Tell us the daft crap non shmuppers say about the genre

[neorichieb1971]

Have you ever used fire and ice in a cave game?

If you're still going by the artfag idea, then Stage 3 in mushi and Stage 2 in futari, respectively. Unless you're talking about shot types or something, its been done in Dimahoo, not a good gimmick though imo

Have you ever navigated a maze in a cave game?

Isn't dodging a complex bullet pattern a maze in and of itself right there?

No, its all lollies.

Oh boy here we go again.png

My favourite Cave game is ESP ra.de. I like the neo futuristic setting. It didn't have much in the way of cosmic bullet patterns.

Also, by putting mazes of bullets on the screen it almost restricts the capibilities of your ship/character to forward firing. Cave have never done (from the ones i've seen) a unique power up system. I'm not saying the games are bad, they are the best. But doing something a little different from changing the theme and not a lot else is only going to go so far. Maybe what i'm talking about just isn't "CAVE".

[monkeyman]

As for the continues argument, I figure endless continues but you restart the level (with full power ups). That way no one gets bored of starting from scratch and people will still need to develop some skills to get to the end (even if they don't 1cc).

Trouble is that most other genres are designed to use continues so if you offer someone unlimited continues (with no checkpoint system) they will take them and feel they beat the game in an hour. - and by 'someone' i mean someone not used to the genre.

And as for that reviewer who thinks it's dumb that people shouldn't have to artificially make a game difficult - he's probably the type who claims that if you don't play Halo on legendary, you're not playing it right, or you have to get 100% stars in Mario Galaxy etc. Trying to 'truely' beat a game is not a concept restricted to shmups.

[captpain]

My favourite Cave game is ESP ra.de. I like the neo futuristic setting. It didn't have much in the way of cosmic bullet patterns.

what

[-Bridget-]

"Japanese (or sometimes just Asians in general) = godly at every video game" and "you must be Japanese in order to play so-and-so" are two of my berserk buttons.

I'm Filipino (and therefore, by many stretches of the word, Asian), and those kind of statements offend me. I don't care if it's a positive stereotype; it's still a stereotype. I dislike stereotypes in general. That and "positive" stereotypes force the victim group to live up to unrealistic expectations.

Aagh. Ooh, I HATE that one. I'd have to agree with you here; there are few comments that could possibly piss me off more than that one.

It doesnt have anything to do with shmups in my case; it's the fighting games that I hear this about. It's just one of the (many) reasons why I dont get along with the "pro" community for that genre, note the quotes. This does not, of course, adequately explain how exactly they think the Japanese players come up with these combos.

I play ALOT of fighting games, the 2D ones mostly. And braggy though it'll sound, I am very good. I dont exactly lose often. PARTICULARLY at Guilty Gear, and I'm nearing that point with BlazBlue as well. But alot of people I meet NEVER believe I could have any skill, until I fight them, because A: I'm not Japanese, and B: I dont watch match videos and copy the Japanese players. I actually, you know, think for myself and come up with all of my combos myself. Gasp! What a concept! According to the so-called pros, this is completely impossible. They seem to think that the very laws of physics prevent anyone from ever doing that.

The worst was when I was at... oh I forget, some convention, probably ACen, and after spending some time playing against random people in GG (using Bridget), someone comes up to me and says:

"Wow, that's incredible! You play just like So-and-so from Japan! He's the top Bridget player!"

Me: "Uhh... who? I dunno who that is."

Him: "Come on, man, I *know* you've seen tons of his matches, for you to play like that."

Me: "Er. No. I dont really watch match videos, like, at all. I tend not to care."

Him: "Dude, that's not cool. You've learned from the guy, so give credit where credit is due"

Me: "I badly need more caffiene here, I think".


That conversation has, more or less, happened numerous times. Irritates the hell out of me every single time. Just.... aaaagh. Yeah, it's even more annoying than the "Touhou is harder than THIS!!!" comments on Cave videos (but only just barely. Those are the SECOND most annoying type of comment, to me).

[TrevHead (TVR)]

i think if shmups goback to using checkpoints or other methods to make sure gamers dont credit feed and have a challenge is really good for casual shmuppers but unlimited continues and no check points can be usefull for those of us who know how to play shmups with many shmuppers not too keen on check point verts

[EPS21]

As for the continues argument, I figure endless continues but you restart the level (with full power ups). That way no one gets bored of starting from scratch and people will still need to develop some skills to get to the end (even if they don't 1cc).

