NTSC-J wrote:
I've always thought that list was really off, but to be fair it's pretty hard to make an accurate ranking like that.
We could try to do our own version, but who here has beaten most of those (maybe Rando?) I think I've beaten about 25% of the list, but it might be a fun project to try to beat them all. Anyone feel like starting at the bottom and going all the way through?
I had a student who recently told me that I was mentioned in this thread. I guess that the student must lurk here, and that she is stalking me on the interwebs, since she knows my nickname. I am quite late, but I am happy that NTSC-J mentioned me (thanks, J!). Jokes aside:
I haven't played shmups in ages, but I have played quite a few of the titles in the list (and beaten some).
I must say that I am wondering if the community behind the ranking follows some specific guidelines for voting (e.g. they need to evaluate average difficulty of patterns, how hard is to recover from a death, and so on). If you have a little bit of experience in teaching/evaluation assessments, you know very well what I mean, I guess.
Said this, and after looking at the list, I need to mention which games' rankings leave me baffled.
1. Omega Fighter (2-all): I see that it is considered a "problem child" (google translation of the page). I remember that this game becomes irrationally hard in the second part of the second loop. I recall people 1-CC it in a finite amount of time, but I recall periodically returning to this game during my teens. In other words, it took me YEARS to reach a a 1-CC. I still believe that all the games within this range (i.e. the 40's) are harder, but I remember that the last few stages are insanely hard (i.e. the ones inside the mother-ship), since bullets are extremely fast/abundant/hard to handle.
2. Parodius DA! and Detana!, as others have mentioned, have second loops that are designed to get the player off the machine. I never went beyond 2-2 on both, and I recall people spending years trying to 2-all them, without succeeding.
3. Game Tengoku: beyond 2-3, I simply found the game too fast (bullets, enemy movement), and most enemies seem to have too many hit-points. It was released in 1995, but it suffered from the problem of its predecessors mentioned above.
4. Twin Eagle: i wish that we could find its development history. I was able ONCE to reach the carrier stage, but for the rest I would simply get slaughtered at any of the previous air chase zones. This game suffers from bad design to pathological levels.
5. Valtric: I recall that I tried to learn how to play this game in '91 or '92, i.e. 5-6 after its release (when I was 10-11), and I could simply not go beyond the second-third stages. Memories are hazy, but I remember it as a very unforgiving game.
So, I would say that the "old school" top-tiers have been voted because of their design faults making them hard to play.
I'd like to split the post for ease of readability, so I will post more soon.
Chomsky, Buckminster Fuller, Yunus and Glass would have played Battle Garegga, for sure.