Can’t stand Cave games…

[Sloppy_J]

Evo Moment 37 is a poor analogy, seeing as the problem space that allowed it to emerge - and be considered so impactful - was contingent on two top-tier competitive players clashing in a high-stakes environment, on top of Third Strike's innately exciting mechanics.

One does not simply make a Daigo Moment STG, seeing as arcade superplayers will soon enough figure out how to reproduce whatever its coolest, hardest, or most unlikely moment is with shocking consistency. Rather, the potential for, and density of, such moments are what define 'stylish' in such a setting.

Touhou has an entertainingly convoluted history with collision. The early Windows games have square hitboxes, which obviously don't work very well when you're trying to represent a big circle. EoSD is plagued with unintuitive killers. Instead of revising the implementation, the subsequent games would attempt to mitigate the problem via smaller hitboxes, which would then enable the overwhelmingly visually dense stuff that followed (TH08 being the most exaggerated case). What really doesn't help is the player's indicator being drawn under the bullet layer.

8 is exactly what I was thinking of those big buggers from the last few bosses that appear to have an outer obscurance layer and an inner danger one, but are pretty hit or miss for actually lining up with the collision.

Great shmups for playing with style are Raiden Fighters Jet and Battle Garegga. The balance is just right for players to add their own personality. In Cave shooters I just feel I’m going along for the ride, there’s no room for me to add anything.

Alright then, how about Ibara - does Garegga 2 in all but name also get tarred with the same brush?
Regular label, since Black is about 10x more CAVEy.

Wombo Combo

Naming a popoff after a pizza is the most FGC thing ever

I was gonna use Devil May Cry 3 / Bayonetta as a reference but that Daigo moment has been seen by most people.

When it comes to shmups, what I mean by style is things like picking off enemies with single precision shots, unnecessary grazing, creeping dangerously closer to the top of the screen - basically taking more risks than you need to simply because it takes more skill and looks cool.

Very good call on Ibara by the way. That’s one Cave title I’ll admit that I’m interested in. Damn these prices though

[Some-Mist]

Cave devs invented the bullet hell genre/cancel based scoring and did it best, but i totally get if one simply doesn't appreciate this style. From a development point of view however, you'd be hard pressed to find many faults.

did they actually invent bullet cancel based scoring? genuine question from someone who loves bullet cancel based scoring

edit: when thinking about early bullet cancelling games I thought of great mahou daisakusen but I'm not sure if the cancelled bullets went towards score and the item system definitely seemed prioritized

[XoPachi]

While we're on that topic, wasn't DOJ the first STG to introduce the modern hyper system that's been standard in this subgenre for decades now? Might be mistaken. I just can't really think of anything similar beforehand.
I always loved how much utility that game's hyper gave the player and it could really be pushed to do some absurd chaining strats. When I first found the game, I figured it was just a get out of jail free (not really free) power boost. Then you learn how you're supposed to use it, how to build it, and what it's actually doing under the hood. But it's such a simple concept and merely a button press. And it's not broken either as the game gives you pushback when you punch it. Risk and reward with a lot of applications. Really great system.

God, DOJ is over 20 years now...

Naming a popoff after a pizza is the most FGC thing ever :lol:

Is it really? lmao

[PerishedFraud ឵឵]

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think DDP had a special version with a hyper.

[Jeneki]

did they actually invent bullet cancel based scoring? genuine question from someone who loves bullet cancel based scoring

edit: when thinking about early bullet cancelling games I thought of great mahou daisakusen but I'm not sure if the cancelled bullets went towards score and the item system definitely seemed prioritized

There's always Takumi stuff: Gigawing, Mars Matrix. Personally I prefer this to cave style cancels, as the positioning and timing aspects are more interesting in Takumi games.

[neorichieb1971]

I like the traditional sprite games more than the later crop.

[MaXXX]

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think DDP had a special version with a hyper.

I think DDP Campaign version had a hyper, but only one guy has the board and the ROM hasn't been dumped

[XoPachi]

I like the traditional sprite games more than the later crop.

I like Cave's prerendered look and prefer it over anyone else who does it. They have a nice sheen and crisp, metallic look to things. But I absolutely adore DDP1 and Dangun Feveron's looks. The richness in detail is so much fun to look at and they have a great visual depth to their already massively creative machine design. Those games look amazing.

I also wish Cave did live rock for DDP again. Don't know why they did that once and then never again. Not that the music since has been bad or anything but DDP1 has a great vibe. Stage 3 and 6's music of that game might be my favorite Cave piece.

