BulletMagnet wrote:Randorama wrote:i go outside screaming and hunting virgin girls...
Bah, you don't need to use a bad scoring run as an excuse to do that!
Hunting virgin girls
?
I would venture to say that the GW games' situation is different from BD, scoring-wise; in most games as you get farther in your opportunities for scoring get better, since there are more enemies to shoot, bullets to reflect, items to grab, etc. Obviously the programmers (aside from upping the challenge) wanted to reward those players who can get far enough into the game with more bounteous bragging rights, so I wouldn't really call that an aberration or anything like that, since it's more or less a gradual increase.
The overall design is basically based on an idea that the more you bet, the more you get.What makes the game delicate to handle is the idea of one energy bar for the special attack and the main shot: usually, the NIF (Nothing Is Fundamental) shmups lack a strategic element of weapon distribution: you usually get one or two gimmicks, infinite recharges, and all you have to do is know when the use them. DOJ or Border Down require a lot of strategy, the former because it forces you to chain, trigger hyper, chain with hyper and refill bar for another hyper, etc. In both cases , scoring means that you have to handle a lot of aspects, which is not the easiest of tasks...
In BD and the like, though, a huge opportunity or two for scoring is just sort of plotzed in the middle, and if you don't take advantage of it then your chance to recoup that lost score more or less doesn't exist for the rest of the run. I don't mind if others like to "seize the moment" in their games, it's just not to my own tastes.
Well, i like the way it's done in Border Down, but for instance i don't like DOJ (in which a small mistake means fucking up a whole run, for the above reasons) or Bakraid (same discourse as DOj but with bombs, like explained in the ST). In this regard, Shikigami no Shiro shmups or Ikaruga are truly excellent, as you really decide what you can't do and what you can, and you always have room for improvements. Beside that, this kind of games are usually easier to be played "Plug and Play": restarting when you're at stage 4, after 20 minutes of playing, is not too funny, if you live a busy life
"The only desire the Culture could not satisfy from within itself was one common to both the descendants of its original human stock and the machines [...]: the urge not to feel useless."
I.M. Banks, "Consider Phlebas" (1988: 43).
