shmups.system11.org

Are they all instant respawn games? I didn't check, but I am guessing somewhere between few and none of them are games that have checkpoints. Would love to see the attempt at Same! Same! Same! 1P, Tatsujin Ou, Image Fight, or R-Type II.

It was their first time ever playing Twin Cobra. How the fuck do you think you can claim that you got a world record on something on the first time you play it? Lol humans are weird.

I think that's part of why this fucko plays in 2P mode. He's able to force some of these checkpoint games to be instant respawn titles instead.

I have no idea how he handled the last boss of Shienryu. You're supposed to get sent back to the start of the stage when you die there.

Tatsujin Ou will send you back to a checkpoint even in 2P mode if you die at more or less the same time or something. I'm not really sure of the timing or exactly how it works, but when a friend and I credit-fed his PCB in 2P mode, we had a hell of a difficult time with the potatoes on stage 6 for that exact reason. Die against potatoes -> go back to checkpoint -> repeat for like 20 minutes.

In 1P mode, Raiden DX removes checkpoints on... was it the unlockable final stage? I don't really remember anything about how to unlock that stage that other than that it's apparently ridiculously difficult to actually go to there.

I made the mistake of watching a Psyvariar Revision video they have (a game where you have to perform above a certain grade to unlock later stages) and they praised the game for its short length, lol. The video was only like 8 minutes, too.

The sad part is there's some real fun to be had playing in 2 player. A lot of games work well for the 2 player 1CC like Giga Wing, Gunbird, Omega Fighter, and even some allow you to have fun with the scoring systems like Futari Maniac and God (one player cranks up their multiplier, then uses laser to cash in, but the other player sits in front and does all the collecting, meaning you go an entire stage with max counter items and theoretically score higher than possible in single player). I don't begrudge anyone for just credit feeding through a game and having fun with it. After all, there's no shame in being bad at a game. But it's super weird to insist that it's somehow a world record.

Of the Toa games, Same! Same! Same! 2P is a lot of fun in multiplayer (but good luck seeing anything if both players have max power flamethrower and you are playing on a CRT! Yep, had that experience once and it was super cool, even though we couldn't see anything at all) and Dogyuun!! has the cool ship lock on thing, but Out Zone is a different game in 2P mode. You can't walk through each other, and that alone radically changes the way you play the game since you have to watch out so you don't get stuck on each other.

Raiden also has the cool shot thing you can only do in 2P mode, as well, now that I think about it.

But yeah, credit feeding is fine, and that's a legit way to learn or play or whatever, but world record on your first time ever playing the game? No way. Not happening. I wonder if my Twin Cobra clear time is faster than theirs is. Too lazy to check, though.

Just to comfort everyone: I think Ketsui is a tough cookie.



It's very much a "everyone who drives slower than me is a nuisance, everyone who drives faster than me is a maniac" thingy.

There's nothing of less value than someone trying to put a number on entertainment. Freakin' entertainment, like it was some objective feat of engineering like a car engine or something. "How's this sunset?" "2/10, no fireworks." "How's petting this duck?" "7/10, it keeps biting me for some reason." "How's this soup?" "4/10. Too much water."

The 10+ point dipshits do irritate the fuck out of me on an extra level, too. Way to have numbers that never get used and don't mean anything. Damn icycalm for making it impossible for me to ignore this. It's another of those "the entire world is insane" kind of things.

The only value of rando opinions is to get the "vibe" of what a certain community likes. Like take MAL reviews. There'll be like this show literally called "Step On Me While Making A Disgusted Face" or whatever. And the MAL score will be like a 4.2/10 or whatever. BUT. On an objective engineering level, the show itself is actually 100% perfect. It provides exactly what the title promises: not one thing less, and not one thing more. An absolute masterpiece. As clear a 10 out of 10 as anything in this world could possibly be.

Don't like it? Watch something else you shitweasel! You don't watch Fist of the North Star if you don't want to see some exploding heads! Or Time of Eve if you don't want to see people drinking coffee with robots, talking about their feelings!

So TLDR: entertainment isn't like an engineering checklist of requirements or a grade like in school. It's a matter of alignment. The time spent dicking around in anonymous rando reviews checking to see if the reviewer actually aligns with yourself could have been better spent making up your own damn mind with your own damn eyes and thoughts.