[Lander]

Yeah, CAVE's prerenders are pretty good. I assume it's down to hand-polish, versus most other sticks-out-like-a-sore-thumb stuff that's just rendered out and used raw.

I was gonna use Devil May Cry 3 / Bayonetta as a reference but that Daigo moment has been seen by most people.

When it comes to shmups, what I mean by style is things like picking off enemies with single precision shots, unnecessary grazing, creeping dangerously closer to the top of the screen - basically taking more risks than you need to simply because it takes more skill and looks cool.

Very good call on Ibara by the way. That’s one Cave title I’ll admit that I’m interested in. Damn these prices though

I can see a comparison with the complex moment-to-moment of character action games. Not CAVE, and it's manifested differently, but I've seen Hellsinker lauded in those terms; mechanically dense, and much on-the-fly decision making buoyed by plentiful tools.

Though are grazing, sniping, and top-screen pointblanking strictly for style in STG? They all (except maybe grazing, depending on the system) contribute to score and / or safety in most cases, and so are intrinsically desirable alongside of the extrinsic motivation of looking and feeling cool.
I've certainly used them in my Mushi runs, for instance, and that one's long on CAVE tradition.

If anything, I'd put the big difference down to the reason the player is given to do such things. In my experience, CAVE tend to favor explicit narrow-deep scoring mechanics (ex. DDP canceling, Ketsui pointblanking, ESPrade chip conversion, etc.) that take a single idea and permutate it, where the Garegga (and Raiden - likewise, nice recommend) approach is a wider arrangement of point-giving levers and pulleys that encourage frequent tricks and variations in playstyle to actuate.
So one is about eking out all the ways to do one thing really well, where the other is about figuring out which of the mutually-exclusive choices available will yield the best result for a given run.

Ibara's gaiden-sequel Pink Sweets is also worth mentioning, being another Yagawa game made after he got headhunted by CAVE. Though it breaks from the Garegga model and does its own weird thing - seems a touch controversial on account of being really hard and kinda busted.

Is it really? lmao

Yep! Courtesy of Round Table Pizza:

The Official Pie of Fighting Games

[DMC]

A few design choices, including two loops, pennalizing the use of bombs, creating somewhat opaque and exponential scoring systems I think prevented me from getting deep into a Cave game, when I got into scoring around 2002-2005.

Two loops:
By the late 90s to early 00s, developers like Raizing, Seibu, Treasure and Takumi succeeded in making challenging STGs with interesting scoring systems without the need for multiple loops. By comparison, most games by Cave at that time used multiple loops, a feature I always felt was a bit archaic. Some reasons: Multiple loops make arcade games unneccessarily long, once you're good enough for the second loop the first one becomes more of a nuisance (although Cave suffers much less from this than, say, early Psikyo), it's a bit anticlimatic to clear the first loop only to be thrown to the next one, and I can't help feeling it's a bit cheap ("Oh, you cleared all our stages?! ...Eh, play them again"). It's like going to a concert and hearing the band play a shorter set list twice.

Pennalizing the use of bombs:
Maybe it was an exaggeration, but around 2005 it felt like you should not use bombs at all in Cave games. I recall in Progear you would not even enter the second loop if you bombed a few times. I recall JAPJAC stating that he used to play on some cabinet that had disconnected the bomb button on Ketsui, because it was so bad bombing (says more about JAPJAC than Ketsui maybe, since Moglar encouraged bombing). In Dodonpachi I got the sense that bombing was really bad as well, but did not know exactly how it worked (my next point). By comparison, Raizing let you use bombs very creatively around this time. For instance, you could bomb bridges, houses, castles, bosses and flamingoes for scoring in Battle Garegga, you could bomb race rivals in Kingdom Grandprix. Using bombs in Raizing games were fun, but using bombs in Cave games was associated with failure-- a shame considering all those cool bomb animations and sound effects.

opaque and exponential scoring systems
By comparison Raizing, Treasure, and Psikyo scoring systems felt accessible. Even if many of these games had opaque rank systems and such, scoring was mostly explicit and simple.Taking Soukyugurentai as an example, you don't need to play much at all to see that targeting six enemies give you a x4 multiplier applied on those enemies, so finishing off a boss would give you 800k instead of 200k if you succesfully targeted all the points. Using a bomb instead would apply a 1/4 multiplier resulting in 50 K. It is very clear how much you can gain or lose. The same goes for Ikaruga, Radiant Silvergun, or any Psikyo game. By comparison, I had no clue what using a bomb in Dodonpachi would do to my score.

