Well rapidfire is unlocked by a cheatcode/gadget on the ports, and it's still something that's not in the game itself. There's a huge difference between playing with cheats/tool-assist and being a cheater (nobody is accusing anyone of cheating here) and there's nothing wrong with calling it a cheat, same as playing with broken extra characters like Aine, Gain, Birthday, etc. Playing with rapidfire is never cheating, just a way of making survival and scoring easier. Since it does does make the game easier than playing with extra lives or bombs it is kind of an easy mode in this sense. It always puzzled me why we never heard of japanese non-rapidfire
Gaiden replays (supposedly there are), even Plasmo doesn't know about them. Scoring with rapidfire is hard, scoring without it is even harder so yeah I don't buy this "more intersting" thing, especially that I usually hear this from people who haven't really played this game without rapid and are too used of cutting the bosses like a hot knife through butter to consider anything else. Attract mode doesn't always show exactly what's in the game (like in
Darius II) and as much as the devs were aware of how their games were played at the arcade they didn't put rapidfire on default on purpose, instead they added a punishment especially made for it. The punishment ended up not being enough (they should have done like in
Gun Frontier) not necessarily because they intended it this way, but probably because they didn't have enough time for balancing (something the devs have admitted several times). Same happened for bosses patterns that you don't get to see, even without rapid, and I have a very hard time thinking they designed their bosses for 30hz pointblanking.
Then of course it's fine for people to play the game however they want, and compete how they want, different straws for different folks. For me as it was my first shmup and that at the time I wasn't aware most shmup players used tools like this I had a hard time coping with it. Now I accept the fact that this is standard for shmuppers, especially japanese ones. It's your choice, play as you want.
@ Rastan 78 : The only western person I know off that dug into Great Thing's milk is a french guy named Doudinou. If you go that way I'd be pretty interested to see what you can do ! Tried the rapidfire milk but this is pretty hard since if you kill the drills when they're close to the boss you avoid the suicide bullets but this will mean... no points. Some serious dodging skill needed for this !
@ MathU : how much do you think one can get out of Titanic Lance without rapid ?
but otherwise the only way to destroy drills is with a bomb (and not enough to be worth it).
Actually you
can earn points by bombing the drills. I did some experiment with this after some wasted credits on both PS4 and Saturn, I'll do a recording of it. The timing is very strict and you don't make a lot with it though (390 000 - 300 000 for the wasted bomb = 90 000 at most), and of course it's utterly pointless if you die even once. But it is enough to make up a bit for the wasted lives (my PB on Sat is only 100 000 less than the one on the cozmic even though I lost two lives). I'll do a recording of it so you can see.
@ BKR : I hope you at least get to reconsider this a tiny bit after watching la soirée presqu'IRL
. And congrats again on that W clear