Observer wrote:And to the guy who said he wants robots with a light shining when they power up, go check Heaven Variant's february video. You are going to love it. Even Japan loved it underneath that layer of moe loli pantsu. I grew up with big badass robots beating the shit out of each other using all sorts of heavy lead and that's what I always look for. (Translation: I absolutely agree with you, man, long live fucking badass robots!)
>Let's rock!
The office is now covered in semen, I'm planning to buy it day 1, and I'm going to make a reaction video to that trailer.
Why is it called the Vic Viper/Warp Rattler? Because the Options trail behind it in a serpent-like fashion, and the iconic front fins are designed to invoke the image of a snake's fangs.
The problem shooter games have in the modern climate is a complex one.
1) They're pure gameplay
This relegates them to a league known as 'casual games' which is a big genre in it's own right (lots of puzzle games, online games etc.) These are games which you're meant to be able to pick up and play for a bit, then put down.
The majority of mainstream audiences today care more about story and plot than they do gameplay, they want games where you're always seeing something new (content rich) even if you're not actually experiencing anything new in terms of the gameplay. Most games are just movies where you get to play little bits, won't challenge you, and you're never 'stuck' on the same section for more than a few minutes. Shooters deliver very little in terms of content, and expect you to repeat and master the same sections.
Going back to casual games, there is a general expectation that games in the genre are easy, just to pass the time with, a shooter loses it's appeal entirely if it's too easy, even if you implement a complex scoring system people are likely to play through it once consider it 'finished' and never look at it again.
There also seems to be a strong association with casual games being kids games, but them some of the themes put people off too, the lolis, and ironically the amount of stuff exploding. It shames me to say that I know of one mother who lets her kids play GTA because it's a driving game / movie style game, but was absolutely *horrified* that I put DeathSmiles on because it's too violent (constant shooting, explosions not just occasional) and adult themed (I guess she really hadn't played much GTA..). Also they're not kids games again because they're hard, and require learning.. Nobody wants to learn.
2) They're inherently '2D'
Sure you can do '3D' graphics, and it's been done to death, but the gameplay is still 2D and mainstream audiences still associate that with previous generations. Put a shooter on and you'll get people thinking you're playing a Megadrive game. Enough has been said about Sony not allowing 2D, Sony not allowing anything without a widescreen mode etc. They've drawn the same conclusions, it makes your systems look 'previous gen'
This has an impact on the price you can sell things for too, to the average non hardcore shooter fan the various factors mean that they value such games closer to the £5 mark than the £20 DS was new, or the £40 you see new releases going for.
That doesn't really answer your question tho... How can you make them appeal? Bundle up all the Cave games past and present, sell it as a £20 package, and you might get some bites from more mainstream players like some other 'retro' packs do. Beyond that you'd probably have to destroy everything you love about the genre, and the games to give it a mainstream appeal much as has happened to games in other areas.
You could add rewind features, tell the player the number of times they were hit in a level instead of killing them, pamper the player never actually present them with a situation which seems too hard, or a real gameover screen. Turn boss fights into big dramatic QTE sequences, with the rest of the game stupidly long but completely bland and make the whole thing into style over substance, but do you really want to go down that route?
Sports games is about the only genre which has survived the whole dumbing down and replacing gameplay with flashy graphics, and I guess for hardcore players the shooters are like sports, but people associate better with real sports so you're not going to be able to get any leverage that way either.
Advertising is of course also a biggie, the majority of current mainstream hit games aren't hits because they're necessarily good, but instead because they're very heavily promoted by the big 3 (and by proxy the retail outlets)
Gimmicks can appeal to some people, I still don't 'get' the achievement fad (even less so not allowing you to keep the ones earned on demos unless you actually buy the game, a lot more people would probably be playing the demos if they knew they could get some easy real achievements that way) I guess you could add modes where your ship is on auto-pilot, auto bomb, and you just point at what needs shooting with a motion controller, but again, it's probably going to piss off other people who like the genre as it is and don't want to be forced to play through those.
Unlocking different modes? Again you'll annoy people who are experienced and want the harder modes from the start, while casual players might not see the point in playing the game again. Putting different modes in DLC so you can sell the thing cheaper is also a great way to piss people who are just interested in the extra modes off (I've said before, that's the exact reason I'm *not* buying the new DDP port)
Is there a real solution? probably not. Like your classic puzzle games it's very much a genre which has been left behind by the mainstream, but as long as publishers and developers keep their goals, budgets, expectations and pricing realistic I don't see why both can't co-exist. The mainstream games of today are barely games at all, trying to compete with them is suicidal. Even on handhelds the next generation is signaling a move to big-budget hollywood style games.
Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo could all help out mind you. If I could walk into a store and buy a small box containing the latest Cave shooter for £2-£5 on a memory card device that plugged into my Xbox just like a classic ROM cartridge would with no faffing about with updates, installation, DRM or any other kind of hoops then I'd certainly be tempted. They'd require less physical storage space than a CD, and give me more piece of mind that I actually own something I can use anywhere than a digital download. Iit would be back to the good old days of budget games
In reality it's an industry wide problem and while some will say that digital distribution is one solution it also severely limits exposure to the genre in other ways (the games aren't in 2nd hand shops, you can't take them over to a friends house.. etc. all of which are ways to get people into new genres) Region locking also doesn't help, if I have a great shooter, but it requires a J360 I'm hardly going to cart the whole kit off to show somebody. For anything which *isn't* a big budget heavily promoted release you need that kind of person to person "I'll lend you this game" type exposure to popularize a genre.
I guess it's also rather ironic that one of the old complaints over shooters is how linear and 'on rails' they were, when pretty much everything else is the same these days, just bigger and with an illusion of freedom.
More than anything else, they have to be understandable.
"Normal gamers" remember Ikaruga, Raptor, Gradius and R-Type because their rules are simple, intuitive and/or familiar. Touch the same color and avoid the opposite color. Spend loot on better weapons. And, uh, do not let any hostile sprite touch any part of your ship sprite.
Oh, it helps that they don't feature seemingly impassable walls of crap that, in the untrained eye, you "glitch" or "cheat" your way through. Bullet-hell makers can alleviate this misconception with player characters whose outer bodies are clearly not solid -- translucent and made of energy, for example, or turning translucent when bullets are close.
There is very much still a place for the more abstract and complex systems of CAVE games and such, but to push these even to interested players, you need a set of tutorial stages covering game systems and play techniques a la Virtua Fighter 4 -- separate from the arcade campaign, of course, or possibly interleaved with the arcade stages to make a "story" campaign alongside the arcade campaign.
Last edited by Iori Branford on Tue Feb 28, 2012 10:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Iori Branford wrote:"Normal gamers" remember Ikaruga, Raptor, Gradius and R-Type because their rules are simple, intuitive and/or familiar. Touch the same color and avoid the opposite color.
I'm pretty sure that 90% of everyone who bought the Gamecube Ikaruga with the frothing demand cover exclusively credit fed through the game while shooting both colors indiscriminately. I certainly did at first--the game was my introduction to shmups, not counting a childhood copy of Darius Twin.
For us guys CAVE shmups gives us most of the tools we need to practice the game, ie practice mode, replays, infinite credits and anything else we need we can find on the net. But most shmup devs have the habit of just putting the content in the game and trusting that players will know how to use it which is folly imo. It all needs to be better implemented so players know how to use it and why that method of play is so fun. Gamers nowadays dont think for themselves they need to be told how they should play the game by the game itself.
The market is crowded with shmups (same as most genres) and some gamers are getting tired of playing them, which is understandable since most ppls idea of playing is just to shoot some shit for the lols, scoreplay and the 1CC never comes into it, they like gimmicks in shmups because that stuff is easy to understand. Same with horizontal shooters which are generally more popular in the west because these games tend to have better stage design and eye candy than verts.
Jamestown was a good start but it really needs someone like CAVE or Treasure to make something similar, but with more structure and a proper playable tutorial like was common in video games especially on PC. Or even better make a special tutorial / practice shmup
One thing that isnt good for the genre is that most devs stick to traditional bullet hell. Devs need to revisit other types like Einhander or try to make something new. Imo something similar to Twinkle star Sprites with online multiplayer is just begging to be made, unfortunately that would need extra work than a run of the mill shooter. Same goes for a true co-op shmup thats similar to Legend of Zelda four swords.
Last edited by TrevHead (TVR) on Wed Feb 29, 2012 2:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Moniker wrote:-Games either don't feature autobombing, or they do it wrong.
Alternatives: Ketsui Death Label and the upcoming DDP-SDOJ have made a common sense breakthrough that makes bombs more useful to your average player. Clearing the current bomb stock whenever an autobomb is triggered both keeps manual bombing relevant, and allows some wiggle room for those times when you just don't recognize you're about to get hit.
To be honest, I can only really see STGs appealing to a wider audience on a single-game basis.
Something like Jamestown comes out and people love it, but it doesn't get them interested in the genre, it gets them interested in Jamestown alone. Same with Ikaruga.
Some pretty brilliant ideas in the OP. I like the direction you're thinking.
Personally, I think the idea of continues and "credit feeding" should be done away with entirely. The concept works in the arcade because every credit was more money you had to cough up, but on a home console, it doesn't make sense. It only creates confusion, or worse, dissatisfaction about the end state of the game. How many casual players have you seen that have claimed to have completed a shooter, when they credit fed through the whole thing? In their eyes, they -have- completed the game, and it was really unsatisfying because it took like 20 minutes and was really easy. Hardcore players will scream and holler that they are "playing the game wrong" but it still doesn't change the fact that the game allows you to "win" like this.
