patterns begin to give me real trouble. What this basically means it that runs where I start off playing well will equalize themselves with runs where I start off playing poorly, because the difficulty adjusts itself. Is that a good thing? Even if the scoring scales up for better players, you have to factor in that better players ALWAYS get better scores in pretty much every game worth its salt. Isn’t ditching the tangible fun of a grazing mechanic or something for some algorithm that just decides how many enemies to throw at you a bit…boring?
Not to mention, if the player dies on a particularly challenging pattern here, he may never see that pattern for another ten games. It’s less of a big deal, but for me a lot of the allure of STGs is self-improvement, and this not only eliminates the need for improvement, but it actually makes it kind of DIFFICULT to get better.
Pretty much every STG in emulation or ported to console at least gives the player the option to bastardize the game with infinite continues. Hell, I doubt most people would have trouble beating these games in an arcade if they pumped in a measley five credits. How much easier exactly do these games have to get, seeing as they already let the player set his own limits completely?
Look, I’m sure this game isn’t terrible, it might even be fun. Depends mostly on the enemy design and bullet patterns. But praising mechanics like this as the features that will SAVE a game genre that needs no saving and has survived since the very dawn of arcades is just nuts.
As for “shoot 1up”, I might give it a run one of these days, I mean it’s only a dollar. But the “euroshmup” as you describe it has never really been any good. With few if any exceptions, a life bar compensating for unavoidable bullet patterns is just shit design.
yeah who would actually want their game to be meaningful to more than just a handful of people
seven twenty-two-year-olds into MOEEEE should be enough for anyone
Lol yeah, because every STG since Twinbee has been about shrine maidens awkwardly confessing their sexuality to each other.
Is that seriously the best you can do? Call me a weeaboo and act like every shooting game that doesn’t dumb itself down for whatever tired infant wants to try it is a waste of time? Oh yeah, I forgot, actually liking video games makes my opinion invalid. I’m going to go call basketball players stupid now, since their game is meaningless.
i don’t think of it as “dumbing down” at all. i think it’s alarming how hostile gamers tend to be when designers start rethinking the purpose of challenge in their pet genres. appropriately, i’m reminded of some responses i observed to “deathbrushing” in mommy’s best games’ last title, weapon of choice.
yeah the shooter genre doesnt need saving since its fueled arcades since the beginning of their time and just look at how well arcades are doing now!
shooters lately only appeal to this tiny niche of people and its good to look at alternatives for a DYING genre
surviving isnt thriving and just becuase you’re ‘intermediate’ and love to memorize complex bullet patterns over and over again doesnt mean theres no where else for the genre to go
When you say “rethinking the purpose of challenge” and mean something like “removing it”, you’ve got to realize I’m not even complaining about the game being not frustrating. I mean, there’s fairly easy shooting games out there, some that I really enjoy. Like Perfect Cherry Blossom or Giga Wing. I’m talking very specifically about some mechanics that sound like a bit of a pain in the ass. For example to reiterate and wall of text, the challenge in this Leave Home likely isn’t even being “removed” so much as it’s “painted over”, and all you need to do to play the hard parts is not die. So what’s the big deal? The deal is that in a regular shooter, dying a few times on the first level can be made up for with a good run with your last life. You may even be able to earn some extends along the way. With the mechanic you’ve explained here, your playing is under scrutiny from the get-go. Screwing up early could keep you out of the hard levels. Hardly fair, especially when, as I said before, anyone can tank through any other STG by just spamming continues. At least then they get some scope of what the hardest parts of the game are like. With infinite continues available to everyone from day one I really don’t see why automatically scaling difficulty and infinite lives is necessary. Why not just give the player the option to select difficulty or choose between paths and add limited lives with infinite continues? All stuff like this does is make things more convoluted and frustrating for everyone.
I did play Weapon of Choice. I like the game, I’m not crazy about deathbrush but it doesn’t ruin the game, but I can see where people are coming from. It kind of messed up the flow of the game a bit, and it seems like an easy way out to actually keeping things balanced.
