I wish modern bullet hell had more focused weapon spreads.

[Squire Grooktook]

I"m exaggerating, I think it's okay but I do think DDP is a massive improvement and crystallization of the formula.

[Zen]

True, but there's more to the make up and structure of a good game then simply what "feels" good on a base level. You also have to build a game around that base with levels, scoring mechanics, bosses, etc. Things which work on a moment to moment basis can still crash and burn on other fronts.

Yes there is but the feel is the core of the game. Without it being right, the game is a dud. You can balance the scoring and generally tweak the shit out of it. If it feels wrong fuhgeddaboudit.
Its like writing a bad piece of music. You can re-mix it all you want but it will still be a bad tune. This is where CAVE is king. Feel.
So I would disagree with your rebuttal re. fighting games. You can tweak and balance an awkward playing fighting up down, left and right. Its going to make little difference. You can take a CAPCOM game, that might have poor balance and work on it to match its fluid feel and you have a winner.

Also Donpachi sucked.

[Squire Grooktook]

Yes there is but the feel is the core of the game.

Oh I'm not disagreeing that the core is the most important thing to get down, no argument there. I'm just saying that it takes some polishing to get that pearl to shine. Learning the ropes of crafting that central foundation can take time and/or experience as well.

[Shepardus]

I'm going to disagree with the "if you re-emphasize shooting then something's gonna have to give." I don't see why that has to be the case at all. Yes, there will be different aspects of the game vying for player attention, but depending on how simple or complex the game is, that may not actually lessen the impact of one aspect. For example, if I have a rhythm game where you just press A, well, that's probably quite boring. But if I make it so you also need to press B, that is maybe detracting from the amount of time I press A, but it actually is giving *meaning* to pressing A (and also B).

In that case the thing that's giving way is the simplicity. One-button endless runners are a thing and they're actually quite popular (or at least they used to be; I'm not sure if they still are), and that's not in spite of being controlled with only one button. One Finger Death Punch is a two-button game which isn't quite one-button, but part of the appeal is its simplicity. If you added movement and other attack buttons like other beat-em-ups or rhythm games, sure there'd be more complexity you can explore but it wouldn't be a pure win-win addition (even ignoring the issue of controlling the game on smartphones).

I'm sure plenty would gladly welcome more unique and experimental shooting mechanics, but if you do that you'll have to, at least to some extent, give up the audience craving simple and familiar shooting action. Considering that the continued love for shmups is in some ways a reaction to the growing bloat of "modern" games, I suspect that audience is a significant part of the total addressable shmup audience. Despite liking to see crazy and unique mechanics, I for one am admittedly more likely to try a shmup if it's familiar enough that I already know how to control it, and can just jump right in and start shooting and dodging. That's what led me to try as many shmups as I did and fall in love with the genre in the first place.

You could try to make the unfamiliar and complex parts of the shooting "optional" in ways such as making it applicable only to scoring, but if you've ever gotten frustrated with Ikaruga's chaining while trying to 1CC the game, you'll know that "optional" doesn't necessarily mean that people who don't enjoy it will ignore it as they probably should. It's also a great design burden to make the stages playable without engaging in the unique mechanics, while also making the mechanics feel meaningful to the game. Eschatos's shield mechanic is arguably the most unique thing about it, but it's also the thing I dislike most about it, and even though the game is technically playable without the shield (at least Easy and Normal, I don't remember if that's true for Hard), I'd rather just play a more "ordinary" game that's designed around that ordinariness. Hellsinker has a character that behaves very much like a generic shmup spread shot ship, but it still feels weird because the levels are designed for more experimental shot designs.

Why aren't there shmups with more differentiated, less mindless shooting? Shmups these days are mostly made by shmup fans; if the demand was there they would have made such games.

Yes there is but the feel is the core of the game. Without it being right, the game is a dud. You can balance the scoring and generally tweak the shit out of it. If it feels wrong fuhgeddaboudit.

