I think it's probably that there's a little bit of a steep difficulty curve on the shielding mechanic, which means that you need to play it for a certain length of time before you really get into it, because it mostly becomes awesome after you've gotten the hang of how the gauge works and how to aim bullets and suchNintendo Saturn wrote: Entirely agree.
Mars Matrix is one of the (if not THE) most replayable games I have ever played (I'm 37 and have been enjoying games since my father got us an NES in 1988). I don't know why it eluded me all those years but I'm never letting it go now, lol.
well, you'd probably be best off opting for a two button setup with just the auto piercing cannon and multieffect button. The rate of fire is fast enough that auto on the normal shot isn't terribly useful, and IMHO makes the game way harder (because it's hard to get to the shield when you need it. I'm not too big of a fan of keyboards as input device for shooters generally, so take this with a grain of salt, but I think it'd be really hard to play with a keyboard. there's a lot of moving around the screen once you familiarize yourself with the level layouts. I find keyboards are best for games where you're mostly just microtapping around a relatively restricted area. This might not be an issue for people more used to keyboards though. I hope it isn't.M.Knight wrote:nZero : Wasn't aware of that. Thanks!
LordHypnos : I indeed noticed that I could stop shielding early to make it recover faster. In that sense, it is not as in Milestone games where activating the shield depletes its entire jauge and you have to refill it from scratch. But it refills faster in Milestone games.
Therefore, I also noticed that you can pick gold cubes from defeated ennemies thanks to the shield but I haven't really mastered in what direction deflected bullets go so it still seems a bit random to me. By experimenting and playing the game more, it should become more understable, I guess.
Thanks for the tip for the trigger but I play on a keyboard, so I'll try to find another comfortable set-up. Playing with three buttons on a keyboard can be cumbersome, but I manged to do rather fine with ESP Ra.De and Touhou games, so it should be alright.
EDIT : Oh, just a little something I have forgotten to say : the Game Over sound is one of the cheesiest I ever heard in a shmup.
Yes, the gameover sound effect is cheesy