Shmups New VS Old

[Ed Oscuro]

I feel like bullet hell shooters have become a sad self parody to the point where they're just not fun anymore.

I don't feel that way.

I think "good" difficulty should be based on the premise of "could a person conceivably complete this task without knowing in advance what to expect?"

People do, actually - but just not many. I'm definitely not one of those people.

Playing around with Cave games a bit lately, though, it seems to me that you can make some decent progress in them (if only towards the one-credit-clear). Playing them for high-level scoring makes them more difficult (sometimes vastly more, as in something like EspGaluda's kakusei mode) but that only seems reasonable.

Ditto with the Raiden Fighters games - those actually aren't terribly difficult by the standards of some other games. I wouldn't exactly call them easy, but they aren't as bad as you might expect.

I think that Cave, as far as their shmups goes, is in something of a trap - to keep the interest of the small group of people following their games, they feel like they have to cater more and more strongly to the wishes of the pack leaders (i.e. the people who are already out there at the leading edge). It's hard to say whether this is right, or whether this is mistaken because many people who were classically part of that group start to peel off and leave, perhaps for reasons you mention, perhaps partly just due to age. I am not sure, though, that there is anything to be gained from trying to have mass-market appeal though - what would that mean anyway?

I will say that my favorite period is the Toaplan era along with the Raiden Fighters games, but I like games from every period in the genre, from really early entries like Scramble and Juno First to newer stuff. EspGaluda is fairly recent (about ten years old) but it is intuitive to play once you have some good information about what's going on.

One thing that I don't miss from older titles is the lack of ship speed options. Flying Shark is almost entirely an exercise in trying to start flying in the right direction as soon as you see an enemy, because your plane is far too slow to twitch-dodge things. Newer games often have that "focus laser" type shot and they also slow down your ship while using it so you can precisely navigate bullets in boss sequences.

The one thing I would like to see is something like a per-stage mode...I tend to do pretty well with scoring in single stages (my few scores that are competitive on Shmups Forum tend to be for 2- and 5-minute caravan mode games) and being able to tackle one at a time is really helpful. Starting up another game just to think about getting to stage 3 or 5 or whatever is just asking me to roll the dice to see if I can hold on without making random mistakes for too long, so that I end up playing a lot of stuff I can already do well repeatedly, to the point it ends up not being fun. I think this structure is a problem with many arcade games, and frankly it doesn't help operators either, because if you can't play well you might not want to play, and if you do play well, you might take the machine for too long. It might be reasonable to give people a reasonable window of time to finish up one stage, and make continuing either skill-based (hit a score threshhold perhaps) or even just a new credit (with scoring again being the differentiator between a "good" player" and a merely "adverage" one).