shmups with a healthbar?

[WelshMegalodon]

Exile (BBC Micro)
Pilotwings (various)
LSD: Dream Emulator (PS1)
Elite (BBC Micro)

Steredenn (Steam)
Monolith (Steam)
In Extremis (Steam)

Maybe what you're actually wanting is a different GENRE OF GAME, like an open-world thingy or a Zelda clone or something, but in which your CHARACTER spends most of its time flying and shooting.

Starflight (Mega Drive)

You're really not doing yourself any favors trying to focus on games from the 8/16-bit era. Easier to emulate, yes, but you're missing out on pretty much the entire doujin scene's output, which is where much of the experimentation happens. If you're looking for a game just right for you, you should be prepared to invest a bit more than it takes to download a rom pack and shuffle it through an emulator.

It's baffling that he's making absolutely no effort to look into the home computer side of things when that's traditionally where all the experimentation has come from. Especially considering that he's a Linux user.

[CyberAngel]

To answer your question more literally: I play games to have fun. I'm very much one of those "life is a journey, not a destination" types of people; when I play a game it's to experience the art and the flow and mechanics and all that, not to win. I don't necessarily care if I get to the end. I don't give a flying fuck about things like score or achievements.

You know, there's a very easy solution to all your problems. Just watch videos on YouTube.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm someone who only turned into a "skilful" kind of player relatively recently and still remember myself when I had barely any experience with the genre. And I recognize a lot of my old self in you. So I understand where you come from. I used to be more interested in games with unusual gameplay mechanics. Hell, I wouldn't touch a game that severely punishes you for dying even today. I thought I'm not the person who would be interested in score and grinding runs. Yet here I am. Still rather picky about my games but no longer afraid of that kind of a thing.

However, I see problems in your approach that can't be excused by a lack of experience and will harm your perception of the genre if you allow them to guide your decisions. It's okay to want to avoid or minimize mechanics you don't feel comfortable with, but don't discount them completely as a principle. Some things might be worth getting used to in order to open up your options. Yeah yeah, I've seen you talking about playing for fun. But consider this. Do people decide learn to dance or play an instrument just to check an achievement? No, they do that because it's fun. However, things like that need practice and dealing with not-so-pleasant aspects. But guess what, even that can be fun, and improved results tend to be worth it. Why else would people keep doing that, huh?

But back on topic, when you try to speak about archaisms you just end up showing more and more that you don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about. Healthbars were a thing in shmups since long ago but actually fell out of use with time. If anything, THEY are an archaic element that has no place in the genre nowadays. Innovation isn't about throwing out everything old and replacing it with something new. It's about keeping what works and getting rid of what doesn't. Healthbars didn't work for shmups as they evolved but lives and score did. Really, your labeling of them as archaic concepts is an example of rejecting stuff on principle for no good reason. They might be outdated in other genres but for shmups they played a great role to help evolve them. Good scoring system adds a whole new dimension of fun that can be had with the game, and you can easily ignore it if you're not into exploring stuff like that. Limited lives force creators to polish their game enough to ensure that bullet patterns can be safely dealt with - and that is THE defining trait of shmups as a genre. And if you don't want to deal with that... Seriously, just credit feed. Not doing that is the most arrogant and noobish mistake possible. Speaking from personal experience here Not wanting to press a button every few minutes is such a crazy kind of laziness that the only other advice would be what I said in the first paragraph.

(Also, I'd love to trade some words on a topic you started in the past, about wanting only non-bullet-hell games, but that's kinda going outside the scope of this thread.)

[WelshMegalodon]

Do people decide learn to dance or play an instrument just to check an achievement? No, they do that because it's fun.

He doesn't want to actually learn to get better at an instrument or explore the mechanics of improving play or compete in contests, he just wants to enjoy the feeling of holding it and pressing keys and blowing into it to produce sound.

He couldn't care less about whether his steps are right or in tune to the rhythm or a partner, he just likes the idea of moving around to music and the general atmosphere.

I have this idea for a "shoot 'em-up" that consists of a series of large rooms connected by large hallways. There are multiple hallways with twists and turns, and there's 8-way scrolling. Like... Bosconian, but with rooms and hallways. There are doors featuring locks or simple puzzles that, once completed, will grant access to more hallways that may feature new enemy types and puzzles. The player's avatar, which consists of a spaceship or some kind of life form wielding a projectile weapon, is either presented in an overhead view a la Asteroids or from the side a la Fantasy Zone. It will have health, multiple types of ammunition, armor, and various inventory items picked up from the overworld that can be used both to fight enemies and to solve puzzles. There is no scoring system and no lives. Progress can be saved and reloaded at any time.

