Oh, flamer.CMoon wrote:Honestly, your all being little punks.
"learn 2 play" is pretty gentle - it's like saying "back to the drawing board, chum! ;) ;)" except with fewer words
IE if they are saying that such and such doesn't need a guage because you can look for this sign or hear this beep. Versus: 'learn 2 play'.Zweihander wrote:
But what direction is truly 'right'?
Schrodinger's cat wrote:Yeah, "shmup" really sounds like a term a Jewish grandmother would insult you with.
I'm just saying a timer would have been really nice, seeing as the shield is vaguely reminiscent of the legendary Radiant Sword attack: It's fun, but very easy to get carried away and get yourself killed. Except, unlike that attack in RSG, this is very different; the shield doesn't start to flicker or change colors, or give you any obvious sign of disappearing.Rob wrote:I'm not sure if anyone's mentioned this, but in the end of the shield's lifespan you get a wider intake of pills (correct if I'm wrong). So you should be able to tell it's ending by this alone.
That and it lasts a few seconds. You should probably move away from potential hazards when you feel it might be gone. It's kind of like processing and anticipating a bullet's speed, you really don't need individual bullet gauges ("this bullet will reach you in approximately 3.7 seconds!").
Schrodinger's cat wrote:Yeah, "shmup" really sounds like a term a Jewish grandmother would insult you with.
You got a point there, well, sort of. When I started playing the game I had the shield disappearing all of a sudden several times, leaving me immediately point-blanked by the enemy I sat on top of.Zweihander wrote:the shield doesn't start to flicker or change colors, or give you any obvious sign of disappearing.
Yeah... I'm simply saying, in my eyes, it's a design flaw. Sloppily-done, and definitely something Milestone needs to avoid doing again.Herr Schatten wrote:You got a point there, well, sort of. When I started playing the game I had the shield disappearing all of a sudden several times, leaving me immediately point-blanked by the enemy I sat on top of.Zweihander wrote:the shield doesn't start to flicker or change colors, or give you any obvious sign of disappearing.
However, what I learned from it was the lesson "don't rely on the shield". And that's pretty good advice for most of the game. Unlike the shield that appears when you don't shoot, the shield you get from the orange powerup is not really important for the game unless you want to score big, in which case you quickly get the hang of how to use it correctly anyway.
I'm sorry, but it all boils down to "learn to play" again. You can hardly blame the game for being wrong if you're not able or not willing to play by its rules. The game doesn't want you to abuse the shield to protect yourself, so you better don't use it that way.
Keep trying. Once you figure out how the game works and you start using shot, sword ABS net and shield intuitively Radirgy is motivating and rewarding. Great fun.
Schrodinger's cat wrote:Yeah, "shmup" really sounds like a term a Jewish grandmother would insult you with.
Actually, I think it subtly encourages you to learn to use the shield in a specific manner. It exists to help you boost your multiplier by resting on enemies and reaping the green pills. Combine it with a continual barrage from your ABSNet and you have can gain yourself a substantial boost to the aforementioned multiplier. Having a gauge would have cemented it's purpose as a defensive (or passive-aggressive) item.Zweihander wrote:
Yeah... I'm simply saying, in my eyes, it's a design flaw. Sloppily-done, and definitely something Milestone needs to avoid doing again.
That's exactly what I tried to say.Alske wrote:Actually, I think it subtly encourages you to learn to use the shield in a specific manner.
If you play purely for survival, yes. But if you're playing for score it becomes quite tricky to perfectly time all your attacks to squeeze as many points as possible out of the stages. I admit that it's unlikely that you lose a life when not engaged in boss battle, but scoring well while collecting all the items is quite a challenging task.Alske wrote:If you want to bag on Raji, you should really bag on the fact that the game is, like Chaos Field, nothing but bosses. Everything in between is filler. Pathetically easy filler.
Fair enough. I'm just irritated at the lack of a practice mode right now. I can't reliably get past the 4th level miniboss or the 4th level boss. My high-score table is one long list of 50-55 million scores. Playing through the rest of the game to get there has become a major chore.Herr Schatten wrote: If you play purely for survival, yes. But if you're playing for score it becomes quite tricky to perfectly time all your attacks to squeeze as many points as possible out of the stages. I admit that it's unlikely that you lose a life when not engaged in boss battle, but scoring well while collecting all the items is quite a challenging task.
So was Chaos Field on DC.Alske wrote:Fair enough. I'm just irritated at the lack of a practice mode right now. I can't reliably get past the 4th level miniboss or the 4th level boss. My high-score table is one long list of 50-55 million scores. Playing through the rest of the game to get there has become a major chore.
Love the game design, but it's a pretty spartan port.
Thing is, that practice mode probably existed at some point in time for debugging and testing purposes. For me, not having a practice mode means that I quit playing a game soon after I start to hit a plateau and I feel like I'm wasting my time. It's not a hard feature, but it's such a nice one.Kiken wrote: So was Chaos Field on DC.
MileStone produce their DC releases strictly as "arcade perfect" ports. The point is to offer the NAOMI game at a much cheaper price. As a result, the turn-around for their DC releases is like 3 months after the release of the NAOMI version (they probably spend no more than a month handling the actual port).
While I too, prefer a practice mode, I can get by without it. Homura on PS2 was a very bare-bones port (no practice mode, no extra content outside of an art-gallery) and yet, to some extend, that actually made my playing more intensive (hell, you don't get a practice mode in the arcade). Same with Radirgy. At first, levels 1, 2 and to a lesser extend 3, became tedious (especially when you're not making much progress)... however, now that I'm consistantly getting up to the final boss, I view the entire play-through as practice and refinement.
No surprises there. I only buy PS2 versions of games if no other version exists (or is even announced).Dave_K. wrote:PS2 version looks like utter crap. 15khz does not do this game any justice. And as Arznei mentioned, lots of slowdown.