Anyway I’m trying and failing at not writing a million words to every three of yours. I hope something’s getting through. I’m not a longtime player of STGs, I only started really playing them a year ago. I got into them because I think it’s fun to take an impossible-looking challenge and pick it apart until I’ve mastered it. I’ve met tons of other people who feel the same way, and even introduced some people to the genre under this philosophy. And pouring out of the Japanese arcades and doujin scene, the games just keep getting more and more awesome. So Death Spiral my ass. I’m willing to bet that until we’ve all devolved into IV-fed meatbags, there will still be plenty of people who enjoy a good clean balls-hard shooter and refuse to take a single continue.
Daphny, arcades are thriving, just not in America. They’re doing fine in Japan, which is why all the good shooters have been coming from there. It’s pretty much the same deal with fighting games, but I guess they were able to get them trendy here again between SF4 and online console multiplayer. That’s neither here nor there, though.
We should look for some alternate developments to Mahjong or Soccer or Golf or something since only a tiny niche audience of Americans etc etc.
In any case it’s perfectly fine for devs to explore new paths, but they are not beyond criticism just because they’re being different or opening things up to a wider audience of sleepy babies.
alexwrench those are all valid enjoyable things about a game but why cant other mechanics be enjoyable as well?
you can have a group of people who are heavily into any niche and still have it be a dead niche
like i really fucking love listening to old music from victrolas, but the only people who make victrolas are fans and they dont make enough for it to ever have mainstream appeal and why bother since its not evolving anywhere anyway
thats how these bullet hell fucking shooters are, they can appeal to a tiny group of people so much that those people will keep creating fan games of that genre in their circle until they die but the genre is still stagnant and since these people are such purist fans they dont want any evolution anyway, they want their bullet curtains
so stop thinking about yourself, because you’ll always have fans making games with tons of fucking bullets but just becuase you cant accept something different doesnt mean its a bad thing at all
like HOLY SHIT SOMEONE IS MAKING SOMETHING I LIKE ACCESSIBLE THAT MEANS MORE PEOPLE WILL LIKE IT WILL MY SECRET FUN HOBBY BE RUINED WITH POPULARITY
like
i dont even
i cant even grasp the point of your arguement besides that you havent played it and wont paly it because it doesnt suit your very stringent requirements for a shooter
maybe you should just not think of it as a shooter and your knickers will become unknotted
actually arcades around japan are closing as well
THERE ARE ALTERNATIVE DEVELOPMENTS TO MAHJONG AND SOCCER AND GOLF even though every single one of the things you mentioned are more popular WORLDWIDE than bullet hell shooters by like an order of magnitude
i mean you’re like a niche within a niche
shooters can be for more people than a bunch of nerdy manbabies too
okay now im readin gover more of your posts and you dont even make sense
how the hell does a game getting harder motivate you to do poorly? do you enjoy just dying on the first level over and over so you dont have to continue?
like it gets harder the better you do because you’re better at the game so you’re going PERFORM BETTER thats how difficulty curves work!
HI MA’AM IM DONE WHERE DID ALL THESE RETARDS COME FROM THAT HAVE SHITTY ARGUEMENTS I WANNA GET INTO A REAL FIGHT
SOCCER IS AS NICHE AS DOUJIN BULLET HELL SHOOTERS
Daphny it’s not a dead niche because new fucking shooting games are out all the time, doing newer and more rad things. Like, have you ever heard of Senko No Ronde? It’s basically a two-player mech fighting game, done from an overhead view. It’s not like it’s a one-time thing, either. Not only was there a sequel, but the MMOSTG Valkyrie Skies (exhibit 2, by the way) used a similar idea for its PVP multiplayer. Acceleration of Suguri is also a game in that subgenre, using a circular field and two shootan game characters spinning around each other throwing bullets all over the place. And THAT’S a sequel to Suguri, which is a shooter that really, there’s not very much else like. It’s fantastic, though. Go check out some youtube videos. All these games are fairly recent, and they expand on STGs in brand new ways that are pretty damn cool, if occasionally lacking a little polish.
Cave recently released a few of its prize shooters (Musihime Sama Futari and ESPgaluda II) as non-regioncoded 360 ports, and as far as I know they sold considerably well. Pretty soon Aksys is going to publish Death Smiles stateside. Cave has been making these games for a long time, and continues to top themselves with wild new systems and patterns.
And let’s not forget that we just got a new Touhou a couple of days ago. It’s a sequel to Shoot The Bullet, a game about taking PHOTOGRAPHS WHILE DODGING BULLETS. It uses a level-select sort of progression where new, tougher ranks are unlocked as you complete more levels. I just really don’t know what to tell you when you say hardcore shooting games are stagnating.
