If you could only play one shoot'em up for the rest of life

[rjosal]

Wow, there's surprisingly little consensus in this thread. I'll add to the diversity by throwing in DOJ. I'm pretty sure it would take longer than my life to beat hibachi. I rather like the chain and hyper mechanic. Some people might say it hurts to see the hole it leaves in your score when you drop a chain, but I like the clarity that gives you. So I think if I was stuck in a CAVE for the rest of my life I could eventually achieve perfection.

[Lobinden]

It would have to be one I'm fairly decent at and like a lot, but could still last me a very long time before I am able to master it. I would probably go for either Raiden IV or Crimzon Clover.

Ketsui would also be a consideration.

[Feedbacker]

Wow, there's surprisingly little consensus in this thread. I'll add to the diversity by throwing in DOJ. I'm pretty sure it would take longer than my life to beat hibachi. I rather like the chain and hyper mechanic. Some people might say it hurts to see the hole it leaves in your score when you drop a chain, but I like the clarity that gives you. So I think if I was stuck in a CAVE for the rest of my life I could eventually achieve perfection.

I second that.
And I'll probably never get tired of Namiki's work on this game, especially this - that stage 5 intro gets me everytime.

[pokemon123]

sure arranges are allowed.

Whoever said DOJ is wrong, WRONG

[Bonus!]

That's a great thread. I would go for Crimzon Clover: World Ignition, which is utterly brilliant. The base game is already fantastic, and then add several ship types, difficulties, and modes, and you end up with a game you could play for years. I'm not the most active shmupper, but I've sunk more time into CC:WI than any other title, and enjoyed every second of it.

[SapphireDensetsu]

I'd have to say that I'm absolutely torn between DOJBL and CC:WI, but in the end, I'd probably give the edge to DOJBL, as it is the perfect game to me. So much room for survival improv with A-EX, restrictive scoring, and 2 loops really makes it the ideal desert island game for me, assuming of course, that I can actually get good.

[pokemon123]

maybe we should have a challenge where we get people in a contest through signups to submit a game and they have to play it for the next 3 months without playing anything else. If you survive the three months you win something. (I am half serious about this)

PS: gus if you come back you don't get to participate because we all know you could win this one because you play futari

[Skykid]

sure arranges are allowed.

Whoever said DOJ is wrong, WRONG

A third vote for DOJ for me: nothing finer.

We had this thread not long ago btw, something about being stranded on a desert island.

[monouchi]

Very interesting with CC:WI votes.
I have a very hard time getting into that game, but I guess I have to give it some more love.

[Gamer707b]

I would go with Radiant Silvergun. Theres something about Treasure's games I just adore. Shooter or not. If you count run n guns then Metal Slug or Gunstar Heroes. Rail shooters goes to Sin and punishment.

[Ed Oscuro]

if you could only make one kind of thread, how bad would it be
if you could only read one kind of thread about a genre you gave up on, how bad would that be?

The Retrogaming Roundtable Forum seemed to get this type of question a lot. The question, I'm sorry to say, is the stunted twin of the "what is your dream game" type thread. At least in the dream game hypothesis it's not so blatantly a ritual of murder-policing community perceptions about perfection, based on the obviously true assumption glory belongs to the past. The island quarantine question is a monument to the past built on rotted timbers and casting away the future. The prospect of ad-hoc dental surgery on an isolated sandbar is more than enough to convince me that this is deeply not fun, but everybody seems to treat it as if it's really a manageable question worth more forum commentary than making detailed survival studies...this is the only way I see the far more attractive promise of the future dying; a resort to highly contrived visions of personal hells. Maybe a nuclear war would do it. Never changes.

On the other hand I absolutely love (?) the spin on this topic, "would you keep playing games if they were like this?" Best asked after playing something like this. "I [sent a ghost home, I] feel I did something worthwhile today!" I like to think that there is some level of crappiness beyond which, in the case of the atomic holocaust and the death of quality programming outside strangely radiation-tolerant LJN cartridges, where I would just find something else to do (assuming leisure time is still a thing). And we'd still have the good ol' Socratic method, and also boots and whips, to get kids off the bad drug of LJN. Even then, that's also predicated on the sense of loss of something better for humanity.