I think this would be along the lines of what komatik is looking for. Except it's more along the lines of Jet Set Willy or Maniac Mansion or DraSle Family or Faxanadu.

komatik, have you played Jet Set Willy?

Have you played Activision's H.E.R.O?

Quartet?

And I'm still waiting for your thoughts on Sylvalion.

[CyberAngel]

Sounds like Descent to me, except it's a FPS.

[WelshMegalodon]

You know what this thread really reminds me of?

http://www.actsofgord.com/Chronicles/chapter36.php

Spoiler

"Well, Crash Team racing doesn't have any violence in it."

"Yes it does. You can hit each other's cars."

"Uhm.. ok...so, no conflict at all you mean?"

"Yes."

"Hmm... Here, try Bust A Move. It's a very good game with no conflict."

"We've tried it before. It's too violent."

"...Too violent? There isn't any violence in the game at all."

"You shoot things and monsters fall out."

"Ok...here, try Intelligent Cube. Great game, no monsters and no shooting."

"You can fall off the edge and the moving blocks can kill the character. Too violent."

"Uh...ok...uhm...well, there are a lot of racing games without violence."

"Racing games have competition. The game can't have any competition."

Incidentally, Harvest Moon would have been the perfect game for the kid in this story. Poor guy.

Sounds like Descent to me, except it's a FPS.

Guy will never play Descent because RetroArch's DOSBox core is shit and he can't be arsed to figure out how to set up standalone DOSBox or PCem. Otherwise he would have discovered Tyrian and left us all alone ages ago.

He's really kind of limited himself into a corner here. It's like asking for a pretty girl who has a Ph. D, earns six figures, works out, doesn't have STDs, and has never been with a man, but will also be willing to come over and suck his dick whenever he wants it.

"I want a girl that will never ask anything of me ever but is also more engaging than a body pillow of an anime chick, also no escorts because I don't want to pay money for this"

"I don't care about looking like a roided-up NFL player, I just like the feeling of being sweaty and holding weights, now direct me to a workout routine that isn't boring repetition or heavy lifting so I can actually have fun at the gym"

Healthbars didn't work for shmups as they evolved but lives and score did. Really, your labeling of them as archaic concepts is an example of rejecting stuff on principle for no good reason. They might be outdated in other genres but for shmups they played a great role to help evolve them.

We can tell him this as many times as we want. I just don't think he wants to accept that maybe, just maybe, lives and score make sense sometimes! Isn't that absolutely crazy?

And guess what, novels also work better when they have these things called characters and plot! Whoever thought such outdated concepts would continue to be relevant today?

I wonder how he deals with using computers that still require user input and programming after so many decades.

[MathU]

Set of rules and limitations, yes, but I disagree that it's necessarily "to guide the development of a player's skill." Sometimes the interaction of different rules and systems is interesting in and of itself; this is something that's mostly talked about in the context of simulation games and roguelikes, though not entirely devoid from shmups (you could tinker with some scoring systems like this, or experiment with weird weapon gimmicks).

I'd argue that most simulation "games" frankly aren't games at all or are paper-thin game experiences because they often have few goals or direction. Just because something features digital graphics and is interactive does not make it a game. When you play around in sims you're effectively tinkering around in a creative experience like Legos or many other hobbies. You can create your own games out of them, by setting goals and limits of your own, but the base experience is not a game. The same critique applies very much to sandboxes like Minecraft. It's the difference between a rubber ball (the base set of mechanics) and the game of basketball.

Limbo and Braid are both puzzle games, but I don't consider puzzle games to be skill based really.

There's plenty of skill to hone and test even in abstract puzzle games. You're always thinking about solutions to problems within the confines of limitations. And you better believe they're skill to develop in the fast pattern recognition of action puzzlers like Puzzle League and Puyo Puyo.

Guy will never play Descent because RetroArch's DOSBox core is shit and he can't be arsed to figure out how to set up standalone DOSBox or PCem.

Descent I and II work great on GNU/Linux over the DXX-Rebirth source ports. There's also Overload, a wonderful love letter released last year by the original Descent developers, which has a nice GNU/Linux port.

[BIL]

You're missing my point.

No, I'm afraid you have missed mine. I know what you want. All I am saying is, you are in a stark minority here, and there's not a lot we can do about it. A genre enthusiast's concept of friendly shooting will lean towards generosity and leniency, but not outright security. Titles like Elemental Master, Hyper Duel and Kamui. I'll chuck in Winds of Thunder too. All remain liable to trip the "totes impossible" alarm by casual standards, because they can kill you, and that's fine. Nature of the casual beast.