Trouble is that most other genres are designed to use continues so if you offer someone unlimited continues (with no checkpoint system) they will take them and feel they beat the game in an hour. - and by 'someone' i mean someone not used to the genre.

And as for that reviewer who thinks it's dumb that people shouldn't have to artificially make a game difficult - he's probably the type who claims that if you don't play Halo on legendary, you're not playing it right, or you have to get 100% stars in Mario Galaxy etc. Trying to 'truely' beat a game is not a concept restricted to shmups.

I think the continue system ZUN put in after MOF works really well for non-arcade shmups, and should be implemented in all the ports as well. If you lose all your lives, your only choice when it comes to continuing is to restart the stage you died in with default lives (3), at a default power level as well. It's punishing enough that to me I'd rather restart the whole game than be gimped with hardly any extends and low power level, and if you feel like drilling the stage into your head, its like a practice mode you can do right then and there.

All these other systems of starting with one credit, then unlocking more over time, only helps for the first couple of plays, but it isn't really teaching the credit-feeder to mend his ways, rather that some persistence will get to how he wants to play (with unlimited continues).

If they can work in an extra arrange mode for all the ports, this should be trivial to implement then.

[BIL]

And as for that reviewer who thinks it's dumb that people shouldn't have to artificially make a game difficult - he's probably the type who claims that if you don't play Halo on legendary, you're not playing it right, or you have to get 100% stars in Mario Galaxy etc. Trying to 'truely' beat a game is not a concept restricted to shmups.

His particular claim (declining continues = "artificially increasing difficulty") is backwards. Using them is artificially decreasing it. "Game Over" is as unambiguous as failure gets in gaming.

[Taylor]

I think additional credits should be tied to achievements, particularly achievements like killing bosses and hitting score targets (not "collect a power up"), hopefully encouraging a casual player to give themselves more obtainable goals and taking the emphasis off 'finishing' it.

[yyr]

As for the continues argument, I figure endless continues but you restart the level (with full power ups). That way no one gets bored of starting from scratch and people will still need to develop some skills to get to the end (even if they don't 1cc).

But then it's just like hitting the rewind button in Prince of Persia, essentially.

Personally I think the only good answer to this problem is to give the player a certain number of lives and ZERO continues. Or, a set number of continues that never changes. That way, the player has to learn the game in order to finish it, and not just get game over repeatedly or play poorly for a few hours.

Although tying additional credits to Achievements is a really interesting idea.

I have a shmup concept on my drawing board that you guys will see in due time.

[lmagus]

DOJBLEX anyone?

one continue every 30 minutes played.

[AraraSPAMWitch]

I play ALOT of fighting games, the 2D ones mostly. And braggy though it'll sound, I am very good. I dont exactly lose often. PARTICULARLY at Guilty Gear, and I'm nearing that point with BlazBlue as well. But alot of people I meet NEVER believe I could have any skill, until I fight them, because A: I'm not Japanese, and B: I dont watch match videos and copy the Japanese players. I actually, you know, think for myself and come up with all of my combos myself. Gasp! What a concept! According to the so-called pros, this is completely impossible. They seem to think that the very laws of physics prevent anyone from ever doing that.

dear bridget,

you sound like a tool

There's nothing wrong with using videos as a tool. All of the top players I know watched videos, copied a lot of techniques, and then used that knowledge to build even stronger ideas. I am relatively sure that even Japanese players go through a similar process. If every player in Japan came up with combos by sitting in his room alone, it would be an amazing coincidence that, once a new combo appears in Japan, everyone and their mother can be seen doing it within a week. One of the fastest ways to get better is to look at what other players are doing and to take it. If you're as good as you say you are, you'll be able to use whatever you've learned to make it better. Otherwise you're handicapping yourself, as people will always be coming up with new and improved shit. But good job thinking for yourself!

[TrevHead (TVR)]

dear bridget,
you sound like a tool

I like how you wrote that starting off polite then quickly insult him after, made me laugh although i do understand the point hes making even though im not a FTG nut. Would he be a even better Guilty Gear player if he watched the pros? probably. But that doesnt mean he has to as many ppl get a kick from working out a game for themselves. Just like shmup superplays.