Almost as depressing and futile as reading a plot synopsis of The Prestige.

[Lord Satori]

Does a bootleg of every shmup I enjoy count as one?

[Squire Grooktook]

if you could only make one kind of thread, how bad would it be
if you could only read one kind of thread about a genre you gave up on, how bad would that be?

The Retrogaming Roundtable Forum seemed to get this type of question a lot. The question, I'm sorry to say, is the stunted twin of the "what is your dream game" type thread. At least in the dream game hypothesis it's not so blatantly a ritual of murder-policing community perceptions about perfection, based on the obviously true assumption glory belongs to the past. The island quarantine question is a monument to the past built on rotted timbers and casting away the future. The prospect of ad-hoc dental surgery on an isolated sandbar is more than enough to convince me that this is deeply not fun, but everybody seems to treat it as if it's really a manageable question worth more forum commentary than making detailed survival studies...this is the only way I see the far more attractive promise of the future dying; a resort to highly contrived visions of personal hells. Maybe a nuclear war would do it. Never changes.

On the other hand I absolutely love (?) the spin on this topic, "would you keep playing games if they were like this?" Best asked after playing something like this. "I [sent a ghost home, I] feel I did something worthwhile today!" I like to think that there is some level of crappiness beyond which, in the case of the atomic holocaust and the death of quality programming outside strangely radiation-tolerant LJN cartridges, where I would just find something else to do (assuming leisure time is still a thing). And we'd still have the good ol' Socratic method, and also boots and whips, to get kids off the bad drug of LJN. Even then, that's also predicated on the sense of loss of something better for humanity.

Almost as depressing and futile as reading a plot synopsis of The Prestige.

I...think you've gone a little too deep.

[Ed Oscuro]

Speaking of another Nolan film! It's just that I've seen this movie before. OP probably doesn't know about it but this can't be a coincidence. Is the party over, is that all we can do?

[Squire Grooktook]

Heh.

Amusing responses aside, perhaps a more accurate phrasing of the op question would be "of the shmups currently in existence, which do you think has the best chance of providing or being capable of providing a lifetime worth of video game entertainment to you on its own?"

[Ed Oscuro]

King & Balloon. It's better than Zuma!

[MOSQUITO FIGHTER]

Air Gallet

[JBC]

"of the shmups currently in existence, which do you think has the best chance of providing or being capable of providing a lifetime worth of video game entertainment to you on its own?"

Something that basically never ends. A shooting game in which record hi-scores can indefinitely be reached & set. A game so simplistically designed as to always stay perfect & beautiful in some way. That's why I pick Galaga

However, I've never experienced the level 255 rollover myself so I'm unaware of how glitchy or strange the game can become afterwards. However, if the score can be rolled over 15 times as indicated by the current world record I would imagine it still remains quite playable.

[Bonus!]

Ed Oscuro,

I think you're missing the point. We are debating this topic under the angle of "what game would you get the most fun of in an unspecified but very long amount of time". It's not about an ideal, hypothetical, "dream" game but a very concrete game that exists and which you, presumably, have spent an inordinate amount of time on, relative to your shmup background, already. This topic could as well have started with, "What is your clear favorite shmup?"

[trap15]

It's a bit different than that. One might have a clear number one favorite, but pick something else if they had to play one game only for the rest of their life, because it'd be possible to enjoy it for much longer for various reasons. So it's more a combination of "what is your favorite STG" and "what STG do you think has the most replay value".

[Ed Oscuro]

It's not about an ideal, hypothetical, "dream" game but a very concrete game

I'm sure you're right about the thread at large - at least, mostly. However - I don't want to get unnecessarily confrontational - you've not understood my post. Not that I could blame you for that, but I've said this question is the twin of the hypothetical dream game question, which means that they aren't identical questions; I'm considering two explicit scenarios in my post above. trap15 gets it.

