Mega Drive Beep! 1995 Final Japanese STG Rankings

[Despatche]

Once again, it really sounds as if you're talking about some other game that I've never seen before. The Thunder Force III that I fire up every now and then cannot be described like that at all. And no, I'm not playing any sort of hack or anything like that.

Here are some relatively easy games, at least compared to other things in this genre: Gate of Thunder (at least on Normal), also Lords of Thunder (at least on Normal), Salamander 2, the typical x.x game on Original difficulty, the typical Touhou game on Normal difficulty, the typical Dark Hell Company/Astro Port game on Normal difficulty, MD Same! Same! Same! on Normal difficulty, Blast Wind, Wing Force, and I guess the Raiden Project ports on Normal (Colonel) difficulty? Things like that.

[Steven]

Thunder Force III was the first shooter that I got a 1CC on, and I did it on like my second or third time playing the game last year and I'm pretty sure I did it on the fucking Sega Nomad with its stock screen. Yes, it really is that easy, even on normal. Even my dumb literally entry-level ass who had played like 3 or 4 shooting games before and finished none of them had absolutely no problems with it... on the Nomad's stock screen.

Sever is broken as fuck and almost insta-kills bosses and Hunter does the same for the stages. All you have to do is sit there in the middle of the screen firing the Hunter and not slam into anything and then switch to Sever to insta-destroy the bosses. Repeat a few times and there you go.

[Sengoku Strider]

Did they even get the Jaguar version? I mean no-one had a Jaguar either but it was probably the same price to get Jaguar + Doom as it was to get a 32X + Doom, with the bonus of having the rest of the game and better performance.

That's a good one, I didn't even consider the Jaguar. It was picked up by a Japanese distributor, but sold around 2000 systems at launch, and said distributor dropped it. A second company came in and released games for a little while. Doom was one of those titles. But since the system sold tiny numbers and was largely ignored/unknown, it wouldn't have been much of a consideration for Japanese gamers; who knows if there were even 1000 copies printed.

I have read that the Lynx had a brief moment in Japan though, so it's not like it was entirely out of the cards. The Jag just had zero Japan-oriented software aside from Raiden. (I'm sure Tempest 2000 & Aliens vs. Predator would have had some cross-cultural appeal though).

It's still some serious stockholm syndrome for people to rate such a gimped port so highly - top 20 out of all the MD games, come on!!

Well, only if you have any idea there was material missing to begin with. Gamers in the West have taken to countless Japanese games with elements removed over the years, after all.

Assuming the translation is accurate and that the other reviews have similar statements, that particular review doesn't really come across that way at all.

Not that I think it's a particularly compelling review, but it is what he's saying. Putting it a little more colloquially: "Gorgeous graphics, run of the mill shooter. You already know if you like those or not. Me, I don't think it's interesting enough to put up with the punishing difficulty. Fun mini game though."

Let me underline here that I've never played Eliminate Down myself; only relaying that I've heard this take echoed elsewhere. But I've also heard it praised to the skies. In those Shmup Junkie rankings he had it as an S, said 'it's the Mega Drive shooter that you need to try. Only the music holds it back from an S+.' The review where I first discovered it was quite effusive as well.

First, you have people repeatedly dismissing games that aren't Thunder Force or Musha as relying on flash because Thunder Force and Musha are what converted them first.

I'm not seeing where anybody in this thread has done that though.

Second, for some reason, a lot of Japanese mags will rate a game down solely for difficulty, even if the actual written text is positive. So even though this translation literally only puts down "it's too hard" as a negative, that's more than enough to damn the game to the hells of the 6/6/6/6. And remember, 6~10 is the actual scale and the other numbers are memes.

This isn't the case. Japan is the birthplace of all these tough shooters, after all. Looking at the rest of that review page will show you that 6-10 is definitely not the actual scale:

But that aside, the idea that you can overlook crippling flaws for the sake of presentation is so... anti-game. I can't come up with a better word to describe this, it's just so fundamentally negative against the entire concept of video games. Then I factor in that people either make a bigger deal out of certain gameplay problems than they are, or that people just straight up fabricate flaws that aren't even present in the game, and I can't help but wonder exactly how people even enjoy this hobby we call video games after a certain point. Simply put, the way people talk about the things they enjoy is an unmitigated disaster. They don't understand why they actually enjoy things at all (and sometimes will actually admit it amazingly), they have no problem shitting on the entire existence of others for daring to call them out for this or even for simply enjoying anything they don't personally like, and they endlessly accuse said others of doing that exact thing back to them.