This video on Street Fighter EX3 actually being good has been making its rounds, and god damn it -- SFEX3 is a game I didn't play strictly due to seeing bad reviews.
I'm genuinely kind of angry that it took 23 years for this to get corrected.

Honestly, the Street Fighter EX series ended up with a weirdly bad reputation -- sure, I'm not that fond of the first EX game, just something about how it moves feels off, but EX2+ is absolutely one of my favorite Street Fighter games. Great sense of style, fun mechanics, and even if there's some goofy nonsense you can do, that's alright. EX2+ is just great.
Around 15 years ago, I remember hearing that the EX games "failed" and were a "misstep". Fuck that shit.

I really should try and remember what other dumb shit reviews and opinions were circulating around all those years ago and try the fucking games out myself instead.

I'm sure there's plenty of games that have been unfairly swept into the dustbin of history in the same way. I'm not sure any shmups apply since they're already a niche enough genre... would Giga Wing have become a hit if Dreamcast reviews of the time weren't claiming the bullets were impossible to dodge but it was also super easy to beat (and get the bad ending lol) by credit feeding it? I kinda doubt it. Mainstream reviews also helped cement the idea that shmups are a niche and inaccessable genre, so maybe I'm not laying enough blame at their feet:

https://www.ign.com/articles/2004/09/15/gradius-v



But then again, Ikaruga became the darling of reviewers and is well regarded and known by non-shmup fans, so who knows? Would God Hand have gotten more recognition at the time with a better IGN score and a bit of education in the game's mechanics? Maybe.

I can't think of any games at the moment that apply here. I know the Descent series never took off the way Doom and Quake did, but I don't think it was because of bad reviews. Rather, the weightless, 6DoF style of FPS in general was always doomed to be unpopular because many people get motion sickness playing it, and it requires MUCH better navigation and spatial awareness to play than Doom or Quake (there's no true "up" or "down" except in rooms with clearly distinct light and floor textures to orient yourself by).

Maybe GunValkyrie? That control scheme is a doozy to wrap your mind around at first, but handles like a dream once you get it down (at least until your sticks break from excessive clicking). There were some reviewers who actually took the time to learn it and absolutely loved it. Most reviewers never really figured out the controls and either knocked the score for it or dismissed it outright.

Come to think of it, that basically describes P.N. 03, too.

PN03 also had the problem of excessive asset reuse. A lot of reviewers are very sensitive to games that seem low-budget, plz understand.

I kind of can't disagree with the IGN quote though. Compare with these quotes from an interview with Shinobu Yagawa.





I do lament that shmups and arcade games got so many bad reviews, but had they gone with a different narrative (something like these games are tough but fair and consist of grinding the same content repeatedly to find solutions) we'd still be in a situation where the genres are niche.

I think there are new challenges unique to shmups in a modern context compared to fighting games or speedrunning classic games for example. Shmups have a lack of translating easily for spectators. There's a small number of players who go for significant achievements in individual games beyond 1CC collecting. There aren't many publicly known personalities or entertaining rivalries. Etc etc.

I wonder. I suspect you're right, but I also know that there's many genres where challenge runs are popular ("can you beat Mega Man 8 using only the ball weapon?!"), and there's been a recent popularity in "hardcore" games, or at least games perceived as such, namely the Souls series. Even if shmups would always have been a niche genre, I can't help but wonder how much their popularity, particularly with western audiences, has been negatively impacted by the classically negative attitudes we've seen in mainstream reviews.

Hmm. Maybe you're right. I mean yeah, in this day and age reviews are consumed by idiots who need to be told what to think, but controlling idiots is an easy source of power and money. Our political dictatorships being a classic example; imagine hating someone that works for the same banks as your team, but they wear different colors and make the wrong kind of mouth-sounds.

Back in the days before the internet and video, magazines did actually have a purpose and a lot more power. It's not some IGN dweeb that made Vampire Survivors a success, when it would have otherwise been a failure like (almost) everything else.

It did reinforce a kind of culture. Such as when they'd have those filler articles about games we'd never get. "The Japanese are weird, dudes. Instead of murder simulators where you explode nazi demons all day, they have these creepy sicko games! And in some of them... you talk to girls! Ew!"