EDIT: as for using continues, why dont devs just use the same system as the 8/ 16bit era shmups like gynoug which gave limited continues with less continues given the harder the difficulty. That was back in the shmups hayday so many ppl who played shmups as a kid, they might return to the fold if shmups used the old system. In a way its this old system that has helped reinforced gamers to credit feed. I remember the handfull of shmups i did play as a kid that i would play a shmup (or any arcade game) untill i used all my continues and it was game over, if ild of completed the game using the stock of continues i had that game was beaten.

[Observer]

I like Crimzon Clover's approach: Want to continue? Buy it with your skill! You have to purchase them with your item points (so you also have to score well and keep trying new tricks) and each credit is progressively more expensive than the previous.

And once you use one, bam, it's gone forever so you have to keep buying those. Will probably be the most used feature during the Unlimited Mode.

[Acid King]

I like Crimzon Clover's approach: Want to continue? Buy it with your skill! You have to purchase them with your item points (so you also have to score well and keep trying new tricks) and each credit is progressively more expensive than the previous.

And once you use one, bam, it's gone forever so you have to keep buying those. Will probably be the most used feature during the Unlimited Mode.

Mars Matrix has a good system like that as well, where you have to play and earn points for the shop in order to purchase more continues and free play. Higher scores mean shit gets unlocked faster.

[Matsunaga]

I always get asked why I have a sideways TV, why did I buy a japanese PS2, what are all those arcade sticks for, why do I still have a Saturn hooked up, why would I pay so much for some game no one ever heard of, and on and on.. Sure, it would be nice if everyone got the point of the shmup, but it's not going to happen.

[lmagus]

I always get asked why I have a sideways TV, why did I buy a japanese PS2, what are all those arcade sticks for, why do I still have a Saturn hooked up, why would I pay so much for some game no one ever heard of, and on and on.. Sure, it would be nice if everyone got the point of the shmup, but it's not going to happen.

Why do I have a sideways TV, why did I buy a japanese Xbox, what is my arcade stick for if I don't play street fighter, why do I have a Saturn hooked up, why would I pay so much...

Same shit over here

[-Bridget-]

I play ALOT of fighting games, the 2D ones mostly. And braggy though it'll sound, I am very good. I dont exactly lose often. PARTICULARLY at Guilty Gear, and I'm nearing that point with BlazBlue as well. But alot of people I meet NEVER believe I could have any skill, until I fight them, because A: I'm not Japanese, and B: I dont watch match videos and copy the Japanese players. I actually, you know, think for myself and come up with all of my combos myself. Gasp! What a concept! According to the so-called pros, this is completely impossible. They seem to think that the very laws of physics prevent anyone from ever doing that.

dear bridget,

you sound like a tool

There's nothing wrong with using videos as a tool. All of the top players I know watched videos, copied a lot of techniques, and then used that knowledge to build even stronger ideas. I am relatively sure that even Japanese players go through a similar process. If every player in Japan came up with combos by sitting in his room alone, it would be an amazing coincidence that, once a new combo appears in Japan, everyone and their mother can be seen doing it within a week. One of the fastest ways to get better is to look at what other players are doing and to take it. If you're as good as you say you are, you'll be able to use whatever you've learned to make it better. Otherwise you're handicapping yourself, as people will always be coming up with new and improved shit. But good job thinking for yourself!

Er. Yes. I didnt say there was anything WRONG with it, with people using videos. What bothers me is that most of that sort of player believes it to be the ONLY way, and then cannot understand what happened when they lose. I've had more than a few of them jump up and scream at me, because they lost, when *I* was just enjoying a casual match for fun. That I *dont* use videos, ever, always seems unbelievable to them (and I *hate* it when someone calls me a liar. If anyone wants to instantly piss me off, that's the way to do it). And frankly, I get so sick of being insulted by jerks because I dont do it the "usual" way. And then again, after all that trash talk they tend to do, they shriek if they lose. There's something wrong with that.

Anyway, it's just like with shmups. I'm not as good at those as I am at fighters, so while I *prefer* learning entirely on my own, for the challenge it provides, I'll sometimes resort to videos depending on the game. There's nothing WRONG with either way of doing it. If someone wants to ONLY mimic other players? *I* might not like it, but if that's what they wanna do, hey, that's great, SO LONG AS THEYRE NOT BEING RUDE AND INSULTING TO OTHERS AS A RESULT. I'll get to that in a moment.