Not to be too pointed here but if you're going to be excessively condescending to everybody, it bears spelling out. You're lashing out with an aggrieved sense of persecution, when it's really that you've got people wheeling around trying to get at just what it is you're saying. Because you've gone on for several posts here without coming out and lodging proper arguments.

There are plenty of variations depending on the logical operators being deployed, but at its heart a valid syllogism generally has to take a form using concrete and supportable facts as its basis.

Thunderforce III's stage layouts are poor because they rely on the player using hunter as a crutch to overcome enemies placed beyond the reach of other weapons, therefore rendering the player passive in the shooting aspect of the game.

...something along those lines. Vaguely alluding to undefined flaws, or committing mind-reading fallacies by assigning sweeping interior motivations to an undefined yet seemingly all-encompassing number of people that you couldn't possibly have evidential basis for are not arguments. Saying "Nobody is self aware of their reasons for enjoying things except me" is just an unsupportable assertion disconnected from reality.

I can tell you that I have no nostalgia for Thunder Force whatsoever, aside from thinking the 2 seconds of TFII shown in the early Genesis TV ads looked kinda cool. But on the whole I was an SNES kid who thought it was just Genesis owners hyping it up because they didn't have anything more interesting. Unremarkable ship design, no clear unique gameplay hook, visuals didn't pop off the magazine page the way Truxton & Gaiares had. It was only decades later through the Sega AGES release of Thunder Force AC on Switch that I discovered just how compelling it was, and now I own all three Mega Drive TF games.

MUSHA I similarly never got to play, though I was more predisposed to viewing favourably because I loved Zanac, Guardian Legend, Blazing Lazers & Space Megaforce during the 8 & 16-bit days. I bought MUSHA Aleste during pandemic lockdowns and...actually it's just kinda okay. I can see why people loved the presentation, but the actual action hasn't clicked with me in the year or two that I've owned it. That said I'm still certainly open to it doing so, though.

[Steven]

I just noticed Kyuukyoku Tiger down there near the bottom. I'm guessing that they never pressed B to go to the options menu to make the game not stupidly difficult. Looking at it from a modern perspective, there really are not many reasons to play MD Kyuukyoku Tiger, seeing as MAME and M2 exist, other than that awesome Mega Drive version of Tsugaru... but if you want the best version of Tsugaru, Uemura-san put it on his Youtube channel: https://youtu.be/bJ1TDeJIrAg

[TransatlanticFoe]

It's a niche interest even here but I think Kyukyoku Tiger MD definitely still has value as essentially a hardcore arrange mode. I don't think ports have to exist as nostalgia or something decent for its time but worthless if an arcade perfect version is available - they can be different enough to stand on their own. I doubt it's a deliberate thing like, say, MD Darius 2 - but it comes out pretty awesome in the end anyway.

[Steven]

I definitely agree if there are significant reasons to choose a certain home version over the arcade version; things like PC Engine Salamander and Mega Drive Zero Wing (yeah, I know, Zero Wing is not a super convincing example, but it's what I can think of right now lol) are just better than their respective arcade versions unless you specifically want the significantly higher difficulty of arcade Zero Wing.

If you want to make arcade Kyuukyoku Tiger harder, it does have both hard and very hard difficulty settings on the DIP switches, but I haven't tried them yet. I think a lot of MD K Tiger's difficulty is from the screen being super tiny (and it even uses the 256 resolution for some reason instead of the 320 resolution!), and you can't really get that from the arcade version. I don't like the super cramped feeling that this port has, and this is also why I don't care for PC Engine K Tiger or any not-arcade version of Tatsujin; after having the full arcade screen size, I don't really enjoy limiting the size of the screen on those games. This does depend on the game; Slap Fight MD is quite comfortable.

MD Same! gets a bit awkward with the super fast enemy planes, but it's mostly pretty decent, and that one is a good example of choosing the MD version over the 1P arcade version; regular humans can actually play the MD version!