Some who stick it out might find it's actually not so bad, dicing with videogame death this way.

I have to fight with idiots and asshole companies and stupid shit day in and day out. When I want to play a game, I want to relax and get away from all that as much as I can.

As a fellow sufferer of IRL Bullshit™, I'm tellin' ya - try out Zanac Neo (PS1), it's a great STG to chill out to. I'm not being snarky here, it's as vital to my shelf as ballbreakers like Image Fight and Raiden II.

[Shepardus]

Set of rules and limitations, yes, but I disagree that it's necessarily "to guide the development of a player's skill." Sometimes the interaction of different rules and systems is interesting in and of itself; this is something that's mostly talked about in the context of simulation games and roguelikes, though not entirely devoid from shmups (you could tinker with some scoring systems like this, or experiment with weird weapon gimmicks).

I'd argue that most simulation "games" frankly aren't games at all or are paper-thin game experiences because they often have few goals or direction. Just because something features digital graphics and is interactive does not make it a game. When you play around in sims you're effectively tinkering around in a creative experience like Legos or many other hobbies. You can create your own games out of them, by setting goals and limits of your own, but the base experience is not a game. The same critique applies very much to sandboxes like Minecraft. It's the difference between a rubber ball (the base set of mechanics) and the game of basketball.

Without getting too far into semantics debates, if you take a more restrictive view of what qualifies as a "game" then yes, the set of possible experiences is going to be similarly restricted. But even within the framework of more traditional "games" like shmups, I would say there are different modes of play (or, more generally, interaction). In hindsight I think much of the time I've spent on games like ring^-27 have just been experimenting to see what I can break and where the game will go, still with the goal of raising the score, but more out of curiosity than a desire to improve myself in particular. I'd probably be about as satisfied seeing someone else push the game as I would doing it myself.

I wonder how he deals with using computers that still require user input and programming after so many decades.

Given the proliferation of frameworks and toolkits promising app and game development with "no coding required!"...

[komatik]

I just find it extremely bizarre that you're so hell-bent

I'm not "hell-bent". This isn't going to stop WWIII or save starving kids in Africa. You have this weird idea that I'm trying to grab people by the throat and demand they cough up games for me or something. All I've said is that I think a bunch of common shmup mechanics are dumb and outdated, that a healthbar is probably the most realistic compromise I'm going to see, and I'm wondering if anyone knows of some decent shmups that feature it. If you know some, great. If you don't, oh well.

on discovering a shooter that rejects "archaic" concepts like lives when it's one of the genres where it actually MAKES SENSE TO HAVE THEM.

::shrug:: I disagree. What you're saying here is exactly the same as all the people who said that platformers had to have lives and score and couldn't exist without them. And then games like Limbo and Braid came out. For me, the question of "could a shmup exist that is still fun without using these concepts?" was already answered before I started this thread, and the answer is "yes". The question I'm actually investigating is "does such a shmup exist?", but I don't know the answer to that yet (and I'm not super interested in spending a bunch of money to find out, at least not today).

And WHY THE HELL do you not consider Desert Strike a shooter?

Honestly I don't really have a strong opinion either way, but I thought most people didn't consider games like that to be "shmups". Desert Strike is very open and freeform. Your movement is basically arbitrary and you can go any direction or backwards or just stop and pick your nose, you can wander off into a corner and sit there for a year and nobody bothers you. You can attack the enemy positions at whatever speed you want, from whatever direction, in whatever order. There's a fullscreen computer thing with a map and mission objectives and shit, and it pauses the game when you use it. A classical shmup tunnels the player to a large degree, both physically and in the sense of timing. Whereas Desert Strike kinda.... doesn't. I feel like it has more in common with Link to the Past than Raiden. I mean I guess if you're considering "shmup" to be any game with a lot of shooting then sure, but then I'm not sure where the boundary is. Is Contra a shmup? Are lightgun games like Terminator shmups? Is Halo a shmup? If the general community calls Desert Strike a shmup then I guess that's the way it is, but I'll be confused about why until someone can explain what the difference is.

you should be prepared to invest a bit more than it takes to download a rom pack and shuffle it through an emulator.

As I've said multiple times before, I'm perfectly fine investing time into finding a game, I'm not so interested in investing money. The games that I like are clearly not what everyone else finds enjoyable. People don't really "get" what I'm looking for and so end up suggesting stuff that isn't really what I'm into. And that's totally fine- it's not someone's fault that they can't offer good examples from a class of games they never play and I've never blamed anyone for that, but it also means that I'm not about to start dropping $15 and $20 on random xbox/steam games or screw around trying to buy an obscure Japanese doujin game just in the desperate hopes that this one will finally be the magic one that's different from all the rest.

