Rain stages?

[qmish]

Today i was running with umbrella under heavy rain, and a random thought striked me: were there any rainy stages in STGs? If yes, how they did it without damage to visibility?

[Kollision]

Robo Aleste stage 2
Last Resort stage 3
Söldner-X Himmelstürmer stage 4

they just made it so you could see what was going on
if rain impairs visibility why have it?

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Most shmups with rain or snow do it in such a way that it doesn't really obscure the action as far as I know. It's there to add to the effect but doesn't interfere with the action. You'd probably be more interesting in knowing about shmups that have stages where there's a specific visibility gimmick at work, or enemies that have attacks that interfere with visibility.

In Imperishable Night for instance, the st2 boss darkens the screen so you can only see a short distance around you, making it harder to see what bullets are about to hit you.

Or there's Strania, where the Side Vower route's first boss has an attack that messes with your visibility by making the screen really fuzzy and difficult to see things if it hits you with it.

What's also cool there's also games like where some enemies have attacks that do no damage, but specifically interfere with your ability to control your ship (Giga Wing st4 boss's claw grabs you and pulls you in, it's escapable, Under Defeat st4 has large turrets that fire lightning that temporarily slows down movement, st4 boss has a spotlight that can blind you by turning the entire screen white). It'd be neat to see a list of games that have attacks that do non-standard effects (but that's probably a separate topic...?).

[Kiken]

Robo Aleste stage 2
Last Resort stage 3
Söldner-X Himmelstürmer stage 4

they just made it so you could see what was going on
if rain impairs visibility why have it?

For Last Resort, the rain is on stage 2. Stage 3 takes place inside a cavern.

To add to what BareKnuckleRoo mentioned, Axelay's stage 4 boss fires a lightning weapon that causes your ship's weapons to malfunction by randomly cycling through all active weapons.

[KAI]

Akai Katana Shin Stage 5

[Jeneki]

My Last Resort MVS cart is super picky about how you line it up. If it's not juuuust right, the ship sprite glitches out and disappears during the rain. Hard to get worse visibility than that

[Stevens]

Valkyrius's stage two is in the rain. The upcoming Xydonia appears to have a rain stage as well.

[MathU]

Parodius gives you an umbrella.

[Shepardus]

Parodius gives you an umbrella.

More specifically, the second half of stage 9 in Parodius Da! and the opening section of the castle stage in Sexy Parodius (the one with Medusa as the boss).

Might be worth looking at games with actively snowing stages too - there's a lot of shmups with snowy stages, and I'm sure at least a couple have snow still falling in the background.

[Kollision]

Robo Aleste stage 2
Last Resort stage 3
Söldner-X Himmelstürmer stage 4

they just made it so you could see what was going on
if rain impairs visibility why have it?

For Last Resort, the rain is on stage 2. Stage 3 takes place inside a cavern.

yeah it's stage 2 indeed, tks for the correction

[Jeneki]

Might be worth looking at games with actively snowing stages too - there's a lot of shmups with snowy stages, and I'm sure at least a couple have snow still falling in the background.

Deathsmiles 2 has snow falling, or at least blurry blobs falling.

[wgogh]

A rain of bullets is good enough? jk

But really, I am sure that Spriggan mark 2 had a raining stage

[copy-paster]

Might be worth looking at games with actively snowing stages too - there's a lot of shmups with snowy stages, and I'm sure at least a couple have snow still falling in the background.

Deathsmiles 2 has snow falling, or at least blurry blobs falling.

Gradius Gaiden stage 1 has snow falling and avalanche.

[Sumez]

Doesn't one of the final stages of G-Darius feature a heavy rainstorm too, if I'm not mistaken?

[BIL]

You'd probably be more interesting in knowing about shmups that have stages where there's a specific visibility gimmick at work, or enemies that have attacks that interfere with visibility.

I love this sort of stuff - both the concept of sensory interference, and the balancing required to create a compelling handicap without causing abject annoyance. Stage 3 of Senjou no Okami II MD's Original mode has a good one, with its deliberately obscuring snowstorm effect; gives zako bullets and grenades a small but deadly edge. Youtube compression seems to turn it into godawful pixel porridge, unfortunately!

A Dong of Ice and Fire:

Spoiler

[MintyTheCat]

Today i was running with umbrella under heavy rain, and a random thought striked me: were there any rainy stages in STGs? If yes, how they did it without damage to visibility?

If the platform has graphic planes then one plane would be assigned to the rain graphics. If it is all handled with sprites alone and there is no hardware concept of a plane then it would simply be overlaid on top of the sprites before it. when the screen is refreshed and done often enough to make believable animation it will look as if it is raining. Also, there may be support for sprite priorities on the platform itself so essentially the rain can be placed "on top" of certain sprites.
Colour-cycling is also an option for rain like effects.

Last-Resort, stage 2 is quite well done and I remember being impressed when I first saw it in 1992

[ciox]

Amazed we got this far without CC stage 4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4pFC0d5pPE
A weirder example is the first stage in Psy-R, some starry streaks that look almost like space rain fill the level https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ujy7KoNpSA&t=3m40s

Neither of the two seem to have problems with visibility, so I guess it's as simple as keeping everything rendered under the bullets as usual.

[Sumez]

Amazed we got this far without CC stage 4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4pFC0d5pPE

No one was ever actually able to see the background on that stage.

[Shepardus]

Amazed we got this far without CC stage 4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4pFC0d5pPE

No one was ever actually able to see the background on that stage.

You could say that every stage in that game is raining stars.