Questions like these should be more fun to deconstruct than to rehash allthetypicalanswers to. Yea, this is "overthinking it," but if it's not important to ask it literally, I wonder why this question gets asked in more or less exactly this fashion, over and over, all across the Internet, in all kinds of communities. I'm not afraid to admit it's a question nobody has to care about. Yet, what social purpose does it have? I'll happily accept that a big part of it is just answering the question, but there's more to it than that. I think it's a conservative, gamers-as-porch-fogeys view pushing the discussion towards the theme of impending loss - loss of companies, tightly-knit fan groups, golden ages.

The most frustrating thing about this question, for me, is that there aren't any self-modifying shmups - none with the kind of features I'd care about (Zanac-alikes don't count). And even then, I like for the process of the development of games to mirror the process of a player reacting to the game. When this is frozen in place, it's lost some part of its charm. So the question, for me, is basically an obscenity, like saying "of all the artists you like, which one would you shoot in the head so you could cherish them forever?" I like to see hope for the future ~

However, I'm just spinning a theory, and not really pinning sinister motives on anybody. I'm hoping to make a statement against the conservative sentiment that products of the past are worth even considering dedicating 100% of your free time to - if I could only play one shmup game ever? I admit the first things that came to mind were Raiden II/DX/RF series, Twin Cobra...I'm not super big on depth of mechanics, ultimately it's got to be about the fun of blowing things up in some way, not a nihlistic tale of the depredations of reality on high energy photons. I'd have to think more carefully than that, but I'd probably treat whatever I chose like a faded picture that I could only take out for special occasions. I'd probably become a lot more productive, but I'd also cease to meaningfully be a games player (and probably 99.99% of people answering this topic, at least the ones who won't die in the first 2 years of enforced videogame monogamy), even limiting the single-game choice to the genre, I'd feel like an incomplete being.

What I'd most like is to see some new products in the space, so that maybe the little hints of obsession with a time-bleached past starts healing, if that's an appropriate way of putting it.
Yes, there's massive amounts of irony going on with me thinking I'm just the one to spout such ideas

[Squire Grooktook]

I think it's a conservative, gamers-as-porch-fogeys view pushing the discussion towards the theme of impending loss - loss of companies, tightly-knit fan groups, golden ages.

I don't really think so. I'm pretty sure I've seen this question asked countless times in other mediums as well.

I think it's just a question of analyzing the merits and values of these games. Which are the deepest? The most replayable? The most challenging? The most fun? It's different from asking "what's your favorite shmups", but not entirely. It's more like a different way of approaching that question.

[endoKarb]

It's just idle, purposeless discussion, with a non-zero chance of producing interesting answers

[spadgy]

I think if I were stranded on a desert island with one shooter cab, it'd have to contain Progear. Desuicided, I presume, or I'd be screwed pretty quick.

I just so want that 2-ALL, and there's so much to learn about manipulating the bullet patterns and scoring. Favourite game ever, so an easy choice for me.

[nosorrow]

Mars Matrix

[rjosal]

I think if I were stranded on a desert island with one shooter cab, it'd have to contain Progear. Desuicided, I presume, or I'd be screwed pretty quick.

I just so want that 2-ALL, and there's so much to learn about manipulating the bullet patterns and scoring. Favourite game ever, so an easy choice for me.

Good call on the suiciding issue... that would be a major bummer.

[spadgy]

I think if I were stranded on a desert island with one shooter cab, it'd have to contain Progear. Desuicided, I presume, or I'd be screwed pretty quick.

I just so want that 2-ALL, and there's so much to learn about manipulating the bullet patterns and scoring. Favourite game ever, so an easy choice for me.

Good call on the suiciding issue... that would be a major bummer.

I don't know why I also put myself on a desert island, as that's not specified in the OP here! But now I'm there, with Progear and nothing else, I'm also worrying about getting sand in the stick mechanism. Moving to this island was the worst decision I ever made.

[dink]

King & Balloon. It's better than Zuma!

great choice! I can play King & Balloon for hours

[Aquas]

The ways to play Batrider are probably endless. It's a wild gamut of risk & reward that fits all player skill levels.