I appreciate what help I'm getting and I do look into every suggestion made (although admittedly it's often several days later). I check out two or three youtube videos for each title to get a sense of how the game plays and I look up threads that talk about the game. It's just that usually it always ends up the same way. Sure, I could spend over a grand buying copies of all these games and the hardware to play them on just to know for sure, but the point is I don't have that kind of money to burn. I'm not artificially limiting myself to 8/16-bit titles because I'm too lazy to run an installer.exe or because of some weirdo philosophy like everyone here seems to think, I'm doing it because I don't have a pile of cash sitting on top of a pile of consoles and PCs. I have mouths that need feeding, cars that need fixing, and bills that need paying, and it's tough for me to justify blowing even $15 on some game that from my research appears to have a 2% chance of being what I'm looking for. When do I see a game that seems to offer a fair chance at being interesting I put it on my shortlist to investigate further.

It's okay to want to avoid or minimize mechanics you don't feel comfortable with, but don't discount them completely as a principle.

I'm not discounting them on principle, I explicitly said that in my post talking about Braid and Limbo. It's perfectly possible to have setups where things like one-hit-kills and reset checkpoints actually work. My problem is that I feel like in 99% of shmups they're just an annoyance and an arbitrary punishment.

when you try to speak about archaisms you just end up showing more and more that you don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about.

Sure, whatever. You can say what you want, and I fully admit this is all personal opinion, but as I see it this "going back to lives" and "healthbars are outdated" thing is just an example of how the shmup community is largely comprised of people who glorify nintendohard shit and ultimately refuse attempts at letting go of the past and letting the genre expand into any other direction. I completely don't agree that things like lives are "keeping what works", but rather a case of "keeping what's familiar" and rejecting anything that strays too far from what they're used to. I also don't agree that shmups have really evolved in any meaningful way (past graphics). Everything is just "more better": more enemies, more bullets, more bomb types, more score. People took the state of the art from the 80s and slowly cranked it up to 11. Of all the games people have shown me over my threads, precious few of them have ever introduced anything that's actually new or innovative.

I mean, if people love oldskool and nintendohard then that's fine for them, to each their own. Even platformers have IWBTG. But it's awfully frustrating that people who want anything else from a shmup are left out in the cold, or told "you don't know what you're talking about" because they don't buy into the circlejerk.

Maybe what you're actually wanting is a different GENRE OF GAME

I've said this a few times before too, but I do play many other types of games from many other types of genres. I just don't bother to ask questions or talk about them here because this is specifically a shmup site. I'm not here because I'm trying to find games to play, I'm here because I'm trying to find shmups to play. And despite what you seem to think I'm not trying to find some one single perfect shump as the only game I'll play forevermore either.

He doesn't want to actually learn to get better at an instrument or explore the mechanics of improving play or compete in contests, he just wants to enjoy the feeling of holding it and pressing keys and blowing into it to produce sound.
He couldn't care less about whether his steps are right or in tune to the rhythm or a partner, he just likes the idea of moving around to music and the general atmosphere.

Guy will never play Descent because RetroArch's DOSBox core is shit and he can't be arsed to figure out how to set up standalone DOSBox or PCem

::sigh:: Seriously dude, just do yourself a favor and get fucked already, really. FYI I have in fact played Descent (1 and 2, still have the CDs too), and as I've said multiple times in my other threads and now this one (threads which you were in), I don't limit myself to only playing EVERY game under RetroArch, that's only console shmups and it's exclusively due to issues of cost. I also don't exclusively or primarily use Linux either despite your implication. There's no point in continuing to even reply to you when you're clearly making shit up and just want to piss on me at this point.

Just because something features digital graphics and is interactive does not make it a game.

This is true. But I still stand by my statement that not all games are a necessarily a test or need to be a test, and that I can still enjoy playing games which aren't.

There's plenty of skill to hone and test even in abstract puzzle games.

... I mean.... maybe? I guess it depends quite a lot on where you make the distinction between skill and talent. For me, talent is something you're born with- you have whatever you got and that's the end of the story. On the other hand, skill is something you learn which you can usually get better at with practice. I think of puzzle games as being more a case of talent and if you're smart enough to figure stuff out. You can practice headshots in a FPS or jumping over gaps quickly in a platformer, but I dunno how exactly you'd practice being smarter. Action-puzzlers don't really count because the skill you're honing is for the action part, not the puzzle part. At least, that's how I see it.