Also Starbucks Coffee Shops are closing as well but they’re still all over the fuckplace.
also also
>alexwrench those are all valid enjoyable things about a game but why cant other mechanics be enjoyable as well?
As you can see above alternative mechanics totally can be enjoyable as well. There’s probably more crazy things that can be done with shooters than there are that can be done with most game genres. But we can’t let that destroy our critical faculties, and the very best games are the ones that appeal to the experts, the people who know the games backwards and forwards and can pick them apart and put them back together when reviewing them. I mean, yes, we make movies for people who don’t like movies (Transformers 2), and books for people who don’t like books (Twilight lol), but they appeal to very inexperienced people, some of whom are retarded.
also also also:
>shooters can be for more people than a bunch of nerdy manbabies too
NO THAT IS ABSOLUTELY NOT TRUE, NERDY MANBABIES ONLY.
>okay now im readin gover more of your posts and you dont even make sense
lol ok lessee
>how the hell does a game getting harder motivate you to do poorly? do you enjoy just dying on the first level over and over so you dont have to continue?
I explained this. Doing better at the game when it’s easy makes the game harder, which thus makes you more likely to die some more. Meanwhile doing worse at the game makes it easier, which makes you less likely to die. If you are not so skilled as to beat the game regardless or so fail as to just still die on the easiest setting, your lives spent are going to average out.
>like it gets harder the better you do because you’re better at the game so you’re going PERFORM BETTER thats how difficulty curves work!
Except the game gets harder as you perform better. durr. So performing better makes you more likely to die, because the game is trying to kill you harder. They did this in God Hand, where enemies got more difficult the longer you went without getting hit. You were rewarded with more cash for that, and you didn’t die in a single hit, so you could rank up and down within a single life, which is why it worked.
Meanwhile it’s all meaningless anyway besides satisfying the conditions to see each possible scenario, because dying’s only purpose in this game is to rank you up or down and by proxy I guess affect your score (if there is one). So, whatever. It just seems really fucking convoluted to me seeing as shooters have had multiple difficulty levels, infinite continues, and split paths before as things the player could actually CHOOSE rather than the game just kind of deciding how it wanted you to play it.
only read up to senko no ronde
that game is as different to vertical bullet hell shooters as leave home, so what were you originally whining about again
actually it doesnt matter if you answer or not becuase you talk too much HONE YOUR THOUGHTS IN FEWER WORDS because its not like you’re saying anything anyway
ps senko no ronde is ONE GAME, oh wait but what about blast worKS OH WOW YOU JUST NAMED EVERY FUCKING SHOOTER RELEASED ON CONSOLES yeah that genre is totally thriving
why are you denying that a genre is dying? its not your fault, it doesnt make the genre WORSE it just means in order to keep it breathing you have to find ways to get MORE PEOPLE interested instead of passing new fan games through the same circle jerking networks
So performing better makes you more likely to die,
oh wait i read this too
you’re also more likely to die on later levels of games that dont increase in difficulty according to your skill, so like i said do you just play the first level of a game over and over because WAHH ITS HARD I MIGHT DIE
the increasing difficulty with your skill is trying ot balance hte game progressing with your skill progressing so you dont get bored, its hard to do but when done right it makes gameplay a lot more varied from playthrough to playthrough
oh god i totally lied i said i was done but i, too alexwrench have a big mouth as well
EXCEPT AT LEAST I CAN KEEP IT UNDER A THOUSAND PARAGRAPHS
sorry i didnt read everything you said its just not that interesting
OOPS I READ ANOTHER SENTENCE god maybe i should just NO NO NO ITS TOO MUCH I HAVE TO GO TO WORK
anyway i see why you would be upset about someone making a game and expecting you to play— WAIT NO I DONT BECAUSE ITS THEIR GAME THAT THEY MADE THAT YOU’RE PLAYING AND THEY CAN MAKE YOU DO WHATEVER THE FUCK THEY WANT
and i mean its not like you’ve played either of these games anyway
caps does not mean anger some people get confused by that
no don’t sweat, I’m pretty familiar with your posting style.