What exactly do you mean by "feel"? As I see it, that's such a vague term that pretty much anything could be said to contribute to the "feel" of a game, from the graphics to the music to the ship mechanics to the level design, so it's a non-statement to say that it's important. And by any interpretation I can think of, the difference between a game that "feels" wrong and one that feels right is usually a lot of tweaking to things like movement speeds, telegraphing actions, damage/hp values, etc. Not necessarily a rebuttal, I just don't understand what "feel" means to you.

[Zen]

What exactly do you mean by "feel"? As I see it, that's such a vague term that pretty much anything could be said to contribute to the "feel" of a game, from the graphics to the music to the ship mechanics to the level design, so it's a non-statement to say that it's important. And by any interpretation I can think of, the difference between a game that "feels" wrong and one that feels right is usually a lot of tweaking to things like movement speeds, telegraphing actions, damage/hp values, etc. Not necessarily a rebuttal, I just don't understand what "feel" means to you.

In the most simple of terms, I refer to how it feels to move and shoot within the game.
To re-quote Xyga;

One big strenght of many of the Cave shooters is that they give you a natural response feeling from your hands back to your brain, the ship and the trigger are frigging extensions of your body, and although they often push this a bit too far with the weaponry you have to admit it is kind of heady and arcade~ey.

Certainly "feel" can be seen as a vague term when applied to a game. Just like the words "good" or "bad" but I wouldn't go so far as to say "it's a non-statement". If someone asked you your opinion of a new shmup and asked you how it felt, I think you would know exactly what they meant.
Likewise, if you asked someone new to shmups to play DoDonPachi followed by the aforementioned Sine Mora and then asked them "which felt better to play", I would strongly bet on DoDonPachi. Wouldn't you?

[Jeneki]

I file that under "good controls". No need to get philosophical about it.

[Sumez]

I'm not really a big fan of Donpachi, but I definitely wouldn't say it sucked. And I don't really think it tried to do anything that didn't work, in fact if anything I think its biggest flaw is that it was very traditional (lynch me if you will, but my first thought back when I got it was that it felt a lot like Raiden, which I never liked)

Dodonpachi, on the other hand, tried something new, and playing that game is immediate bliss

As for fighting games, I was thinking about that... But honestly, anyone claiming that Street Fighter II "failed" doing something new, obviously couldn't have been around when it came out
Sure, it has flaws and balance issues, but they mean nothing in the broader perspective.

[Shepardus]

If someone asked you your opinion of a new shmup and asked you how it felt, I think you would know exactly what they meant.
Likewise, if you asked someone new to shmups to play DoDonPachi followed by the aforementioned Sine Mora and then asked them "which felt better to play", I would strongly bet on DoDonPachi. Wouldn't you?

I would probably lean towards Dodonpachi myself (can't say for sure without having played Sine Mora; I just discovered it has a demo on Steam so I'm downloading that now), but I wouldn't be surprised to hear people say they like how Sine Mora feels because the graphics draw them into the action and the world's atmosphere.

[Sumez]

No one thinks Sine Mora feels good to play. In a strange turn of events leading us back to the actual topic of this thread, the pea shooter alone is a big detriment to this.

[ciox]

Option 2 is risky. You're swimming in uncharted waters. No one's going to help you but you. You might fail. You might make ten crappy games before you figure out how to make your game work. But that's art. If you really want to be creative, that's the struggle you have to face. It's the same struggle all the aspiring creators before you faced.

I guess this is going pretty heavily off-topic (but I think we are already?), but while I agree about your two points, there's one thing I find interesting. How often have we seen games with unique and original mechanics that "didn't get it right" the first time, but managed to perfect it in later incarnations?
Curiously, most examples I can think of with memorable games that did something different, even going back to the earliest arcade games, those games typically got it right the first time. Conversely, original games that just didn't work, would usually be cursed to repeat the same mistakes or at least fail to really correct their issues in eventual sequels or revisions.

