The Good:• Tyrian 2000 has a TON of content. Secret levels, a massive selection of weapons to play with, a huge number of game modes. It's difficult to actually see everything in the game, there's so much stuff! It's truly a labour of love.
• Weapon and ship customization. Being able to play with a variety of loadouts and unlock new weapons is really fun. There's a lot to experiment with, and a lot of the weapons are pretty viable!
• Graphics and music are really well done. Weapon and enemy sprites, explosions, and so on are all really exciting.
The "Interesting But Not Executed Well" Stuff:• The
twiddle, where you can input buttons do do special command attacks. Neat idea in theory, but I would like special command attacks to require using a special button to trigger them, such as Up Down Up Special sort of thing. The problem with their use being tied to the main firing button is you easily can trigger some of them by attack, such as the repair one that
immediately drains all your shields to refill some armour. And I don't like unintentionally triggering them by accident if it costs me a valuable resource (shields) when it's easy to do so.
Twiddles would have been cooler if a) they used a dedicated special button so you couldn't use them by accident, or b) they didn't drain your shields, and instead worked on a cooldown timer, so accidental activations wouldn't jeopardize you.
The Bad:• The hitbox is approximately the size of a whale. It's absolutely massive, and is bigger than the ship sprite.
• Inertia. Inertia sucks. It especially sucks when taking damage causes you to bounce around at times like you're a pinball, and when your massive hitbox size makes it easy to be bounced around.
• The healthbars suck. Specifically, by using a healthbar system, the designers thought that they needed a massive hitbox to balance the game, so instead of exciting dodges you run into a system where you're more just managing how many hits you take and planning on running through bullets to mitigate damage, rather than focusing on evading them altogether. Healthbars also lead to sloppier design, because designers don't focus on making sure everything is actually dodgeable.
• The darkness gimmick sucks. It's way overused on the hardest difficulty where many levels that normally don't use it now have the darkness gimmick. Those sorts of gimmicks should be used very, very sparingly, far more than Tyrian 2000 chose to.
• I'm not fond of the generator system. I'm not crazy about systems where your main weapon has limited ammo. It's really annoying having to plan around making sure you have enough juice that you don't constantly run out of ammo due to a poor generator. There's other ways to make balanced custom weapon games that are more enjoyable, where all the weapons try to be usable. What generator you have eventually becomes meaningless anyways late game where your generator is strong enough to fuel pretty much any weapon loadout. Ginga Force uses something similar, but it's not as troublesome because enemies constantly seem to give out ammo refills. I see other people have mentioned Ginga Force, and I agree with them that it'd be a good way to get inspiration on a modern example of a game with customizable loadouts.
My recommendations to make something similar to Tyrian while fixing some of what Tyrian breaks:Don't use lifebars. Lives + a shield that can take a fixed # of hits, where each shield segment recharges over time would be better so you can make the hitbox smaller and allow tighter dodging while still having a forgiving shield mechanic in place so you only lose a life if you get hit twice within 15 seconds or however long it takes to recharge. Rolling Gunner Overpower uses this system and it works well. You could even use each shield segment as a charge for a twiddle attack, turning it into a risk vs reward element.
As a side note, I used to love Raptor and Tyrian 2000 as classic MS-DOS games. And then my tastes changed and developed as I played more shmups, particularly arcade shmups. They're decent games, but they're flawed in many ways, and a product mostly of tastes of that era. Something like Major Stryker, while less visually impressive, feels more truly arcadey in terms of how it handles. I never got into Stargunner, mostly cause I felt it had enemy bullet visibility issues (I was always getting hit by grey shrapnel from enemies without really feeling like I saw what hit me).
Currently, I am of the opinion that
SideLine, a little known game from Taiwan, is the best MS-DOS shmup ever made. By an absolutely
massive margin. It blows Raptor as well as Tyrian clean out of the water in terms of how it plays and handles, and could have easily gotten a true arcade release, that's how good it is. Specifically:
• Relatively small hitbox size. The game is still difficult, but extremely fair, and it is exciting to squeeze through tight bullets.
• No inertia. Inertia is one of the biggest complaints I have with Tyrian 2000.
• No lifebars. Attacks all do the same damage to your 3-hit shield, including collisions with objects. This leads to better design, since everything becomes realistically dodgeable instead of designing attacks where you have to soak and manage damage.
• Fun weapon and subweapon variety to use.
• Full 2 player mode. This is very uncommon in an MS-DOS shmup.
• Amazing music and graphics.
As a fan of MS-DOS shmups I'd highly recommend checking it out. My ideal dream game would be something with the sheer content of Tyrian 2000 including a variety of customizable weapon loadouts, with the tighter arcade-style handling of SideLine.