All I am saying is, you are in a stark minority here, and there's not a lot we can do about it.

Oh believe me, I know. -_-
That became very obvious a couple posts into the first thread I made here months ago.

[Shepardus]

you should be prepared to invest a bit more than it takes to download a rom pack and shuffle it through an emulator.

As I've said multiple times before, I'm perfectly fine investing time into finding a game, I'm not so interested in investing money. The games that I like are clearly not what everyone else finds enjoyable. People don't really "get" what I'm looking for and so end up suggesting stuff that isn't really what I'm into. And that's totally fine- it's not someone's fault that they can't offer good examples from a class of games they never play and I've never blamed anyone for that, but it also means that I'm not about to start dropping $15 and $20 on random xbox/steam games or screw around trying to buy an obscure Japanese doujin game just in the desperate hopes that this one will finally be the magic one that's different from all the rest.

I appreciate what help I'm getting and I do look into every suggestion made (although admittedly it's often several days later). I check out two or three youtube videos for each title to get a sense of how the game plays and I look up threads that talk about the game. It's just that usually it always ends up the same way. Sure, I could spend over a grand buying copies of all these games and the hardware to play them on just to know for sure, but the point is I don't have that kind of money to burn. I'm not artificially limiting myself to 8/16-bit titles because I'm too lazy to run an installer.exe or because of some weirdo philosophy like everyone here seems to think, I'm doing it because I don't have a pile of cash sitting on top of a pile of consoles and PCs. I have mouths that need feeding, cars that need fixing, and bills that need paying, and it's tough for me to justify blowing even $15 on some game that from my research appears to have a 2% chance of being what I'm looking for. When do I see a game that seems to offer a fair chance at being interesting I put it on my shortlist to investigate further.

Well, if you pirated doujin games like I assume you've pirated your roms, money wouldn't be an issue there either. Devs deserve to be supported for their work, but I'm sure more than a few people got their start in shmups pirating doujin games. Many doujin games have demos too, and some are freeware.

[CyberAngel]

Of all the games people have shown me over my threads, precious few of them have ever introduced anything that's actually new or innovative.

Again, don't make the mistake of mixing up categories. "Innovative" doesn't equate "fun". Modern FPS games now have RPG elements, loot boxes and microtransactions. Are those innovations? Yes. Do they make those games more fun? Eugh, no, I'd rather go back to my DOS version of Doom instead. There's a reason for a retro-style FPS boom nowadays.

But honestly, digging in your heels about this matter, as well as making groundless insulting assumptions about the general consensus of what works better for shmups as a genre just because it doesn't include stuff you prefer, really isn't winning you any favors here. For someone lamenting the lack of innovation you sure are pretty hesitant to move outside your comfort zone.

[WelshMegalodon]

just an example of how the shmup community is largely comprised of people who glorify nintendohard shit and ultimately refuse attempts at letting go of the past and letting the genre expand into any other direction

I challenge you to find more than five people on this forum that genuinely enjoys the cube rush in Gradius III because of how bullshit it is. Or the ridiculous hitboxes in Salamander and Detana!! TwinBee. Or Zing Zing Zip. Those are examples of games actually being unfair. Not being sent back when you lose a life.

And complex scoring mechanics are a form of evolution. It's far more common for there to be counterstopping exploits in shooters made before 1990 or so because there wasn't as much thought put into scoring. Compare that to something like Mushi, which... I mean, just look at this.

If I'm making stuff up here, I'm not the only one.

[Shepardus]

just an example of how the shmup community is largely comprised of people who glorify nintendohard shit and ultimately refuse attempts at letting go of the past and letting the genre expand into any other direction

I challenge you to find more than five people on this forum that genuinely enjoys the cube rush in Gradius III because of how bullshit it is. Or the ridiculous hitboxes in Salamander and Detana!! TwinBee. Or Zing Zing Zip. Those are examples of games actually being unfair. Not being sent back when you lose a life.

You can count me as one of those few who are fine with Detana TwinBee. But in all seriousness, I do feel like, komatik, you're overestimating just how tryhard the shmups community is. If all of us were so obsessed about 1CCs and scoring and whatnot I'd expect the Hi Scores subforum to be more active than it is. Many of us just enjoy blasting stuff, maybe credit-feeding if we want to see the whole game. The difference is that most of us are content to accept that playing an arcade shmup in that way is not the default state of affairs, and having to adjust the game to suit our intentions, say by credit-feeding, doesn't bother us as much as it seems to bother you.