The shoot'em up was especially suited to a limited timespan. Everything has its moment in the sun. Westerns. MMO's.

Can you even conceptually think of what a pure shm'up with a $100 million budget would even look like? As pure game as a game can be, I just don't think they're built to scale like that.

How many of them were made to be played over a long period of time, not relaying on replaying the same stages over and over to mastery? Gothic Wa Mahou Otome? Ongeki?

It doesn't really matter though. You can't make a horse drink water. I recall playing the Mario Kart 64 time trials at a relative's house to kill some time, a distant cousin walked in and was like "why are you playing that?" like he'd walked in on me molesting a plant or something. These reviews are perfect for the people who read them.

"For people who like this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing they'd like."



I never got sick from viewing any video game, but watching this youtube video of a FPS using Zelda 1 art assets changed that. Just a couple seconds of bobbing up and down and I was ready to hurl.

Diablo 3 was really my first experience with that kind of thing. The first two games in that series had a normal human as the FX guy. Knew that you had to have gentle, soothing ASMR sounds if people were expected to hear them over and over again for hours. Skeletons getting hit were some pencils and dice rolled around in a cup. Diablo 3 FX guy? Steel sharply scrapping against steel. It was the first time I was ever in physical pain thanks to a video game. Brain felt like it was bleeding after trying out the demo.

It's interesting if you want to torture people with information output devices, but I'm rather grateful the majority of games don't try to physically hurt or kill their players.

Jesus Christ.

Addiction of 4? Wut?

I feel like I'm having a stroke reading it.

No mention of throws or weapon combinations, no mention of the double jump attack or slides... this person was outright bad that the game, and attempted to compensate for it in the review with "humour". They also apparently didn't pay attention to the game and think Black's stage is the sixth level.

How did people get jobs as videogame reviewers if they were so fundamentally bad at them? Is there no quality assurance for this kind of thing? BIL posted this in the From thread and it blows my mind that someone who presumably has to be literate enough to write the reviews doesn't get their job qualifications questioned because of this.

As much as this particular video has been regurgitated and shared over the years, I'm not sure if it quite fits this thread. The person who ended up playing that Cuphead demo wasn't even supposed to play the game (let alone review it) but had to step in for whatever reason. According to his own words, he found his gameplay "unusable", but the video was posted anyway along with the preview because some of his colleagues thought it might get a laugh or two. Whoever made the final decision on that obviously failed to understand that video games are quite a serious business.

Probably nepotism, and also it was 1993 and basically nobody over the age of like 15 gave a shit about non-sports console gaming.

Sure it does. The thread is a general catch-all for paid reviewer incompetence, and even if you suck at run 'n guns I don't think being able to follow an onscreen tutorial to solve a basic platforming puzzle where the solution is spelled out is a big ask. For the people whose livelihood depends on the success of a game, it must be incredibly frustrating for the mass market's perception of your game be negatively impacted by a reviewer who seems barely capable of engaging with the game, as in the Gunstar Heroes review above.

edit: I don't want to keep bumping the thread just to discuss this one Cuphead video, but honestly if you're being paid by an employer to attend a videogame conference in another country, it's not unreasonable to ask that you be capable of solving a test of basic reading skills and problem solving without struggling too much. Despite finding the dash button early, he then spent a solid 40+ seconds jumping against the wall without dashing. The charitable interpretation was he was trying to see if you could wall jump? I dunno.

I'm sure many a player has been stuck in a similar tutorialization situation longer than a minute or so. Learning process differs from person to person and obviously your taste in games can effect how you approach different problems. Even text tutorial prompts can be quite ambiguous.
He did eventually solve the jumping puzzle so in the end the tutorial did its job

Did he then go and review the game, berating it for being impossible or badly designed? No, he wrote a preview and acknowledged that he was clearly out of his depth here. I fail to see how that would've resulted with a negative response to the game, especially when most of the discourse centered around "yet another game journalist who sucks at games" bulletin.

I just think a truly lazy review requires a fair amount of misplaced hubris from the writer, i.e. something along that GH review.