Crimzon Clover manages to retain visibility by not only rendering the stars underneath all the action, but also using more faded colors for them compared to the bullets. There aren't a whole lot of yellow bullets in the game, and the ones that are there are a lot brighter and more saturated than the stars in the background. All the bullets are multicolored too, so it's never just yellow, it's a white center with a glowing yellow outline or something like that.

[BulletMagnet]

IIRC one of the stages in Jamestown (the second, maybe?) has a rainy section.

[Kiken]

Adding to the snowfall list:
Akai Katana stage 3
Mushihimesama Futari stage 2 (Reko even exclaims as she begins the stage: "So this is snow? It's the first time I've seen it!")

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Bridges are also a way some games interfere with visibility. Solid State Survivor's last stage which has a section where you are flying down a tunnel and girders pass overhead repeatedly that obscure your vision a bit. And then there's Armed Police Batrider has that one highway stage where your vision's blocked as you enter and exit a tunnel, and you can get killed here by the enemies that are firing while you vision's obscured.

You've also got some things like Crimzon Clover and Kaikan stage 5 where something will fly over the screen as you transition between segments, but those don't really matter they're totally safe (no bullets or enemies) and are just for visual effect.

Not shmuppy, but rain is cool so: https://m.imgur.com/t/rain/9hmZG

[professor ganson]

I love this sort of stuff - both the concept of sensory interference, and the balancing required to create a compelling handicap without causing abject annoyance.

Yes! Noise affects performance in any more demanding visual task, so it's interesting to think about how video games can increase challenge by deliberately introducing noise into the info channel. And you're certainly right to highlight the trade-off of frustration, but I'm guessing that's a more general point about raising game difficulty and isn't specific to the point about noise.

[MX7]

Obviously not a STG but the disco stage in Bare Knuckle 3 did this masterfully, with panic inducing yet consistently timed stobe bursts and a sudden dense FM wall that's totally contrapuntal to the rest of thw soundtrack.

My all time favourite visual obsfucation is probably the Under Defeat stage 4 boss, with involves the player in the diegesis in a way surprising for an arcade shooting game.

[BIL]

And you're certainly right to highlight the trade-off of frustration, but I'm guessing that's a more general point about raising game difficulty and isn't specific to the point about noise.

Exactly - just good design sense, really. Moderation. The ideal is a thin layer of complication over a solid base, both elements interacting to produce a compelling challenge - outright frustration shouldn't be the aim. I also like it when there's some way to actively counter the hazard - as a small example, the gravity mines in Scrambled Valkyrie (SFC)'s first stage. Your ship's maximum speed makes pixel-precise dodging harder, but it's ideal for tearing free of their grip.

I always thought of Battle Garegga's rampant debris and gunmetal flak in these terms. The bullets aren't as murderously fast as Raiden's nor as overwhelmingly dense as DDP's (edit: unless you really piss off the rank), so it made sense to me that they get a slight leg up on the player via other means. I do get why Garegga irritates some, regardless, but then I dig similarly Marmite, knowingly user-unfriendly stuff like Castlevania's ruthlessly unyielding jump arc.

My all time favourite visual obsfucation is probably the Under Defeat stage 4 boss, with involves the player in the diegesis in a way surprising for an arcade shooting game.

^ as hilarious as I find Rob's pro review commentary on it ("If I wanted a light shined in mah face, I'd go see tha fuckin dentist!"), I think it's brilliant on both mechanical and conceptual levels too. The risk of being blinded and killed in a moment of weakness gives the sense of a knock-down drag-out fight; sand in the eyes and a knife in the neck. Really gritty and tactile, especially in the more binary world of conventional STGs where contact typically equals death.

Steel Empire (MD)'s stage 2 midboss does something kind of similar - not on the sensory level, but with the concept of a secondary "precursor" attack. One that's technically harmless on its own, but can fatally set you up if not properly counteracted. It's a monster tank fought in darkness, with a search beam that pursues you vertically up and down. Whenever you cross the beam, viciously fast rockets are unleashed - quick enough to connect at screen's length if you don't keep moving. Since the tank is also filling the air with drifting flak, you can't just passively wait for the beam to approach; you need to proactively cut through it when there's an opening on the other side. I love multitasking, multi-segment bosses and auxiliary, unconventional attack mechanics, so this fight earns a fond place in my heart.

The earlier half of the stage actually does involve a bit of visual interference, via a spotlight effect - everything beyond your craft is in darkness - but it's very mild compared to BKIII's disco, or Super Shinobi's similar Round 2 boss (another discotheque, incidentally!).

[Axelay]

Stage two of R - type final has rain.
Depending on the red or blue switch you shoot on the stage two boss. It sets up the weather for the next playthrough it's pretty cool.

The rain hits your ship (no damage)
The switch can make the stage have a heatwave, Flood
And others I can't remember

[BIL]

Oh, W-Ring (PCE) has a pretty neat rainy stage, its third. Doesn't affect visibility, but it looks rad. Zako bob up from floating islands and cascade down flooded plateaus. The alternate "EX" version has a notably cool visual tweak to go with the upped difficulty, becoming a surreal ocean of blood.

[wgogh]

^
I love PCE graphics. Lords of Thunder, Valis, Spriggan.. I dont know what it is, but somehow the games on that system seem to know what makes a 16-bit graphic great.

[BIL]

Same. The PCE/CD was in a good spot technologically, I think. Lots of colourful, sharply-detailed STGs with minimal reliance on cool-at-the-time hardware trickery. Economically stylish works like Lords of Thunder, Nexzr and Soldier Blade won't age.

[professor ganson]

Totally agree about PCE. It's the system whose games I get nostalgic for the most, followed by Gameboy Advance. And it's the graphics more than anything else that drive the nostalgia. Just the right amount of detail, leaving the brain to fill in the rest.