Shmups New VS Old

[Retrocade Fantasia]

I've been playing alot of shmups lately. The 360 is now up there with the Saturn, PC Engine and the mega drive/Genesis as one of the great Shmup systems

But what do you prefer the speedy fast modern shmups where it rains bullets or the classic sprite based shmups which are still hard dispite the face it's not raining bullets.

I don't know I can't say I have a preference. I enjoy Star Soldier just as much as I enjoy anything Cave has put out. But at the same time
Cave Shmups hurt so good.

[TonyTheTiger]

I feel like bullet hell shooters have become a sad self parody to the point where they're just not fun anymore. 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?" And bullet hell shooters have essentially thrown that out the window with what is essentially a flashy exercise in rote memorization.

It's not so much the raw concept of "bullet hell" that turns me off. I think that a shooter with the premise of a swarm of shit flying at you is great in concept. I just hate the implementation. And since most shooters today are the "fake difficulty" style, I much prefer the ones from the 16bit era and earlier.

[Retrocade Fantasia]

The worst is Ibara Pink Sweets playing that was a chore. It was so brutally difficult it's not fun at all. Not like other cave Shmups that get it right like Do Don Pachi Resurrection and ESPgaluda. The key is knowing where your hitbox is.

It's a tough call, a Good shmup needs good graphics, balanced challenge and an amazing OST.

Darius always provided that.

But I'm torn I LOVE Cave but Darius, Star Soldier, Parodius all great and how amazing was Battle Garegga?

[TonyTheTiger]

The key is knowing where your hitbox is.

Which I think is dumb and totally counterintuitive. I don't like the concept of "grazing" since it's more or less telling you "hey, see this thing that represents you? Well, it technically doesn't. This other invisible thing does." Imagine if they did this in a fighting game where fireballs passed right through a character's head.

It's nonsensical and from what I can tell the only reason they do it in shooters is because somebody said "uh oh, if we put that many bullets then the game becomes unwinnable. So let's just shrink the hitbox." The legitimate solution is to make the hitbox match the ship and then design a competent game with proper difficulty around that.

[Retrocade Fantasia]

But doesn't every shmup since the begining of time have a Hitbox?

[Aussie2B]

I'm not particular fond of bullet hell shmups, so old shmups for me. I like shmups where the developers think about the design of the whole stage and incorporate that into the gameplay, rather than having nothing but empty space where enemies are haphazardly thrown on the screen so they can spew some elaborate pattern of bullets. And for vertical shmups, I seem to fall for games that have dual planes, so I have to worry about both ground and airborne enemies. Dragon Spirit and the TwinBee series are among my favorite shmups. Gate of Thunder is probably my favorite horizontal shmup.

[TonyTheTiger]

But doesn't every shmup since the begining of time have a Hitbox?

Has a hitbox, sure. But the hitbox in size and shape should, within reason, represent the thing it's a hitbox for. Again, look at the hitboxes/hurtboxes for a fighting game and you'll see that, outside of specific moments of invulnerability during certain actions, they fairly accurately match the sprite on screen. To have a ship that's supposedly "you" but have the hitbox be an extremely tiny invisible square in the center of the sprite is just straight up arbitrary and silly. What the hell is the ship for, then? Why not just play a game of nothing but hitboxes flying around?



Compared to...

[Emperor Megas]

I feel like bullet hell shooters have become a sad self parody to the point where they're just not fun anymore. 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?" And bullet hell shooters have essentially thrown that out the window with what is essentially a flashy exercise in rote memorization.

It's not so much the raw concept of "bullet hell" that turns me off. I think that a shooter with the premise of a swarm of shit flying at you is great in concept. I just hate the implementation. And since most shooters today are the "fake difficulty" style, I much prefer the ones from the 16bit era and earlier.

I agree, completely.

[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).

[IHatedSega]

They need to mix together the ease of the older games with the beautiful bullet/lazer patterns of the newer games. The solution is a big life bar, and a ton of 1 ups and energy on the field to get. Then you have different modes of playing. Just market the game to both groups with each difficulty settings.