And lol no I’m not pissed about them making the game, dude, I said in my first post it was probably not that bad. I’m just miffed that Anna’s frigging INSISTING that some of my favorite video games are some kind of death-knell. Increasing complexity isn’t some kind of dead end, and casuals aren’t going to lead us to a new age of gaming with their childlike disinterest. Video games are supposed to get more complex. If they didn’t we’d still be playing Galaga.
Also maybe punctuation is the problem if i stop using that my posts will be shorter
capitals too
>the increasing difficulty with your skill is trying ot balance hte game progressing with your skill progressing so you dont get bored, its hard to do but when done right it makes gameplay a lot more varied from playthrough to playthrough
i actually have no idea what you said here it’s not like shooting games are boring as it is
>you’re also more likely to die on later levels of games that dont increase in difficulty according to your skill, so like i said do you just play the first level of a game over and over because WAHH ITS HARD I MIGHT DIE
dude, seriously
but those games don’t get easier when you fuck up a little, sometimes you screw up in shooting games nobody’s perfect, but you shouldn’t have to be punished for it by the game becoming easy and boring
Also yea whatever so i guess you don’t think senko no ronde looks like a shooter despite the bullets and dodging and it being a versus shooter but i still mentioned the new touhou bunkachou, suguri, valkyrie skies, and cave releases.
but alex they’re unpopular i don’t know anybody who likes them they’re dying because none of my friends
I like them, my friends like them, there is an english language forum dedicated to them, I live a subway away from an arcade full of them, and the sky is falling because you can’t dodge those bullets unless the game omits the difficulty menu and just turns on easy mode for you. It’s cool man. It just takes a little practice.
yo every time you write ‘her’ i want to stab you
peace
“but those games don’t get easier when you fuck up a little,”
Battle Garegga does. To be fair, I’ve never played Battle Garegga, but from what I’ve heard, the rank system is considered infuriating because the game becomes literally impossible if you play too well. I’m assuming this game doesn’t have that problem.
I’m going to go play this game now.
Now that I’ve played the demo of leave home, my biggest complaint is that everything has that weird visual blur effect that makes it significantly harder to see things, which is already a problem with horizontal shooters because it’s harder to track horizontally moving objects. In contrast, look at Kenta Cho’s rRootage, where you can very clearly see where all the bullets are and the hitboxes are obvious. Makes things far less frustrating. If you die, it should be immediately obvious what killed you so you can avoid it next time.
I also have to comment on this little gem:
“I mean, there’s fairly easy shooting games out there, some that I really enjoy. Like Perfect Cherry Blossom or Giga Wing.”
If you’re talking about a Touhou game as being “fairly easy”, your difficulty curve is already skewed.
That said, the difficulty of bullet hell titles is a bit exaggerated. Yes, they’re quite difficult, but the games get far less difficult once you’ve memorized the bullet patterns and know how to maneuver around them. If you look at things like that “HARDEST VIDEO GAME BOSS EVER!” video, you’ll notice that most of the time the player doesn’t move very much and only really concentrates on a few of the bullets.
Of course, in order to do this, you have to play the game a *lot*. And this is where the arcade origins of these games make themselves obvious.
…
Seriously? Huge rant and flamewar over an adaptive difficulty curve?
There are still games out there that *don’t* have an adaptive difficulty curve?
Why? What possible complaint could there be about it. (As a concept. Any particular implementation might be terrible, like any particular fixed curve might be.)
It’s not even a genre constrained thing. Final-Fantasy Seven had it. Very few people noticed. (Heck – it goes back, in some ways, to the very earliest games. They just keep getting faster and harder until they exceed your ability to play and you lose.)
The difficulty curve (whether automatically or manually generated) should be a non-feature. Like the controls – it needs to be there, but it should never be noticed. If you notice it, it’s gone wrong.
There’s something I thought I should interject about the ranking system in Leave Home: it’s not only based on how long you go without dying. Difficulty increases as you destroy enemies and collect items; it decreases a lot when you die and I believe it decays over time as well.
For the record: The glow effect also isn’t as bad after the first stage.
I love shooters and I’m happy to see the genre expand, even though I personally felt Leave Home was a bit of a misfire. I don’t think the genre is in a “death spiral”, though- it’s culty but it’s elemental enough that I think they will always be with us. Ikaruga sold well enough to merit an XBLA re-release; Geometry Wars sold about a kazillion copies when the 360 was released. If anything, the number of professional shooters making it to the US has increased over the last couple years with the advent of online distribution.