And complex scoring mechanics are a form of evolution. It's far more common for there to be counterstopping exploits in shooters made before 1990 or so because there wasn't as much thought put into scoring. Compare that to something like Mushi, which... I mean, just look at this.

I would hardly hold up Mushi 1 as an exemplary scoring system that had a lot of thought put into it, because all those counters and autofire rate shenanigans are, in my humble opinion, pretty dumb. But I appreciate the general point being made, shmups have used scoring systems to add variety and cater to multiple audiences without necessarily fragmenting them, and continue systems to throw a bone to still others. Hellsinker even has multiple scoring systems that encourage vastly different playstyles. The specific arcade tropes like "credits" may be archaic in aesthetic, but I think the resulting gameplay still holds water.

[WelshMegalodon]

I think I may have actually found the perfect shmup for komatik:

viewtopic.php?p=623122#p623122

Chouji Meikyuu Legion (超時迷宮レジオン, ~"Super Time Labyrinth Legion")

It's actually a pretty staggeringly creative game - it is, as far as I know, the first game to have a 'rewind time' mechanic which the kids like so much these days. You have a set of smart bomb things that, when activated, send everything backwards except you for a couple of seconds. They aren't as effective as a standard bomb, but the game is pretty generous with them and they add a new dimension (har) to gameplay.
The power ups are people (pink and blue) whom you go around rescuing - they then hop on turrets on your ship and shoot at enemies. Every now and again a space ambulance flies by, giving you the opportunity to drop off some of the people you rescued (this is a somewhat tricky operation, as you have to hold still for a bit and sit in just the right spot) for a score bonus, at the cost of them no longer popping aliens in the face for you. I also really like the temporary power-up that creates a string of duplicates of your ship (presumably you from a different moment in time), using the spot where you picked it up as a tether point for the duplicates. Like the rewind bomb, it doesn't last nearly long enough though. There is also some sort of level select feature where you are presented with two doors at the end of each stage that you can blast open - one is called a 'short cut' but the level you go to seems pretty random to me. Requires more research.

Honestly I don't really have a strong opinion either way, but I thought most people didn't consider games like that to be "shmups". Desert Strike is very open and freeform. Your movement is basically arbitrary and you can go any direction or backwards or just stop and pick your nose, you can wander off into a corner and sit there for a year and nobody bothers you. You can attack the enemy positions at whatever speed you want, from whatever direction, in whatever order. There's a fullscreen computer thing with a map and mission objectives and shit, and it pauses the game when you use it. A classical shmup tunnels the player to a large degree, both physically and in the sense of timing. Whereas Desert Strike kinda.... doesn't. I feel like it has more in common with Link to the Past than Raiden. I mean I guess if you're considering "shmup" to be any game with a lot of shooting then sure, but then I'm not sure where the boundary is. Is Contra a shmup? Are lightgun games like Terminator shmups? Is Halo a shmup? If the general community calls Desert Strike a shmup then I guess that's the way it is, but I'll be confused about why until someone can explain what the difference is.

By most people's definitions, that's true, it really isn't a shoot 'em-up in the vein of an R-Type or a Parodius, but I'd argue it has enough shooting action to entertain a fan of “classical shmups”.

I might even go so far as to call it an evolution of the shoot 'em-up genre. You know, the thing that you've spent countless threads on this forum allegedly looking for.

On that note, if you're intentionally restricting yourself to a genre that's practically defined by how allegedly back-asswards it is, you're not going to find anything you like.

I'm not artificially limiting myself to 8/16-bit titles because I'm too lazy to run an installer.exe or because of some weirdo philosophy like everyone here seems to think, I'm doing it because I don't have a pile of cash sitting on top of a pile of consoles and Pcs.

FS-UAE is free, though. And so is DOSBox, and so is PCem, and so is WinVICE, and so is Altirra, and so is FUSE, and so is XM6 TypeG.

how the shmup community is largely comprised of people who glorify nintendohard shit and ultimately refuse attempts at letting go of the past and letting the genre expand into any other direction.

Everyone in this thread, please raise your hand if you honestly glorify games that lack balance or are otherwise poorly designed purely on the basis that they're hard.

If this were actually true, the highest rated games on SHMUPs would be Gradius III and Winnie the Pooh's Home Run Derby.

Last time I checked there were quite a few arcade games recognized here as genuine pieces of shit. Divine Sealing is the obvious one, but plenty of god-awful Micronics and Tiertex conversions, too. The PC Engine ports of Strider Hiryu and Golden Axe are hot trash. So are the Master System port of Jyuuohki and most home computer ports of Out Run. The ZX Spectrum and Atari 2600 ports of Double Dragon are legendary in their genuinely shittiness.