I think shooting games would really benefit from a Mega-Man like stage structure, where each level is played independently of the rest of the game. You play one stage at a time, and have a fixed number of lives to finish it, with no continues. If you lose all your lives, you go back to the stage select menu and start over. If you complete a stage successfully, the stage is marked as completed on that file, and you can retry failed stages as often as you want until you can clear the stage in the given number of lives. This allows the designer to really jack up the difficulty on each stage. You can make a stage pretty hard when the player only has to beat that one stage at a time - you can make a stage that might require two or three lives of effort in one level, rather than an entire loop. There is also a greater sense of satisfaction, because you must master that stage in order to beat it. Individual stages are harder, but the game is easier to complete overall, because you can take it apart piecemeal rather than in a bigger, monolithic run.
This also allows players that want to play for extremely short time periods to have more meaningful playtime.
Having multiple stages to pick from at one time alleviates frustration from being unable to beat one stage - you can switch to a different stage if you get stuck on one. It also creates a sense of meaningful progress as the stages are marked completed one at a time.
I would also allow the game to be completed (the final boss stage unlocked) when around 75-80% of the stages are finished, as opposed to 100%. This way players can skip the stages that give them the most trouble. Of course, the TLB only appears if you clear all stages.
Levels would be ranked depending on how well you scored in them. Levels that are completed especially well get a flashy medal, gold S Rank letter, w/e bling on them, so there is a visual incentive and sense of accomplishment to seeing your whole stage select screen blinged out with "S Rank completions". Levels keep track of your score, and each level has a leaderboard. The levels are also totaled for an overall campaign score as well. This makes online competition very easy to discern.
Regarding autobombs - I really like Touhou's solution, where you have a reflex window after getting hit during which you can bomb to save yourself. It's a good compromise between reflex skill and leniency, in my opinion.
Blackbird wrote:How many casual players have you seen that have made a walkthrough for a shooter, when they credit fed through the whole thing?
lol goowang
Agreed about the deathbombing mechanic in Touhou; I'm surprised more shmups haven't done this sort of thing. I was actually thinking about this the other night and thought maybe something like God Hand's rank system would work in a shmup (including a visual Rank meter). Rank would not only affect difficulty, but scoring - higher the rank, higher the point value of items enemies dropped, hence a risk vs reward thing. Instead of simply increasing the difficulty for doing stuff you'd normally do, make it so rank actually drops based on doing things like simply firing repeatedly, missing point items, dying, beginner stuff, but have significant rank increases for stuff that only someone serious about scoring would do, like beating a phase of a boss without using the focus shot or beating enemies at close range/near the top of the screen. Even weirder stuff like clearing a stage without shooting to get a huge rank increase in order to score in the next stage and stuff.
People who are newer to shmups or just playing casually for survival wouldn't affect the rank as much as someone aiming to keep the rank maxed out or as high as they're comfortable with in order to score. I wonder if that sort of thing'd be a happy medium.
Blackbird wrote:Personally, I think the idea of continues and "credit feeding" should be done away with entirely. The concept works in the arcade because every credit was more money you had to cough up, but on a home console, it doesn't make sense.
Heh, tell that to most gamers. They think "oh, I bought the damn game, I shouldn't have to deal with this limited continue bullshit."
BareknuckleRoo wrote:People who are newer to shmups or just playing casually for survival wouldn't affect the rank as much as someone aiming to keep the rank maxed out or as high as they're comfortable with in order to score. I wonder if that sort of thing'd be a happy medium.
Deathsmiles I feel accomplishes this with the 1-2-3 level select, and Death Mode.
There are a few shmups with multiple paths as well, usually there is a path that is "easiest" and another path that is more difficult, but has the highest scoring potential.
Blackbird wrote:I think shooting games would really benefit from a Mega-Man like stage structure, where each level is played independently of the rest of the game. You play one stage at a time, and have a fixed number of lives to finish it, with no continues. If you lose all your lives, you go back to the stage select menu and start over. If you complete a stage successfully, the stage is marked as completed on that file, and you can retry failed stages as often as you want until you can clear the stage in the given number of lives. This allows the designer to really jack up the difficulty on each stage. You can make a stage pretty hard when the player only has to beat that one stage at a time - you can make a stage that might require two or three lives of effort in one level, rather than an entire loop. There is also a greater sense of satisfaction, because you must master that stage in order to beat it. Individual stages are harder, but the game is easier to complete overall, because you can take it apart piecemeal rather than in a bigger, monolithic run.
This is exactly what the original Xbox version of Metal Slug 3 does, and people bitched and moaned about it to an unbelievable degree because they couldn't continue. I don't think it's a viable solution, either.
