Bassa-Bassa wrote:-Hopefully you don't mind much the counterarguments here as well jehu, I felt obliged.-
Not at all, man. Glad for the discourse actually. I was just worried the topic was going to go off course early, but now we've got the discussion simmering a little, think there's more room for some parallel discussions. (And you're right about the bolding. I thought that was going to call more attention to itself, but it just looks like a signature...)
Rastan78 wrote:The argument for autofire being cheating is kind of suspect if you don't know the developers intention. Western gamers seem to see it as if it's not default then it's cheating. Info is kind of hard to come by regarding this.
With your comments on 'intention,' we're getting into literary studies' 'death of the author' territory. Not that it's my favorite thing in LitCrit, but here I think it's healthy. Not knowing developer intention doesn't suggest we should always use it or always turn it off. Rather it suggests: in favor of 'using autofire' and 'not using autofire' - and using all potential autofire rates in between - there are only arguments. Middleground arguments - in this case, autofire rates that are between MAX AUTOFIRE and ABSOLUTELY NO AUTOFIRE - are notoriously difficult to adjudicate, so the discussion naturally gravitates to one of the poles. Through, incidentally, this makes me all the more interested in cases for 'human-level' autofire rates for certain games. The sustained challenge with none of the excess wear on your joints and your buttons.
I think in almost every STG, there is an argument for MAX AUTOFIRE. Persuasive arguments for non-optimal rates are rarer (IMO) and much more interesting, hence the topic. I myself was surprised playing Metal Black to realize that there are some cases where I have more fun without MAX.
Rastan78 wrote:Even in Darius Gaiden the main programmer went on record saying autofire is used in the game to raise rank and that high rank is essential to the best scores. Within months of the game's release Japanese players were taking advantage of that rank boosting metagame to push the game to its limits. Meanwhile we are still arguing almost 30 years later. It's right there in the Gamest Mook developer interview that came out in 1994.
This is a really interesting case. I went and looked for it, and - if we Westes are allowed an excuse for overlooking this detail - it seems to be because the English translation was only released slightly less than a year ago (Dec. 2021).
However, I'm not completely convinced that the interview itself suggests anything about autofire as you're arguing. You're referring to this passage, right?
—How many different gradations of difficulty (rank) are there?
Kurabayashi: Well, if you divide them up very finely, there’s 16 million levels of gradation. (laughs) But if you look at the actual effect of the rank on enemies, it’s far less, somewhere between 16 and 256 levels of difficulty. The way you raise the rank is by firing your shot continuously, destroying boss parts, destroying entire enemy formations, and taking power-up items. All of these will raise it a little. It also goes up naturally the longer you play. Conversely, if you don’t take power up items, the rank will stop rising temporarily.
Maybe it's a translation thing (is it? please correct me if I'm misinterpreting), but I don't read this statement as explicitly referring to autofire use. IIRC, rank in Gaiden doesn't increase for shots so long as you hold in the shot button and use default autofire rate. However, if you're manually mashing, you get the rank boost - this is what I took him to mean. The more shots = more rank feature certainly opens the door to the autofire meta you're referring to, but I don't know that this clears up the question of 'intentionality' for autofire and Gaiden. I'd default back to your first point: we ultimately don't know the intention here. And this leaves open the door to the enduring legitimacy of both the AUTO and NO AUTO approaches.
BIL wrote:I will say, whichever approach you prefer (0/10/15/30hz), Metal Black is genuinely a different game via manual fire.
When I was finding this out for myself and researching the clear, I was struck by many of your old posts where you were seeking to disabuse the community of the idea that Metal Black was a brutal, unforgiving clear. The 30hz clear came pretty quickly for me, so I thought the apparently widespread community consensus of Metal Black's difficulty was strange. But then I began to infer that the prevailing opinion must have been based on no-auto attempts. Is this right, do you think - or is this just a bad inference?
Community opinion on Metal Black seems to have changed quite a bit since then. I'd theorize that's because of the more universal move to 30hz, but I'm not sure why I think there would have been so many more no-auto pumper players then. Has there been a community-wide change in stance towards the AUTO question over the last 15ish years, or am I just imagining?
Also, BIL
I raise your rather elegiac ode to the dead Mr. Catepillar with a brutal techno tribute to the
ULTRA-BUFF vision of the bastard who pulls walls together with PURE CORE STRENGTH. A much-loved DJ tool to deafen warehouse-dwelling clubbers with ear-shattering square waves this past summer.
BIL wrote:I'd be A-OK with a manual and autofire ship choice. This is how Thunder Dragon 2 works, with 1P benefiting from 30hz, and 2P the exact opposite - 30hz will cripple its natural 60hz autofire, causing awful Euroshump feels.
Fuck, did I not know this? I knew this, right? I need to get back to TD2 - I've always hated 2P, but I rather doubt I turned off my full-auto settings when switching from P1. Might open up the game again.
Rastan78 wrote:That's probably the ideal solution. One of the best tidbits from a dev we have on that is where the Gun Frontier dev said the auto rank boosting factor was never meant to curtail ops from installing circuits, in spite of what some people probably thought. It was an experimental attempt to balance the game for a wide variety of users. Maybe not perfectly balanced, but perfect balance is overrated IMO.
Thanks for bringing all this cool info into the thread, Rastan. Making me think - good shit.