It goes without saying that most of these are also ridiculously difficult due to the fact that their coders spent less time testing them than the average person does wiping his ass. But we don't hold them up as mythical pathways into Nintendo Hard difficulty masochism nirvana.

We ignore them because they suck.

I really wish you'd just admit to having a strawman already.

Play the DOS version of Prince of Persia on DOSBox or an emulated 286. Now play the god-awful Mega Drive port by Domark. The latter is harder than the former because it's less responsive, screen transitions are no longer instantaneous, and swordfighting is basically a matter of mashing and hoping for the best.

One of these is clearly favored over the other on these boards. Guess which one.

Seriously dude, just do yourself a favor and get fucked already, really.

Last summer I literally had my entire hand inside a girl up to the wrist. But nice try.

I dunno how exactly you'd practice being smarter.

You can practice recognizing and creating Tetris and T-spin setups all day. The same goes for Sudoku grids, Rubik's cube algorithms, Bejeweled chains, and even certain types of differential equations, because all of those involve (relatively) simple patterns. It's not unlike how people can learn to speed-read, calculate large sums in their heads, or recite digits of pi without necessarily having a genius level of intellect. While that does not necessarily mean that you can practice being smarter, it does mean that puzzle games are also largely skill-based, just not necessarily reflex-based.

I would hardly hold up Mushi 1 as an exemplary scoring system that had a lot of thought put into it, because all those counters and autofire rate shenanigans are, in my humble opinion, pretty dumb.

I mean, it's not like I don't agree, but MUH INNOVATION.

There's no point in continuing to even reply to you when you're clearly making shit up and just want to piss on me at this point.

->

"I don't care about looking like a roided-up NFL player, I just like the feeling of being sweaty and holding weights, now direct me to a workout routine that isn't boring repetition or heavy lifting so I can actually have fun at the gym"

This is literally what you're saying, though.

Well, if you pirated doujin games like I assume you've pirated your roms, money wouldn't be an issue there either. Devs deserve to be supported for their work, but I'm sure more than a few people got their start in shmups pirating doujin games. Many doujin games have demos too, and some are freeware.

Maybe we should donate some doujin shooters to him so he doesn't have to spend money to see that we aren't all nutjobs who glorify walking to work 20 miles away every day on the basis that it makes keeping your job harder.

[komatik]

Devs deserve to be supported for their work

Yes and I agree. I acknowledge that I have no moral highground here when I write this, but piracy is a sliding scale. I'm ok grabbing roms because for most of these games the company no longer exists or no longer sells a modern version. In the few cases where they do, it's often a crappy port that's messed up or has so many changes it's not really the same game. I'm FAR less eager to pirate a current gen game from a living company, and I'm really not comfortable at all pirating a current gen game from some indy group of a couple dudes doing it as their passion. If I see a free demo that runs on a platform I already own then I check it out, but I'm not going to steal food off someone's table, and I'm not touching cracks or warez with a 100-foot pole.

For someone lamenting the lack of innovation you sure are pretty hesitant to move outside your comfort zone.

Ugh. This isn't a case of "comfort zone" and I dunno where people got this idea that I've only ever played like two games. The whole reason I even created an account on this site was because I had first looked at all those silly 10 BEST SHMUPS lists on the web, downloaded them, hated them, and am now trying to find something else. I'm not scared to play games that kick the player around- I already did and I decided it wasn't want I wanted.

But in all seriousness, I do feel like, komatik, you're overestimating just how tryhard the shmups community is.

Maybe. From my POV it's more a case that your baseline for 'tryhard' is waaaaay higher than mine. This is a thread where multiple people are telling me that being punished for trying to have fun is literally the objective and that if I don't want to constantly prove myself and be tested then there's no point in even playing. When I balk at that I get insulted and told I'm a baby who wants everything handed to me on a silver platter. You, Shepardus, have always been pretty easygoing and I've never seen you get anal retentive or shit on someone for having different preferences, but the same can not be said for half the other people who post in my threads.

[Sir Ilpalazzo]

This is a thread where multiple people are telling me that being punished for trying to have fun is literally the objective and that if I don't want to constantly prove myself and be tested then there's no point in even playing. When I balk at that I get insulted and told I'm a baby who wants everything handed to me on a silver platter.

You did come in here talking about how you think one-hit deaths, limited lives, and checkpoints are "fake difficulty" and "pointless", then characterize everyone who disagrees with you and who is trying to explain to you why placing limitations on the player in those ways can be a good thing as a masturbatory luddite while dismissing their arguments out of hand. I think that if you can't recognize that those design conventions have persisted for good reason and still remain valid elements of game design even today, you'll never really be able to find common ground with the userbase here.