I have to say, though- I am all for trying new things, but I’m wary of the apparent assumption in the original post that to be good, a game has to be “accessible”, and to be “accessible”, it has to not be challenging to anyone. It seems self-evident to me that different people play games for different reasons. Shooter players on the most part are interested in shooters as a test of skill. Is it possible to be both “accessible” and difficult for skillful players? Probably, and Leave Home is a good start, but my instinct is to be wary of trying too hard to be everything to everyone in a single game.
- HC
William, just to clarify, I seriously think PCB is pretty easy. It’s completely manageable until a very annoying difficulty spike in level 4, at which point the player will likely have earned four or more extends even if he’s screwed up a few times. Also I’m going to have to give Battle Garegga a shot one of these days as I’ve heard nice things about it, though I still have my doubts about a mechanic like this paired with infinite lives. It feels kind of absurd, like, why does the difficulty even matter if you never die? And what does never dying even matter if the difficulty scales automatically?
Otherwise I’m honestly a bit embarrassed with how this went (probably Daphny’s goal all along), though I stand by what I’ve been saying. Vitenka, it’s not really so much about just the mechanic, or even the game. The problem is, as far as I’m concerned, more about what Anna wrote than the game itself, and I think that’s pretty clear from my first post.
The point isn’t that everyone should be doing it, the point is that “hey look, someone is finally doing it.”
“It feels kind of absurd, like, why does the difficulty even matter if you never die? And what does never dying even matter if the difficulty scales automatically?”
The same reason the difficulty matters in any other shmup with unlimited continues. And dying matters because dedicated shmup players, at least, tend to care about 1CCing(minimizing death) or scoring(I’m going to assume that dying makes it harder to score in this game because it would be bizarre for it not to)
GODDAMNIT SHMERKER THAT WAS WHAT I WAS TRYING TO SAY THE WHOLE TIME
also that wasnt a flamewar at all
Shmerker I swear if what Anna or Daphny said AT ALL resembled that, I wouldn’t even have bothered with all this. They both said that this is the kind of thing the games NEED to do.
Also William, and here’s the real point I want to make in this post, is that you can’t 1CC a game where there are no credits. I mean, each credit gives an allotment of lives that tells you, from the get-go, what a “proper” round of the game is limited by. I think that’s a pretty important rule for the devs to set.
Now, I realize that this game is only a stone’s throw away from that. All you need to do is add lives and a continue screen and you’ve got Battle Garegga, R-type Final, or some other shooter with branching paths and difficulty levels. But I’ve mentioned that before, and it’s part of my point: this game really isn’t doing anything new. It’s just taking the old branching paths, difficulty levels, and credit feeding, and removing some of the player’s control over them. Can you see why it’s kind of loopy to say something like this is a breath of fresh air to a genre that’s OMFG DYING BECAUSE CASUALS GET DISCOURAGED WHEN A GAME TELLS THEM THEY AREN’T GOOD ENOUGH?
Don’t really know how many times I have to explain this.
“It’s just taking the old branching paths, difficulty levels, and credit feeding, and removing some of the player’s control over them.”
Because you’re completely unable to self-impose challenges?
I don’t have some kind of obligation to MAKE every game entertaining. That’s kind of what the dev’s there for.
Regardless, the sentence you quoted doesn’t even have anything to do with that.
This article is bullshit, and you know it. KNP Tetris revolutionized the Euroshmup way before this shit.
shooters more like pooters
“and the player’s performance affects how threatening they are. dying makes the game easier, perservering makes it more frantic. in this way it rewards performing well”
That isn’t a reward – a reward comes from a person, even if through a proxy. So if it shows that your skill level is 8 out of 10, that’s a reward.
But just making it harder – no, not a reward. That’s more like a punishment for being good, and no recognition of being good on top.
With the first Max Payne I thought the same thing, but then realised I’d be playing harder for no purpose other than to slow my skilled ass down.
Your into social connections in games and in regards to games – there has to be some social recognition, from the designer to player, otherwise it’s not a reward, it’s just BS to wade through.
Whoops! Look what forum just independantly rediscovered the old Killer/Socialiser/Achiever/Explorer split.