I also think a more petty reason could be why some people did not get into Cave at this time. The exponential scoring systems made it feel like there were oceans between beginners and experienced players, even around 2005. In addition, Cave boards here were more competitive. I think some people found it more exciting to get into the other games because they felt unexplored, whereas Cave games felt exhausted and required more effort from the player to become competetive. This combined with multiple loops, opaque scoring systems that pennalized bomb usage could give the impression that the games aren't really that accessible.

[el_rika]

Most of the Cave later shmups don't even have 2 loops (Daifukk BL, Espgal2, Mushi, Futari (BL), Ibara). I mean, i think only a couple have (Daifukk?).

But you got an interesting point DMC about the games being so excessively played, and the gap between superayers and your average player being so immense, that it all becomes intimidating.
In my opinion however, this speaks volumes about the immense depth and polish the scoring systems have in these games. I mean, you are literally only limited by your own skills, as you can push the games to some heart stopping extremes (...the actual sprites even dissapear in some cases for Christ sake)

[cfx]

When it comes to shmups, what I mean by style is things like picking off enemies with single precision shots, unnecessary grazing, creeping dangerously closer to the top of the screen - basically taking more risks than you need to simply because it takes more skill and looks cool.

I don't get this at all. If it doesn't contribute anything to the game in terms of score or some other advantage, why bother with it?

Risk vs. reward is a great thing in games that have it. Risk for no reason is just dumb.

Looks cool? All I can say to that is lol.

[Sloppy_J]

When it comes to shmups, what I mean by style is things like picking off enemies with single precision shots, unnecessary grazing, creeping dangerously closer to the top of the screen - basically taking more risks than you need to simply because it takes more skill and looks cool.

I don't get this at all. If it doesn't contribute anything to the game in terms of score or some other advantage, why bother with it?

Risk vs. reward is a great thing in games that have it. Risk for no reason is just dumb.

Looks cool? All I can say to that is lol.

It’s entirely subjective of course, and your viewpoint is valid.

For me though, there has to be some artistry in the highest levels of anything - that human element. If we just follow the rules and play it safe all the time, we’re no different from AI bots. Perhaps I’m being a bit too romantic by making these comparisons, but the likes of Maradona, Michael Jordan, Roger Federer, Jaco Pastorius, etc. - the true greats, they never stuck to the logical by numbers approach. They did things with style which is what made them greats. I think shmups is an area within video games where such heights can be reached, if the game in question allows for it.

For me there’s nothing cooler than people doing things the hard way and making it look easy.

[Cell247]

Evo Moment 37 is a poor analogy, seeing as the problem space that allowed it to emerge - and be considered so impactful - was contingent on two top-tier competitive players clashing in a high-stakes environment, on top of Third Strike's innately exciting mechanics.

One does not simply make a Daigo Moment STG, seeing as arcade superplayers will soon enough figure out how to reproduce whatever its coolest, hardest, or most unlikely moment is with shocking consistency. Rather, the potential for, and density of, such moments are what define 'stylish' in such a setting.

Touhou has an entertainingly convoluted history with collision. The early Windows games have square hitboxes, which obviously don't work very well when you're trying to represent a big circle. EoSD is plagued with unintuitive killers. Instead of revising the implementation, the subsequent games would attempt to mitigate the problem via smaller hitboxes, which would then enable the overwhelmingly visually dense stuff that followed (TH08 being the most exaggerated case). What really doesn't help is the player's indicator being drawn under the bullet layer.

8 is exactly what I was thinking of those big buggers from the last few bosses that appear to have an outer obscurance layer and an inner danger one, but are pretty hit or miss for actually lining up with the collision.

Great shmups for playing with style are Raiden Fighters Jet and Battle Garegga. The balance is just right for players to add their own personality. In Cave shooters I just feel I’m going along for the ride, there’s no room for me to add anything.

Alright then, how about Ibara - does Garegga 2 in all but name also get tarred with the same brush?
Regular label, since Black is about 10x more CAVEy.

Wombo Combo

Naming a popoff after a pizza is the most FGC thing ever

This. Dodonpachi and sequels are there own thing. And I can see not liking them. But Ibara and the relation to Garrega and the game play is fun. Progear and Esprade are so fun also. Each games mechanic is why I think Cave games rank so high. They do so much with three buttons.