And yeah, I've heard the "but then if you're good like you say you could use videos to make yourself even better", and to be frank, I dont give a rat's ass. There's a couple of reasons for this. 1, a big part of the reason I dont use them to begin with is that I need enough of a challenge to hold my attention, AND I just like the satisfaction of doing it myself. And 2, I'm the sort where if someone pushes me too much to do something, I'll instantly do the opposite, and do it as much as possible, because I get just a BIT totally irritated about it. And I've had people from that community honking at me and insulting me for AWHILE over this, so I sure as bloody hell aint using the bloody videos NOW. A personality flaw, perhaps, but I at least admit to it.

No, my overall problem is just with that community itself. There's exceptions but alot of them are NOT friendly people. I, for instance, would *never* call someone a "scrub" or a "noob" just because they're new to a game and I'm not. A:, that's bloody stupid, and B:, it's incredibly rude and insulting to the other player. There's no call for that sort of crap. But alot of the pro community seems to not understand this. I've known MULTIPLE people to get put off of fighters entirely just due to things like that from players that defeat them, early on in the learning process. THAT is my main problem with that community.


Anyway, enough ranting from me. I now return you to your regularly scheduled topic.

[captpain]

How about you just laugh when you kick ass and don't worry about what the losers think, yeah?

[Taylor]

To be fair though, Bridget is not a character where you just have to discover a few combos to be competitive. He's about movement tricks and using the yo-yo for pressure, mix-ups and okizeme and not all of this is intuitive (214K~FD for example). If I saw anyone playing him really well I would assume they watched at least a few videos. Though I wouldn't assume they took their entire playstyle from it, one of the great things about GGXXAC is you can pretty much develop your own style (unlike the compromise that is BlazBlue).

[sunburstbasser]

When I was in college, my professor bought his kids a Wii. He asked what game to get, and I said to download R-Type and once the kids beat that, they get another game.

Hearing that, one of the other students asked "Whats R-Type?" And I responded that its a shmup. Once I saw the look on his face, I said shoot-em-up instead. "Oh, like Halo?" No, like Gradius, moving the ship around and avoiding bullets. "Oh, a third-person shooter!"

I eventually resorted to calling R-Type a more modern Space Invaders because he did not understand the concept at all.

One girl asked if I kill people in the games I play and I told her "I suppose you could argue that there are people inside those little scout ships, but mostly its aliens and giant robots."

I did once have a few people play DoDonPachi via MAME on my laptop, and the reactions were just priceless. Yes, it takes ONE bullet to kill you!

[gs68]

I need a new faceplate for my FSTE.

"Hey Ray, you play Street Fighter IV, right?"
"No, I don't play fighters."

[Acid King]

Friend: "So when are you going to buy a new game?"
Me: "I just bought ESPGaluda 2"
Friend: "So when are you going to buy a game other people play?"

[BulletMagnet]

When I was in college, my professor bought his kids a Wii. He asked what game to get, and I said to download R-Type and once the kids beat that, they get another game.

Now that's just cruel.

[Obiwanshinobi]

When I was in college, my professor bought his kids a Wii. He asked what game to get, and I said to download R-Type and once the kids beat that, they get another game.

Now that's just cruel.

"No R-Type III until you beat Super R-Type."

[lgb]

why don't we just not bother with continues, platine dispositif does that! usually.

[kengou]

one of the great things about GGXXAC is you can pretty much develop your own style (unlike the compromise that is BlazBlue).

Having played a lot with -Bridget- in BlazBlue, I can tell you he absolutely destroys me with completely on-the-fly made up combos all the time. I actually spent a lot of time watching videos to learn combos, and he just hops on and makes up these ridiculous Carl combos or Noel mixups that I can't defend while I'm desperately trying to land all the standard Tager atomic collider combos I copy. BlazBlue has PLENTY of room for innovation and personal playstyles.

[MathU]

Cave/Treasure make the only good shumps

Man this shit gets annoying.

[gs68]

Cave/Treasure/ZUN make the only good shumps

[AraraSPAMWitch]

Tager

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, I think I found the problem

[Taylor]

one of the great things about GGXXAC is you can pretty much develop your own style (unlike the compromise that is BlazBlue).

Having played a lot with -Bridget- in BlazBlue, I can tell you he absolutely destroys me with completely on-the-fly made up combos all the time. I actually spent a lot of time watching videos to learn combos, and he just hops on and makes up these ridiculous Carl combos or Noel mixups that I can't defend while I'm desperately trying to land all the standard Tager atomic collider combos I copy. BlazBlue has PLENTY of room for innovation and personal playstyles.

I wasn't talking about combos, but you seem to have cut that part out of my post.