Bullet Audissey

[Ixmucane2]

Bullet Audissey is an interesting Flash shmup, a bullet hell boss rush game. It has good and bad sides:

• Keyboard controls!
• No inertia!!
• A very small hitbox!!!
• Nice music.
• Crude but serviceable graphics (including a dot to mark the player hitbox).
• No powerups, ever.
• A boring front-only peashooter, with just enough scattering to waste shots.
• No bombs.
• A huge number of lives, disguised as a moderate number of lives with multiple hit points.
• But you'll need many lives because dodging everything is, to put it mildly, improbable.
• But not in all levels: some have easy to find and very persistent safe spots, or opportunities to win with little exposure to actually dangerous enemy fire,
• Bullet patterns range from boring easy (a few) to stupidly unfair (too many), with a lot of excessive randomness and many instances of inappropriately large and close bullets that form walls without the gaps that are needed to dodge them.
• Almost always excessive bullet speed, in at least one case too fast to follow a moving gap.
• The mechanics of grazing enemy bullets to collect ammo and awarding extra bullets and extra damage after shooting continuously for a while are nice on paper, but they force an unnatural pattern of alternatively loading to full capacity and discharging everything.
• Not charging and not shooting for a long time after being hit, and not charging while shooting, tend to be annoying features: you end up "chaining" being hit, with zero progress between hits.
• The second button slows down you, the enemies and all bullets, often leaving you in the same trouble as not slowing down, without the precision dodging allowed by player-only slowdown (with already slow bullets) or the easy roundabout escapes allowed by enemy-only slowdown (with normally fast bullets).
• And slowdown is unequal between you and enemy bullets, sometimes causing frustrating hits because you suddenly become faster than leading bullets.
• An interesting take on grinding: you can play and replay levels in any order getting experience every time, but you only have the lives left from your best runs (effectively motivating players to practice each level enough to no-miss it and "recover" all lives lost in previous runs) and experience rewards are moderate (extra lives or hit points, better charging, more slowdown).

On the whole, I find Bullet Audissey novel (at least for a browser game) and worth playing, but bordering on frustrating; the shoddy design of some levels is inexcusable.

[moozooh]

Oh yeah, I tried that one a week ago or so. Found it stupidly easy; I never had to use the slowdown even once, and beat most levels on one life. The trick is grazing everything as much as you can and going full-charge on vital points. By the end of the game I needed less than a minute to finish each stage.

It's another example of game devs using existing ideas and popular trends without any real clue as to how to tie them together. We have six major ideas/elements.
1. Bullet hell mechanics at the core, because that's how shmups are supposed to be like in this day and age.
2. Grazing, because uhh... Touhou does it and it's popular? Most likely. Here's it's not used to score; instead it's used to kill bosses before they become utterly boring.
3. Subpar dubstep as the soundtrack, because it's also popular and there don't seem to be other shmups using it. The music itself is rather badly produced, but that still probably is the only idea the devs have pioneered.
4. Synchronizing attacks to music. It seems like a fresh idea, but in fact it's been done many times; most prominently in Zillion Beatz. It's rather undeveloped here, too, because way too much emphasis is put on beat rather than emotion, pace, etc. Lost opportunity.
5. RPG elements, that's classic. I guess the idea is "scrubs can't play a shmup if it doesn't have a shop or experience counter of some sort". It's so superficial it's aggravating.
6. Path branching. The way it's done gives player the illusion of choice (A→B→C or A→C→B changes very little), as opposed to actual choice (Darius games; either A→B or A→C). Why is this choice needed at all is an open question, as most will still play stages in the order of difficulty increase, because that's by far the most gratifying (and also logical). If you're designing the game in a way that lets the player skip stages, you may as well not include them from the start.

In other words, this game falls short of pretty much everything it aims for. Making controls reasonably tight is a good foundation, though, most fail already at that point.

[Ixmucane2]

I think the pseudo-branching is a genuine choice: with 2 to 4 accessible levels you haven't beaten yet, and usually more that you should retry, there is a wide range of different challenges.
They tend to be cheap and frustrating challenges, but it's still better than having only one level to retry incessantly: at the end of the game you'll have beaten each level in any case, but what matters is the individual run, not the nonexistent storyline.
Moreover, the order of difficulty increase is quite subjective (I suspect I'm missing some tricks) and allowing some flexibility is a rather honest form of adaptive difficulty.

[Rex Cavalier]

Boring and euroshmuppy