WelshMegalodon wrote:I just find it extremely bizarre that you're so hell-bent
I'm not "hell-bent". This isn't going to stop WWIII or save starving kids in Africa. You have this weird idea that I'm trying to grab people by the throat and demand they cough up games for me or something. All I've said is that I think a bunch of common shmup mechanics are dumb and outdated, that a healthbar is probably the most realistic compromise I'm going to see, and I'm wondering if anyone knows of some decent shmups that feature it. If you know some, great. If you don't, oh well.
WelshMegalodon wrote:on discovering a shooter that rejects "archaic" concepts like lives when it's one of the genres where it actually MAKES SENSE TO HAVE THEM.
::shrug:: I disagree. What you're saying here is exactly the same as all the people who said that platformers had to have lives and score and couldn't exist without them. And then games like Limbo and Braid came out. For me, the question of "could a shmup exist that is still fun without using these concepts?" was already answered before I started this thread, and the answer is "yes". The question I'm actually investigating is "
does such a shmup exist?", but I don't know the answer to that yet (and I'm not super interested in spending a bunch of money to find out, at least not today).
WelshMegalodon wrote:And WHY THE HELL do you not consider Desert Strike a shooter?
Honestly I don't really have a strong opinion either way, but I thought most people didn't consider games like that to be "shmups". Desert Strike is very open and freeform. Your movement is basically arbitrary and you can go any direction or backwards or just stop and pick your nose, you can wander off into a corner and sit there for a year and nobody bothers you. You can attack the enemy positions at whatever speed you want, from whatever direction, in whatever order. There's a fullscreen computer thing with a map and mission objectives and shit, and it pauses the game when you use it. A classical shmup tunnels the player to a large degree, both physically and in the sense of timing. Whereas Desert Strike kinda.... doesn't. I feel like it has more in common with Link to the Past than Raiden. I mean I guess if you're considering "shmup" to be any game with a lot of shooting then sure, but then I'm not sure where the boundary is. Is Contra a shmup? Are lightgun games like Terminator shmups? Is Halo a shmup? If the general community calls Desert Strike a shmup then I guess that's the way it is, but I'll be confused about why until someone can explain what the difference is.
Shepardus wrote:you should be prepared to invest a bit more than it takes to download a rom pack and shuffle it through an emulator.
As I've said multiple times before, I'm perfectly fine investing
time into finding a game, I'm not so interested in investing
money. The games that I like are clearly not what everyone else finds enjoyable. People don't really "get" what I'm looking for and so end up suggesting stuff that isn't really what I'm into. And that's totally fine- it's not someone's fault that they can't offer good examples from a class of games they never play and I've never blamed anyone for that, but it also means that I'm not about to start dropping $15 and $20 on random xbox/steam games or screw around trying to buy an obscure Japanese doujin game just in the desperate hopes that
this one will finally be the magic one that's different from all the rest.
I appreciate what help I'm getting and I do look into every suggestion made (although admittedly it's often several days later). I check out two or three youtube videos for each title to get a sense of how the game plays and I look up threads that talk about the game. It's just that usually it always ends up the same way. Sure, I could spend over a grand buying copies of all these games and the hardware to play them on just to know for sure, but the point is I don't
have that kind of money to burn. I'm not artificially limiting myself to 8/16-bit titles because I'm too lazy to run an installer.exe or because of some weirdo philosophy like everyone here seems to think, I'm doing it because I don't have a pile of cash sitting on top of a pile of consoles and PCs. I have mouths that need feeding, cars that need fixing, and bills that need paying, and it's tough for me to justify blowing even $15 on some game that from my research appears to have a 2% chance of being what I'm looking for. When
do I see a game that seems to offer a fair chance at being interesting I put it on my shortlist to investigate further.
CyberAngel wrote:It's okay to want to avoid or minimize mechanics you don't feel comfortable with, but don't discount them completely as a principle.
I'm
not discounting them on principle, I explicitly said that in my post talking about Braid and Limbo. It's perfectly possible to have setups where things like one-hit-kills and reset checkpoints actually work. My problem is that I feel like in 99% of shmups they're just an annoyance and an arbitrary punishment.
CyberAngel wrote:when you try to speak about archaisms you just end up showing more and more that you don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about.
Sure, whatever. You can say what you want, and I fully admit this is all personal opinion, but as I see it this "going back to lives" and "healthbars are outdated" thing is just an example of how the shmup community is largely comprised of people who glorify nintendohard shit and ultimately refuse attempts at letting go of the past and letting the genre expand into any other direction. I completely don't agree that things like lives are "keeping what works", but rather a case of "keeping what's
familiar" and rejecting anything that strays too far from what they're used to. I also don't agree that shmups have really evolved in any meaningful way (past graphics). Everything is just "more better": more enemies, more bullets, more bomb types, more score. People took the state of the art from the 80s and slowly cranked it up to 11. Of all the games people have shown me over my threads, precious few of them have ever introduced anything that's actually new or innovative.
I mean, if people love oldskool and nintendohard then that's fine for them, to each their own. Even platformers have IWBTG. But it's awfully frustrating that people who want anything else from a shmup are left out in the cold, or told "you don't know what you're talking about" because they don't buy into the circlejerk.
WelshMegalodon wrote:Maybe what you're actually wanting is a different GENRE OF GAME
I've said this a few times before too, but I do play many other types of games from many other types of genres. I just don't bother to ask questions or talk about them here because this is specifically a shmup site. I'm not here because I'm trying to find games to play, I'm here because I'm trying to find
shmups to play. And despite what you seem to think I'm not trying to find some one single perfect shump as the only game I'll play forevermore either.
WelshMegalodon wrote:He doesn't want to actually learn to get better at an instrument or explore the mechanics of improving play or compete in contests, he just wants to enjoy the feeling of holding it and pressing keys and blowing into it to produce sound.
He couldn't care less about whether his steps are right or in tune to the rhythm or a partner, he just likes the idea of moving around to music and the general atmosphere.
WelshMegalodon wrote:Guy will never play Descent because RetroArch's DOSBox core is shit and he can't be arsed to figure out how to set up standalone DOSBox or PCem
::sigh:: Seriously dude, just do yourself a favor and get fucked already, really. FYI I have in fact played Descent (1 and 2, still have the CDs too), and as I've said
multiple times in my other threads and now this one (threads which you were in), I don't limit myself to only playing EVERY game under RetroArch, that's only console shmups and it's exclusively due to issues of cost. I also don't exclusively or primarily use Linux either despite your implication. There's no point in continuing to even reply to you when you're clearly making shit up and just want to piss on me at this point.
MathU wrote:Just because something features digital graphics and is interactive does not make it a game.
This is true. But I still stand by my statement that not all games are a necessarily a test or need to be a test, and that I can still enjoy playing games which aren't.
MathU wrote:There's plenty of skill to hone and test even in abstract puzzle games.
... I mean.... maybe? I guess it depends quite a lot on where you make the distinction between skill and talent. For me, talent is something you're born with- you have whatever you got and that's the end of the story. On the other hand, skill is something you learn which you can usually get better at with practice. I think of puzzle games as being more a case of talent and if you're smart enough to figure stuff out. You can practice headshots in a FPS or jumping over gaps quickly in a platformer, but I dunno how exactly you'd practice being smarter. Action-puzzlers don't really count because the skill you're honing is for the action part, not the puzzle part. At least, that's how I see it.
BIL wrote:All I am saying is, you are in a stark minority here, and there's not a lot we can do about it.
Oh believe me, I know. -_-
That became very obvious a couple posts into the first thread I made here months ago.