Too lazy to check to see if this has been posted previously, but I just remembered this thing: https://www.nintendolife.com/reviews/ni ... om-special

I don't really like Snow Bros that much, and as such I somewhat agree with some of the criticism here, but the way it is presented is just fucking bad.

To their credit, they did give a second opinion from someone who apparently actually understands the game; but like, why weren't THEY the main reviewer?

Right? That second opinion wasn't there originally, though; they put it up a few days or so later after they got called out on the low quality of the review.

It should come as no surprise that Tom Massey is the forum's own Skykid, hence why in one paragraph there's a better review than there is in the rest of the article: viewtopic.php?p=1494229#p1494229

That Andy Dyer review is like how I would do reviews if I thought they had any value: "This is just a copy pasta of _____. Here are twenty other games that are the same thing, but better."

.... in my defense, there'd probably be fewer than twenty while talking about freakin' Gunstar Heroes.

Making a game that's actually new and not ass is really, really hard. You might remember when Street Fighter 2 was invented, and then we suddenly got a million variations of Street Fighter 2. These days it seems more like you just fuse two games together and try to make it work out, like with Ongeki. Or just not worry about being original, and throw something fun in there, like a goose.

Blockbuster movies being carbon copies of Star Wars is always illustrative: every movie has to be about punching some bad guy in the face, and has a little "romance" stapled onto the side. Strip both of those aspects out of a movie, and you might have something worth watching.

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Reviews are kind of like personals, aren't they? Nobody gives people the basic tutorial on how to write a personal: you should write it like you're saying hello to the kind of person you like. But 99% of them are these clueless paragraphs of drivel about liking puppies and kitties, and looking at sunsets. Aimed at some imaginary generic mayonnaise person that doesn't exist, terrified of offending someone by expressing anything real of themselves in the things.

If a review isn't for someone who likes a kind of thing, who the hell is it for? A mahjong/foosball review of "haha, it's just mahjong/foosball" isn't a review, it's an attempt at entertainment for a general audience. Like those upvoted shitposts on Slashdot/Reddit/etc that don't actually have any information within them.

I think that's the real problem this forum has with them: these rags aren't some hobbyist newsletter. They're entertainment for certain kinds of people.

... god I was so baffled as a kid that the show Entertainment Tonight wasn't about movies or tv shows.... it was about actor's personal lives. I had and still have zero understanding why that's so popular.

Wahayyy! Doing it MASSIVE bruv! Phwoaar! I see you chaps are unacquainted with England's #1 novelty toilet paper brand, [insert name of 90s gaming magazine here]

Actually, there were at least a couple decent ones. Some real passion and guts in that STG battle royale featuring a bunch of technical darlings and Hellfire, which the authors gave to Toaplan's warhorse, despite its noted lack of flash. You'd see some killer NTSCJ-exclusive content, too; the despair endemic to PAL gaming - late, shitty, overpriced - brought a "fuck this shit, just import" mentality I still relate to. Made an impression on my malleable young dome, those did.

I liked those more than our EGMs, and sure as shit GamePros - though I must admit, I can't recall the names offhand. They were seasonal things, picked up on holidays to the UK, or gifted by visiting family. I'm sure I'd have purchased regularly, had I been on the opposite side of the pond.

But yes - there's no mistaking the terminally auto-analingual Bad English Games Journo, or his brethren in the music/film/theatre rags. To understand, you must understand Lad Culture (RIP 90s/00s). Fellow denizens of our sunny isle, like Burinju and Lander, will likely know what I mean! A mild-mannered tosser, of cheeky insouciance and unbovved-ness that might elsewise endear, finds himself with a byline, and is transformed into the journalistic equivalent of a dogfart in a steaming elevator. Fucking Christ, man - it stinks in here! Where's it coming from though, there's nothing to speak of! Oh, right. I'm reading "MEGA" circa 1993. State of the art in vapid shite - worra larf m8!

I remember this C&VG review of Ninja Gaiden (XB), complaining bitterly about its difficulty - SO UNFAIR, M8 - before slagging it off as a "mindless button bash." You think blokey's mind might stay attached to the rest of him if you'd engage it a bit, chumley? Sadly, engagement, effort, application and so on are garlic to our Laddish bloodsucker. Git Gud? Yer avin' a larf m8!

