and yea, dragonblaze and gunbirdII especially are not very pussy-friendly, and they can be pretty irritating at times (instant kill lazers, safespot oriented patterns, lots of deaths with a full bomb stock, etc), but on the flipside they open up for more consistency (when a solution is formulated it can be repeated easily, if you have a halfway working brain, anyway). also, cave score sytems are either flatout boring, or they have a tendency to become a bit tiresome after a while, but maybe thats just me. psykio shumps (sic), have no elaborated score engines, but they get a lot of replay value through the many different ships/characters. you know, DJ Takumi style.
as for the precognition factor, ketsui is considered cave's most "random" piece of software (suicide bullets, etc), and still, even the experts have no problems admitting the game is "only" 10% adlib dodging and 90% pattern learning. and someone whos better at daioujou than you, me, your mom, and the rest of the forums' members together, described it as a "game of memorization".
bottom line- if you want to perform well in a nakamura shooter, foreknowledge is neccessary, but not sufficient (i know this is obvoius, but i like to state the obvious).
BTW, arcadia's reader top20 of 2006 had no espgaludaII -- cave sucks!
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"veni, vidi, punchi (and a little bit of shooti)" -tavia
