Classic arcade shooter difficulty ranking (also 8/16-bit!)

[YoniArousement]

Perikles's YouTube channel seems to be gone. I liked watching his clears, saved a few of his videos and the descriptions to a few of them. There was even a Destructoid article on the Switch release of Twinbee that featured one of his videos.

[copy-paster]

Perikles's YouTube channel seems to be gone. I liked watching his clears, saved a few of his videos and the descriptions to a few of them. There was even a Destructoid article on the Switch release of Twinbee that featured one of his videos.

Truly unfortunate as I honestly liked watching his replays. But don't worry the guy is back, his last post recently is on side-scrolling thread in Off-topic.

[bcass]

The placing of DOJBL 1-ALL *below* R-Type 1-ALL is fascinating. What is the rationale for that?

[Rastan78]

I think that Perikles post is from a ways back. Might be safe to say he's long gone. The dude's actions after getting called out, while cryptic, were more or less a tacit admission of guilt.

Would be interesting to see list of games with the highest skill ceiling. In other words what are the most difficult games to play at high level, not the most difficult games to play at bare minimum requirement of 1cc.

Tough list to make I guess since most players can't play any games at a high level, a few can play some games at a high level and only the best can really play many games that way.

Guess you would have to ask a player like WTN who is expert at games with difficult clear but simple scoring (Tatsujin Ou), easy clear but very high max skill ceiling (Raiden Fighters 2 w/Fairy), and high difficulty and skill ceiling (DDP or Great Mahou).

[To Far Away Times]

The placing of DOJBL 1-ALL *below* R-Type 1-ALL is fascinating. What is the rationale for that?

I've beaten both games, and I definitely wouldn't agree with that. I used heavy save state practice for both though, and you absolutely can't wing it in stage 6 and 7 of R-Type, where as you can kinda wing it a little in DOJ BL. But R-Type is pretty easy to consistently execute with practice, whereas DOJ BL is not. R-Type is hard but totally doable with practice, but DOJ BL is the hardest game I've ever beaten.

[bcass]

I think that Perikles post is from a ways back. Might be safe to say he's long gone. The dude's actions after getting called out, while cryptic, were more or less a tacit admission of guilt.

I don't want to drag-up any previous forum drama, but I'd be interested to know what happened?

[Rastan78]

Search for an old thread called the problem with Perikles and grab some popcorn. It's a doozy.

TL;DR Some of Perikles' runs were called into question as looking suspiciously like they were TAS or played at half speed.

He never really flatly denied the accusations by stating that all his runs are legit, and he never really admitted to cheating either. He requested that all his scores be withdrawn and deleted his YouTube channel.

Back on topic, that comparison between R-Type and DOJ brings up an interesting point in that not all shmups test the same skills. A game might be memorization/routing heavy but have not require a lot of execution or the exact opposite. Challenge can depend a lot on what style you enjoy or play the most.

[bcass]

Oh, that's a shame. So I guess the list in the OP is not really useful then.

[Rastan78]

but I was also diligent over the last few days and cleared a bunch of stuff which is of course also incorporated here (Andro Dunos, Captain Tomaday, Double Wings, Explosive Breaker, Gyrodine, Operation Ragnarok...).

At least 6 new clears in "the last few days." I'd say the list should be taken with a grain of salt at the very least. Still makes for an interesting point of comparison/ discussion though.

[To Far Away Times]

I think that Perikles post is from a ways back. Might be safe to say he's long gone. The dude's actions after getting called out, while cryptic, were more or less a tacit admission of guilt.

I don't want to drag-up any previous forum drama, but I'd be interested to know what happened?

He may have been a little dishonest in some of his replays, but the thing is, he had shown he really did have skillz to beat these games at a high level. Honestly, I remember looking at his strats and replays and finding valueable advice. There's only a few questionable runs out of hundreds of legit ones. He also did some great write ups and was generally one of the best posters on here, so I really don't care that he cheated a few runs. His scores should be stripped for sure, but his contributions were still very valueable.

[trap15]

He could have flat out cheated every single game and it wouldn't have any bearing on the accuracy of this list, which is easily 500x times better than the shit Japanese one. For the most part I find this list to be very reasonable within +/-2 ranks, which is infinitely better than the lolfest of the JP list which has several games clearly 10 or more points off of reality.

[wiNteR]

Well, for what its worth, perhaps some people would be interested in posting [1] in the thread I made over a decade ago:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=29880
The thread seems to be old enough that despite the fact that I have gotten very few new 1CCs in past 8 years or so, a dozen of my 1CCs still seem to be missing (which I got 2 to 3 years after posting the thread).

Looking back at it, I would make few minor changes to it (actually, no major change though). For example:
Aero Blaster (little higher)
Gigawing Generations (little higher)
Gradius-V (little higher due to length)
Progear (little lower)
By "little higher", I mean plus 1 or 2 points. By "little lower" minus 1 or 2 points.

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At that point there wasn't much interest in that kind of thing. There seems to be somewhat more interest recently (and in past few years perhaps). Also, probably, the table functionality was added a bit later after this (at least no one seems to have made a table in the above thread). I still don't know how to make tables though.

Before I have never thought about posting a link to my own thread. But given that there has been some interesting discussion in recent threads (or in past few years), it seems reasonable to leave a link. Also, one thing is that the lack of time-out on "editing posts" in this forum supports/favours threads of this nature.

Though perhaps, it also might be reasonable to have a "separate thread" for discussion (so that it would be easy to find people's posts about ranking).

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[1] Or maybe someone just make a new thread