[CyberAngel]

Seriously, nobody here criticizes you because of your preferences per se. You WERE given a bunch of honest game suggestions, after all. However, it's trying to rationalize your preferences as something objectively superior that irks everyone. Because seriously, do you think you know what works for the genre better than thousands of players worldwide that have been into it for decades? Again, I recognize a lot in you from myself when I was just a beginner, but even I never had such arrogant opinions about those who were unreachably (as I thought back then) better than me.

[komatik]

Last summer I literally had my entire hand inside a girl up to the wrist.

Yeah, honestly that's probably the best chance you have at pleasing a girl when your dick is the size of AAA battery. Congrats on being 13yo btw.

[WelshMegalodon]

Why am I the 13-year-old when you're the one correlating pleasing a girl to dick size? If what you said was true, lesbians would never succeed at getting their partners off without a strap-on. Besides, going down on a partner is much more engaging anyway, and more of a confidence booster since it can be practiced and improved.

[Xyga]

Health bars are those vegan joints, aren't they?

[WelshMegalodon]

Relevant thread and the relevant response::

https://forums.shoryuken.com/t/combo-timing/156347/17

This is probably just the worst place to have a discussion about this because people have a really narrow point of view of what fighting games should be, how the community is set up, how to weed out people like me who don’t want to put 100 hours into a single video games. My point of view comes principally from someone exterior to the scene, who just wants to enjoy his video game and who enjoys good design in general. This is bad design and the only good opposing comment I’ve read was “give a man a fish, teach a man to fish.” Well, I just want to buy a fish.

Let’s be honest here: two people in this thread have already given you all the information you need to know to understand link timing. You’re still complaining. You’d still complain if there was a metronome.

[MathU]

To be perfectly honest, and this is speaking as someone who plays every character in the Guilty Gear XX series at an advanced level, the fighting game genre absolutely has a big problem with constructing what are essentially pointless time sinks for training. Building up the muscle memory to actually do tiger-knee'd chemical love FRCs into low air dashes with I-No feels amazing when you finally get it but it's an extremely tedious, frustrating experience spending hours and hours in training mode where you're not even playing with anyone. There is something to be said about training for performative displays (long combos with overly tight links) over training how to properly react to your opponents. Both of these are forms of skill, but one feels a lot more like rewarding self-improvement than the other. Scrolling shooters don't have quite as much of the former outside certain long, cheap boss attacks that rely on rote memorization like Black Heart's vulcan sweep in Battle Garegga or the hard stage memorization of games like Gallop.

[m.sniffles.esq]

Man, this thread.. Literal dick insults... Anyway:
I had a somewhat longer more elegant response this morning, but I'm in the middle of a pinball circus and was whisked away without saving. So, this is the abridged version. And seeing that we've hit penile digs, perhaps blunter and less elegant is fitting.

The OP seems to do a lot of seeking in this thread and others he or she has started, in attempts to find a shooter fitting imaginary criteria they really feel should exist, but is looking like does not.

Can I suggest perhaps changing the time and energy spent searching for existence towards shepherding into existence?

Things like Unity have greatly increased accessibility of game design to those that don't have design or coding knowledge. If you've noticed an absolute glut of indie titles of late, it's a very big reason why. And a basic version is free to use (since cost seems to be a large issue for you, like us all).

At the very least, perhaps the process of trying to create this game can provide the after-work relaxation you seek from playing the game. At the most, it's creation could be the shot in the arm you feel the genre desperately needs. Or maybe us old, curmudgeonly "tryhards" will outright reject it. Really only one way to find out...

[Flashman]

Last summer I literally had my entire hand inside a girl up to the wrist. But nice try.

Don't do that mate, you're just ruining it for the next person

Anyway, these SHMUPS with shields....

[Kollision]

in b4 the lock

[Square_Air]

Honestly, maybe you should just play Undertale. Neutral route is very forgiving.

[WelshMegalodon]

Is... he gone?

And to think that his last post was a jab at the hypothetical size of my member, something that had absolutely nothing to do with the discussion. What a legacy.

Can we at least agree that we as a community made a genuine effort to find shooters that weren't all about masochism and attempted to provide the player with some breathing room? We tried, didn't we?

[Leander]

I appreciate the effort
Also this thread will be preserved for future generations to admire.

[MathU]

If all of us were so obsessed about 1CCs and scoring and whatnot I'd expect the Hi Scores subforum to be more active than it is.

To be fair, there do exist individuals who love playing for score but have little interest in competing there.