You can see another fine example via the infamous Amiga version of Final Fight. As was SOP, it looks passable in still shots; say, in a magazine, or the back of the box you're carrying to the checkout. In motion? You'd be better off making paper cutouts of those screenshots, then acting out your own imaginary credits. The mechanics would probably be more accurate, too!

Its enduring legacy is the shit-eatingly smug twat responsible, who not only coded his own gurning pixellated Front Hole into the game itself, but also included a heaving .txt file explaining why he thinks the game is shit, the CPS hardware was wasted on it, and also, here are his favourite bands. Wahaaay! JOY DIVISION and NEW ORDER?! That's MASSIVE, lad! But watch out, readers! At one point, he tells of getting jumped leaving a "club" (I wonder why!), and needing stitches. At least the nurse were fit, pwhoaar! This was presumably to make up for the lack of brutal street violence in the port itself, and tbf, hearing our loquacious tosser had the shit slapped out of him is pretty decent comp!

That's the Cheeky Chappy Likely Lad for you; an endearing little moron, until he writes your review, or codes your Amiga version, or spills your pint. What occurs from there depends on your propensity for ultraviolence. This is a peace-loving country with markedly low homicide rates.



With some reservation, I think it applies to the wider subject of Shitty Game Reviews.

If the New York Times' restaurant critic is off sick that week, and his only substitute is the office chimp, who proceeds to shit on the floor before wiping his ass with the menu - first of all that is hilarious, and I would expect the video proof to achieve prompt immortality, as Deano's own little mistake has. With a great less histrionic pity-partying from the chimp, too.

But second, it's no longer about the reviewer. He's clearly not equipped to carry out the task assigned. Anyone could tell, just by a glance at his fucked chimp face, and his monged chimp hands. It's now about his taskmasters, who have overseen, signed off, and published a shitshow for public consumption.

I do believe there is a minimum standard of competence to be demanded here; well short of frame-perfect genius superplayer level. Looking at that footage, I would instinctively wonder if the controls were laggy or glitched in some way. I bought Cuphead sight unseen, barring a review from our own Squire. The control response is in fact remarkably sharp, as he said.

My second instinct would be that the reviewer is, ahem, "avin' a larf," ala those shitty old UK mags. And it seems this is nearer the mark, with Deano's superiors having a right larf on his - and everyone else's - dime. I suppose my question here is: "Why?" You're not entertaining us, nor are you here to. Your job is to produce useful coverage. I know, I know, a useful mainstream site - that's bad comedy right there. But it's the principle, surely?

This also concerning a gametype that's long been mainstream-fashionable to trash as outmoded, generic, and bringing nothing worthwhile to the table (see Gunstar mouthfart review). I'm not surprised they collectively caught hell for it. If the audience is used to your stridently telling them something is dishwater dull, sight unseen, purely for operating in two dimensions, and your man is then revealed to possess all the discerning taste of a shit-eating chimp... getting called a bitch-assed pussy motherfucker sounds about right? I'd go even further and say the dread I feel sorry for your mother.

In fact, fuck this shit. Enough pussyfooting about. I wouldn't care if GAYMERG8 SHADOW UNIT ZEOTH had literally kidnapped Deano and his bosses, brought them bound and gagged to a busy LA overpass, then very inconsiderately ass-raped them with rolled-up copies of said review. Actually I'd laugh my ass off It's far from the worst thing to occur in such circumstances, let's be honest with ourselves. The way Deano carried on, you'd think they'd left him hanging handless/headless, not merely walking kinda funny for the rest of the weekend. :3 And so maybe I'm the wrong person to judge, being a connoisseur of both arcadey action games and mischievous sodomy.

Reservation being, I don't often participate in these threads. When I see dogshit on my commute, I'm disgusted, certainly. But my attitude is "move on," not "stop and painstakingly document the worst examples." Ironically enough, given the tone of that Gunstar review, they're really not all that unique - "lmao man jump and run and hit thing lol lol lol - OMFG! GENERIC COVER SHOOTER w/LESBIANS?!?! GOTY 100/10 *WET GAGGING NOISES*" - certainly not enough to warrant all that laborious pressure-washing and deodorizing and airing out. (the linked example is subtly different; that's an example of dogshit being tracked onto the carpet)

By the by, I'm not a Mass Effect fan - the poor bastards, sounds like they got rode hard and put away wet - but they provided some interesting ANTI-DEANO ammo at the time. This would seem to speak to that "basic competence" issue.

