Raiden considered a bullet hell?

[Blinge]

No.

And as for the term "manic shooter" what shooters released in the past 15 years wouldn't be considered Manic? other than Twin Tiger Shark or R-type games..

Psikyo awkwardly straddle the line imo, it's why i'm finding Strikers1945 so hard to improve at.

[Obiwanshinobi]

And as for the term "manic shooter" what shooters released in the past 15 years wouldn't be considered Manic?

Shikigami no Shiro 1-2-3? Homura?

[Blinge]

Totally a bullie hell.

For the purpose of my question we should disregard bullet hells.

[Special World]

hydorah

[dpful]

duh, raiden's bullets are too small.

[qmish]

https://seanmalstrom.wordpress.com/2016 ... ew-raiden/

Raiden is THE game that started the bullet-hell shmup phenomena. There are bullets all over the place! The only way to play this game seems to be very patiently. You fly around, and you will die. You need to sit back. I find this way of playing boring and despise Raiden for it. On a console like the Turbografx 16 that is filled with shmups, there are so many other much more fun shmups to play than this. Your ship moves way too slow. The power-ups are OK. You never feel truly powerful in this game. Other than that, it plays like any other shmup.

If you hesitate to try Turbografx 16 because you “do not like shmups”, then you should avoid this game. Today’s shmups are bullet-hell shmups. It is not that you dislike shmups, you dislike bullet-hell. Raiden is the pioneer of bullet-hell. Current shmup games call Raiden ‘classic’ and ‘amazing’, I call it forgettable and the game that destroyed the genre.

Does Raiden deserve the Malstrom Award? No. This game is extremely overrated, hasn’t aged well, and only shmup nerds keep hailing the start of the game series that destroyed the shmup genre. Raiden is very well made, very challenging game, but you can skip it to go play something more fun and interesting.

Hope this gave you some laughs

On a side note, is it me or Psikyo games give you more maneuvre than smth like Raiden IV in dodging "dem fast bullets"?

[wizkid]

I'm under the impression that the player's hitbox has shrunk in all shooting game genres/sub-genres over the past 25 years.

That is definitely not true. The small hitbox/bullet hell design has simply become more popular, is all. Games like Satazius, Ether Vapor, The Tales of Alltynex trilogy, and probably a few others are notable examples of modern well regarded shmups that do not embrace a smaller hitbox.

i'm playing satazius now and the hitbox is tiny(it's basically a very, very thin horizontal line). same thing with raiden 3 and 4, the hitbox is tiny in comparison to earlier games. i've played ether vapor only briefly, but you can turn hitboxes on and it's really small. of course in none of these games it's a tiny dot in the middle of sprite like in danmaku, but hitboxes have really shrunk across all kinds of shmups.

[Sumez]

Hope this gave you some laughs

I can at least agree with the part about Raiden being overrated

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Today’s shmups are bullet-hell shmups. It is not that you dislike shmups, you dislike bullet-hell. Raiden is the pioneer of bullet-hell.

Reviewer obviously has a misunderstanding of the term bullet-hell and how it's used nowadays. Bullet-hell is a relatively modern term that refers to games that generally have very small player hitboxes that use dense patterns of relatively slow bullets requiring small tap dodging adjustments. Modern, non-bullet hell games exist where bullets are less dense but faster, more emphasis is on environmental hazards, etc.

re: the rest of the thread from 2014:

Raiden isn't a bullet-hell game, even in the modern era of the series which have reduced the hitbox (relative to the old games) and changed bombs to immediate safety bombs still are more of a Psikyo manic-shmup kind of feel with fast aimed bullets requiring wide dodges being the main hazard. Slower, dense patterns where much of the screen feels obscured, is more what you'd find in a bullet hell style shmup, not in Raiden games.

Raiden Fighters Jet gives you a fairly small hitbox with the Slave ship for instance along with fairly quick bombs, but it's still a manic, high speed shmup and definitely not bullet hell. Raiden III and IV still retain this kind of shmup feeling.