On to my next point:
A long standing piece of advice holds that the player should succeed 7 times out of ten. But the source of that advice is more subtle – that the average player wants to succeed, and wants to feel challenged.
I think this advice is generally very good.
Sliding along that…
Yes, shooter were, at least until recently, dying off. And yes, being too hard to attract new players was one of the reasons. Old players WILL stop playing from time to time, and if no new players come in to replace them, there’s no one left to sell the games to, so the genre starts to die off.
The major reason, though, was just that other genres were being seen as newer and shinier – so most new games were being made in those genres. (The current flavour of the year being ‘mix some mmo-rpg in that’, and, of course, farmville-style games)
Genres go in cycles. Shooters have had their big upsurge and death, they’ve even already had their renaissance and death. Now they’re on an upswing of nostalgia.
Will they get really big again? Well, they’ll probably never dominate the way they once did – there’s just too many other types of games possible nowadays.
Will they die? Eventually everything dies.
But if they only allow the nostalgic and the highly-trained into their club then yes, they will die faster.
I NEVER SAID THAT
That’s so cool Vitenka, it’s like you haven’t read anything on this page.
>Old players WILL stop playing from time to time, and if no new players come in to replace them, there’s no one left to sell the games to, so the genre starts to die off.
I like this because it assumes that old video games simply disappear to a place where nobody can play them, and that the only games that actually exist are the ones released this year. Game Overthinker said it, too. He’s a numbskull.
Also, Dude, WHEN A GAME GENRE “DIES”, AND THEN HAS A RESURGENCE, THAT MEANS IT DID NOT DIE. What are you defining “death” as “any period of time during which the genre is no longer being made”? DUDE, DEVELOPERS HAVE TO SLEEP, TOO.
Uh, I’m not seeing that as the main problem with the genre. Most shmups today have both infinite continues and the ability to choose the difficulty. You can see the whole game in 30 minutes without any skill if you wanted to.
Which is what most people do see as the problem. A good share of gamers expect gazillions of hours from a game, so a game where you’re done in 30 minutes and if you want to play more, you have to play the same game again isn’t very thrilling. Not to your average person paying $60 for their game, anyway.
Alex: Personal attacks are so very useful.
Yes, clearly, the old games will not magically cease to exist.
But the genre, as a living developing thing, will be dead. Or will, at least, hibernate until someone reinvents it.
The terminology is the same as for, for example, languages. “Ancient Greek” is a dead language. Not because no ancient greek exists – plenty of written records exist and are actively studied.
It’s dead because it is frozen at that point in time – it has no living speakers who will continue to develop it as a language and create more.
i just realized triyng to convince some dude that a dead genre is dead doesnt matter becuase its still dead
GOD DAPHNY STOP TRYING TO GET EVERYONE TO AGREE WITH YOU ON TEH INTERNET SOME PEOPLE TAKE FACTS AS INSULTS ITS NOT YOUR FAULT
Woe Is You: My point exactly. Pretty much the only way to play these games is to set your own limits and work for the 1CC. The difficulty is a boon.
Vitenka, I mean it with no sarcasm that I am certain you are smarter than the Game Overthinker. Don’t take my ad hominems personally, they’re a spice, not the main course. But shooting games have been being made pretty consistently. Far as I know they never came to a full stop, and I think I’ve made it clear now that the state of things today really doesn’t show any signs of a full stop. I mean, come on. ROGUELIKES aren’t even a dead genre yet. Or Point and Click Adventure games, which by all rights probably SHOULD
Daphny: It’s supercool how your argument in no way resembles mindless trolling.
Shit I hit submit by mistake while adding to paragraph 2. Continuing:
Point and Click Adventure games by all rights probably SHOULD be gone for good. Lord knows Telltale isn’t doing them any favors. But we get Machinarium out of it, so it’s not all bad.
And just for fun, consider that JRPGs have managed to stay alive by adamantly REFUSING to innovate.
Who cares if shmups are dying or not, and why should people want to make them more popular? I thought the point of being an indie dev was that you got to make what you want, without having to be a slave to stuff like sales. If Koyama wants to make a super easy accessible game like Genetos, that’s cool, if x.x wants to make Cave clones, that’s cool too.