It does happen, in fact I can give you an example where the same company refined their formula, then regressed to the earlier primitivism, Psyvariar from Medium Unit to Revision to 2.
They had several months to refine Medium Unit into Revision, making it into a better game in every respect, then when the time to develop a real sequel came, development was rushed and the team was pruned, with the new sequel showing sparse level design and less balanced mechanics reminiscent of the first entry.

I think a "Revision" for 2 was planned (ENHANCE: http://i.imgur.com/EA9BbrE.png) but it never came to be. So yeah, it's possible to go both forward and backward in innovation.

[Squire Grooktook]

I'm not really a big fan of Donpachi, but I definitely wouldn't say it sucked. And I don't really think it tried to do anything that didn't work, in fact if anything I think its biggest flaw is that it was very traditional (lynch me if you will, but my first thought back when I got it was that it felt a lot like Raiden, which I never liked)

Dodonpachi, on the other hand, tried something new, and playing that game is immediate bliss

As for fighting games, I was thinking about that... But honestly, anyone claiming that Street Fighter II "failed" doing something new, obviously couldn't have been around when it came out
Sure, it has flaws and balance issues, but they mean nothing in the broader perspective.

Still, that's the thing: maybe it's not an outright bad game, but many times early installments or previous works by the developer serve as stepping stones to crystalizing the formula.

Donpachi might not be a bad game, but IMO it's a rough, unpolished, and wonky, but completely necessary stepping stone to reaching the Dodonpachi formula.

It's the same for fighting games. I wouldn't call many of them bad (except Marvel Vs Capcom 1*, which precedes what is probably one of my top 5 favorite games of all time, and it's shit), but it took additional experience and time to realize them to their full potential.

*The Marvel series has a rich history which I'm quite well versed in. It's actually pretty interesting to see how the (at the time, very experimental) mechanics and ideas in the series developed when you trace a line from X-Men Children of The Atom and Street Fighter Alpha (XCOTA used a modified version of the Alpha engine) to mvc2 and beyond.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

No one thinks Sine Mora feels good to play. In a strange turn of events leading us back to the actual topic of this thread, the pea shooter alone is a big detriment to this.

Noone who's played a competently designed shmup anyways. You will of course get reviewers who focus entirely on the graphics and miss the numerous control issues such as low peashootery autofire rate, non-capped rapid fire rate, the inability to customize the control scheme, no slowdown/speed adjust button for digital movement. The real tragedy of Sine Mora is that this was all inexcusable, sloppy design for a modern shmup and was completely avoidable. If at least the controls had been polished up we'd have had at least a decent, good-looking shmup, even if the scoring system and other various mechanics were questionable.

Fuck you DonPachi is great. If you think it sucks, you really don't know what a sucky shooter is.

Ditto, Donpachi is a solid game that's really enjoyable. My only major gripe with it is the really low music quality which isn't a massive detriment to the game.

The first Touhou shooter (Story of Eastern Wonderland) was pretty terrible if you ask me

Nah, it wasn't a bad game. Rough around the edges perhaps, and it did have button tapping as a mechanic to increase shot damage (which wasn't necessary, the default autofire rate isn't too bad) but it was pretty fun I think nevertheless. My only really major issue with it is how Lunatic makes every enemy fire revenge bullets at you, which I think is a really lazy way of making a harder difficulty mode.

[Sumez]

Oh my god... those Sine More epileptic bullets....

Who on earth figured that was a good idea?

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Oh my god... those Sine More epileptic bullets....

Who on earth figured that was a good idea?

The same people who thought ripping off the primary abilities in Espgaluda and Giga Wing while stripping them of any scoring meaningfulness was a good idea. Honestly I don't mind enemies that are designed to specifically explode into bullets when shot as long as they're used sparingly, but making everything in Insane mode spit those out when they're shot is just stupid and lazy design.

[Special World]

I don't enjoy Sine Mora really at all, but I think if it had one unforgivable sin, it was that the game had a number of different special abilities and if you wanted to get a high score you were encouraged to use absolutely zero of them.