[Despatche]

Never mind that it's a weird butcher of an equally weird Japanese term, bullet-hell is a very misused term at the end... by the community, of course. The community started this. "Manic", "bullet-hell", these don't really exist. You either have a few bullets or you have a lot.

Psikyo games are mostly bullet-hell, and the bullet counts were cranked up year after year. Raiden games could definitely be said to be "proto" bullet-hell, descending from Same! Same! Same! and the like. The difference between bullet-hell and a "regular" game is that regular games typically use very small amounts of bullets. Some, like Salamander and Same! Same! Same!, use lots of bullets, so they are generally considered "proto" bullet-hell by anyone in Japan, for sure.

[MathU]

Hope this gave you some laughs

I generally appreciate Malstrom for his savage attacks on Nintendo and others' "sick obsession" with 3D and his general respect for older game design, but he's really not the most hardcore player around.

One time I mailed him some thoughts about Super Metroid and it seemed like he'd never replayed the game.

[qmish]

Blind disrespect for 3d is not good either; his opinions are pretty much... Hit or miss. Like sometimes he doesn't have a clue on level design at all etc.

Still, Malstrom - and also guy from conflictingviews.wordpress - while both of them very questionable as players (pushing some agenda about dat adventure feel etc), from time to time they express pretty interesting thoughts which may insult at first, but actually show things from other perspective that sometimes is so needed.

[Jeneki]

https://www.gog.com/game/raiden_v_directors_cut

DESCRIPTION

About: THE ORIGINAL BULLET-HELL IS BACK!

gog says Raiden is bullet-hell. The original one. Case closed everyone.

[Shepardus]

On a side note, is it me or Psikyo games give you more maneuvre than smth like Raiden IV in dodging "dem fast bullets"?

Psikyo games do give you faster movement speeds than any Raiden game other than the Raiden Fighters games, but beyond the early stages their patterns are very punishing of wild, un-deliberate movement, so you have to be very careful about how you move. Both Psikyo and Raiden games are very unforgiving, though for somewhat different reasons.

To me the defining feature of "bullet hell" is the arrangement of bullets into stylized patterns and pattern variations being the primary distinguishing factor between challenges. Bonus points if said challenge often involves dodging "through the patterns," which adds extra importance to the arrangement of the patterns and which tends to encourage small hitboxes. Parodius games at high rank and later loops of Gradius games fill the screen with about as many slow-moving bullets as a light bullet hell, and their player hitboxes aren't that much larger than Dodonpachi Saidaioujou's. But in those games bullet attacks are almost always individual projectiles aimed roughly at the player, or sometimes a small spread of bullets or some horizontal or vertical laser attacks. Any distinction between sections comes from non-"bullet" threats such as environmental hazards and enemy layouts. That doesn't necessarily mean that the bullets don't pose a challenge, but they don't make up the "character" of the stages the way they do in, say, Touhou boss fights. Other games that are described as "bullet hell" or "inspired by bullet hell" but aren't quite traditional shmups, such as Enter the Gungeon, have this same aspect to them - you can see a deliberate attempt in such games to express different attacks as different patterns of abstract bullets such as the generic radially-symmetric spiral. I realize that's incredibly nebulous but so is any other definition of the genre.

Games where the bullets come mainly from suicide bullets (such as Batsugun Special, V-V, Cho Ren Sha 68K) are borderliners to me. I haven't played Raiden all that much but it's borderline at best to me - the bullets are too fast and sparse most of the time to really clump into distinct patterns and during the stages they're mostly aimed attacks where the main threat is that of a bullet coming too fast for you to react from an enemy placed at an unexpected angle. Psikyo's later games such as Strikers 1999 and Dragon Blaze are very much bullet hell; you can see a trend towards dense patterns that linger long enough on the screen for the shapes to visually emerge, even if the bullets are still very fast by most standards.

[mamboFoxtrot]

The Shmupsorites Paradox: How many bullets can you remove from a bullet hell until it is no longer a bullet hell?

Serious answer: Without reading the thread, I'll agree with Shepardus said

[Goompaolo9500]

No.

No.

No.

No.

No.

Nein.

[evil_ash_xero]

Nope.