Have to add that I don’t know why there needs to be a casual/hardcore split. Just have selectable difficulty settings or adjustable difficulty and everyone’s happy.
I don’t know who this Alexwrench is, but don’t take him to be the official shmup community spokesman or anything. Someone who hasn’t played Garegga is as much a representative shmup player as a platform player who hasn’t played SMB3 yet. Seriously, no offense, just how it is.
Almost all shmups have rank (adjusted difficulty), so it’s nothing new and certainly nothing to be against. Don’t people who do well want more challenge and people who do poorly want less? If anything, shoot1up is the game to go after, with its “rich get richer” lives -> firepower type of crap you see in most other genres. MBG is already considering rank instead of reverse-rank for his next game.
Every genre looks stagnant to people outside it and vibrant to those within it. I think there’s tons of innovation and could cite lots of games an outsider wouldn’t care about. To respond to the last post’s JRPG thing: that’s silly. For better or worse, by being a maximalist genre, JRPGs actually have far more variance within genre than any other. You can get any two run ‘n gun fans to agree that Metal Slug owns, but good luck finding even one JRPG that most everyone likes.
I’m not going to read future comments, so if anyone was going to reply, hopefully this will save you some time.
Yeah, I don’t think I was calling myself “the official shmup community spokesperson”. But I sure as hell don’t think not having played a single game makes my opinion null and void, regardless of how popular, well known, or influential it is. It’s not like I ever passed judgment on Battle Garegga, anyway.
>Almost all shmups have rank (adjusted difficulty), so it’s nothing new and certainly nothing to be against.
Never said I was against it. I think combining it with infinite lives is kind of silly, but that’s it. Even so, I’d like some examples as far as this “almost all” claim goes.
>Every genre looks stagnant to people outside it and vibrant to those within it. I think there’s tons of innovation and could cite lots of games an outsider wouldn’t care about.
Moral of the entire thread.
>For better or worse, by being a maximalist genre, JRPGs actually have far more variance within genre than any other.
Sure, if you call Ocarina of Time and Disgaea JRPGs (they’re not).
>I’m not going to read future comments, so if anyone was going to reply, hopefully this will save you some time.
As if I was posting for your sake.
five minutes of adaptive difficulty, i can get down with. i think this’d be more of a problem if the same scheme were shoehorned into a traditional shmup, in which pacing is much more dependent on rigid patterns — these things are long, scrolling tapestries, depicting tales of vengeance and war and whatever other metaphors can be contained within the mechanic of shooting things that move.
you guys don’t seem to be arguing about the same things at all, really.
leave home, with its difficulty scheme and somewhat fixed playtime, is more related to those arcade games that predate videogames — like ski-ball or shooting galleries, it’s step right up, see how well you do and then make way for the next paying customer.
i’d say the reason this comments thread has spiralled so far into degeneracy is because this particular post, however unintentionally, doesn’t acknowledge the things other shooters have been doing for well over a decade now to address the same problems as leave home — things like bullet reflecting systems, invincibility to certain shots, grapple systems, shot cancelling (this is my favorite aspect of metal black), tiny hitboxes, max powerups upon death — these are all systems placed to alleviate difficulty without breaking the pacing.
Leave Home is to typical shmups what Rockman 5 Endless is to Mega Man 5, it seems.
anyone who says shooters are becoming “harder and harder” isn’t doing their research. Cave’s most recent games, daifukkatsu and deathsmiles II, are much easier than their previous games due to things like bullet cancelling and autobomb, their console releases have included very easy novice modes, and then konami released Otomedius which is kind of like Gradius, only with boobs and no difficulty.
The whole “shooters are becoming so hard” spiel really just means that shooters were hard a few years ago and people haven’t caught up with the times. The new games are more accessible than ever, and often just as deep as the older ones, so hates better stfu.
glad to see someone brought up the ranking systems that have have been commonplace since garrega, but i’m surprised that no one has mentioned that all shooters (at least all arcade shooters!) have ALWAYS let even the least skilled players see the entire game… for a $price!
whats a sprice
the sprice is nice!
also a couple of other interesting games:
each time you start a new game in in ketsui DS your stock of lives is one more than last time.
and on the opposite side of the spectrum, guxt, pixel’s shooter, basically forces players to 1cc it: there are no continues and you start with a single life but can find more by doing well/paying attention in (almost?) every level.
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