trap15 wrote:
That's not true in the least. They are hard in order to pull in money, but you make it sound like they're designed to be impossible, which is strictly false in 99.9% of Japanese-developed games.
Getting good at them requires building a skill-set. There are numerous shooters that a veteran could clear on their first time seeing the game, and many games feature randomness to prevent pure memorization from being viable.
Impossible? Nah, most shmups arent Pink Sweets
To be fair, I think tools like MAME and Training/Boss rush modes greatly facilitate the learning progress. But that wasnt always the case when they were originally released in Arcades, because since the game gets exponentially difficult (or has additional loops) the player would get less chances to learn the difficult parts, and would be forced to play from the beginning or coin feed through, or until, the problematic parts.
I mean cmon, the beginning of DDPDOJ's second loop straight out takes all lives from you and no continues are even allowed, can you imagine that on a real Arcade?
I really dont want to sound like "that guy" who thinks shmups are impossible for most players. It's just that when you think about their original context, that being Arcade Games, you have to wonder just how many coins were lost due to the unseemly difficult curves players had to put up with in order to master even a single loop.