SCRANDALOUS DEETS

"What?! The new Toyota BumSexeru swerves violently to the left and bursts into flames when the accelerator is engaged?! We must overhaul the drivetrain and steering column, STAT!" It was later determined the test driver was getting blown by Dean Takahashi while lighting a crackpipe at the time of the fiery incident, caused by a simultaneous climax and massive crack hit "Oh. Whoops!"

(as said, I don't follow any of that shit. I just had a bunch of my bitchass homies who DO whining about it, so I remembered! )

In retrospect, the only magazines I really liked as a kid were Nintendo Power, Game Players, and Next Generation. Nintendo Power was a clean compact ad for upcoming games, very few opinions and more about showing off a game's content, and even had an RPG corner when I was really into them. Game Players had this humor schtick that made it fun to read - they had their own made up lore. Where each writer was kind of playing a character, with their own feuds and bugbears. And Next Generation was more into the technical aspect of actually making games.

There really was quite a bit of humility in Game Players I found endearing. It's a pity EGM with its cramp paragraphs by four different people, with a giant fuck off number pasted over it, so it was impossible to read the useless text, was far more successful.



It was really, really bothering me how he refused to press any other buttons. That's like.... the first thing I do in a new game. Push all the buttons. See what they do.

When he finally fired a bullet (just one now, the penalty for pushing the wrong button too much is a harsh one you see), I clapped.

Ah fuck! Game Players, that's the third man. Good stuff. I noted they seemed to undergo a bit of a personality crisis in the late 16bit days... I had one issue from the SNES launch, very genteel... then by the time Saturn was on the horizon, they'd gone a bit edgy m8 - but as you say, in a self-deprecating way, and moreover I always detected a lot of vital passion in the writing itself. Those motherfuckers LOVED their Bomberman multiplayer, I remember reading about their trade show proselytizings in other mags, haha.

Bill Donohue, was it? Oh hell yeah, got it first Google. Guy looked to be 50s at least at the time, I wonder if he survives. I was shitposting his bit about chase cam VS driver cam the other day (he was very annoyed some racing game lacked the latter; the image of a red-faced, steaming-mad Bill, gripping the wheel with one vein-popping fist, chugging a frosty Bud with the other, that's writin son ).

I wanted to say VG&CE, but I only read their earlier, more august incarnation briefly... then they did a total 180, going totally GRUNGE, MAAAAAN and just getting kind of weird. Not unlike GP, and now I think of it, EGM, though without the former's elan nor the latter's reliable blunderbuss "Look kids, 500pages! Gotta be SOMETHIN good in here right!" "OH WOWW ROGUE TITTIES FROM THE EX-MAN GAME!" "Ha ha! That's right, Timmy!"

I burst out laughing when I read this in the comments the other day.



Yeah, this seems to me a pretty fundamental thing to do, especially in a console game where the controller has a limited, finite number of buttons compared to a keyboard in a PC game. A poor fellow on GameFAQs couldn't figure out how to access a menu in Wizardry 1/2/3 SNES and it turns out he'd had the same problem, he hadn't thought to try all the buttons (there's two separate menus you access in the labyrinth, one via Start / Select, and one via the X button). I guess this kind of trial and error curiosity is something we can easily take for granted...





Are you kidding me? Isn't there a point where someone sensible realizes something might be off and they're like "hey, am I doing this wrong"? Wouldn't they maybe ask for help to see if they've missed something fundamental? Argh.

Reading the TV Tropes page drudged up a lot of forgotten memories. The guy demanding people send him cheese as tribute, then begging people to stop when they actually did. How they had "Cosmic Race" as their lowest rating. There's some kind of "Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer" game that nobody remembers, but I have to research now because of uh reasons.

Now that we're in the future, we can actually see what all the hubbub about Cosmic Race was about!

All the ninety's nostalgia is nice for the AeStHetIc, but it really was horrible time. Finding out that one guy is still doing Jaded Gamer articles, I went in and of course had to read the one about the latest Ghosts n'or' Ghouls game everyone was talking about. ..You really can't go back : /