Blackbird wrote:I think shooting games would really benefit from a Mega-Man like stage structure, where each level is played independently of the rest of the game. You play one stage at a time, and have a fixed number of lives to finish it, with no continues. If you lose all your lives, you go back to the stage select menu and start over. If you complete a stage successfully, the stage is marked as completed on that file, and you can retry failed stages as often as you want until you can clear the stage in the given number of lives. This allows the designer to really jack up the difficulty on each stage. You can make a stage pretty hard when the player only has to beat that one stage at a time - you can make a stage that might require two or three lives of effort in one level, rather than an entire loop. There is also a greater sense of satisfaction, because you must master that stage in order to beat it. Individual stages are harder, but the game is easier to complete overall, because you can take it apart piecemeal rather than in a bigger, monolithic run.
This is exactly what the original Xbox version of Metal Slug 3 does, and people bitched and moaned about it to an unbelievable degree because they couldn't continue. I don't think it's a viable solution, either.
Changing the structure of continues is a no-brainer to me. Even if it's limited to making continues restart you at the beginning of a stage. Touhou 10 or 11 did this and I thought it was great. The arcade system of letting you continue on as if nothing ever happened only makes sense in arcades. This would just be bringing continues up to the standard established back on the NES. A mega man style select, OTOH, would probably force the game to be structured around it, or at least heavily reworked. But for games like Thunderforce IV, it would be a shoe-in.
Blackbird wrote:I think shooting games would really benefit from a Mega-Man like stage structure, where each level is played independently of the rest of the game. You play one stage at a time, and have a fixed number of lives to finish it, with no continues. If you lose all your lives, you go back to the stage select menu and start over. If you complete a stage successfully, the stage is marked as completed on that file, and you can retry failed stages as often as you want until you can clear the stage in the given number of lives. This allows the designer to really jack up the difficulty on each stage. You can make a stage pretty hard when the player only has to beat that one stage at a time - you can make a stage that might require two or three lives of effort in one level, rather than an entire loop. There is also a greater sense of satisfaction, because you must master that stage in order to beat it. Individual stages are harder, but the game is easier to complete overall, because you can take it apart piecemeal rather than in a bigger, monolithic run.
This is exactly what the original Xbox version of Metal Slug 3 does, and people bitched and moaned about it to an unbelievable degree because they couldn't continue. I don't think it's a viable solution, either.
Metal Slug 3 had a 20-minute-long hard-as-nails final level. I think a game created with this structure in mind would do better to take advantage of it: short-medium stage lengths, with the option to run all stages and/or blocks of stages in a gauntlet.
(Personally, I thought the Xbox Metal Slug 3 was an amazing port. I can't even be assed with the XBLA version, it sucks so bad in comparison)
Short answer: more loli's, smaller hitboxes, and more ornate bullet patters where most of the bullets spawned aren't likely to hit you anyway.
But seriously I don't think the genre should appeal to a broader audience anyway. It's not that I like shmups because their niche, but because they have been a niche genre for so long they've established a set of conventions that work.
Of course there comes a point where the tired and true just becomes repetitive. I think in the last 10 years Cave has flooded the market with too many games that play way too similar to each other. I'm all for innovative new mechanics and game structure and many of the concepts mentioned in the first post are good ideas but new elements need to come from a desire to make intriguing original games, rather than from the idea that the games need radical new ideas to appeal to a broader audience. When you head down that road you just get crappy games.
A question: what were the sales numbers for Ikaruga and Radiant Silvergun, on XBLA? I really want to know. Since those are two of the finest shmups ever made, and both can certainly throw off certain "ideas" about the shmup genre, from folks who haven't played many.
It also kind of ruffles my feathers a bit, when people say they look old. And games like Castle Crashers, which looks(and is) a flash games sells TONS, and looks and plays old? Well, its' got a good sense of humor, and has unlockables...I guess that works.
Back to the topic at hand, I made a comment that we need to have more kick ass games. That, I definitely believe. However, new games look about like old games, so you can just give them the HD treatment, and no one will ever know. Thank god for past gens of shumps, that no one knows about!
That being said..what can be done? Jamestown did the "right thing", by adding all the locked shit, that they did. I think it's all junk, but it definitely works for today's "gamer", and will keep them playing. Then again, I don't think Jamestown sold jack. Maybe it did OK for it's budget though.
You should have other modes, that are sort of like Geometry wars, so players can feel like they spent their money wisely...or whatever.
And release them in the west on XBLA or PSN, for god's sake. Today's gamer wants hours and hours of content, for their money. And they aren't going to play these for hours and hours. So, sell 'em cheap.
And for some of the harder games, we could add easy modes. Not as easy as CAVE's easy modes, but easier modes. Today's players have no fucking skills
It's all pathetic, and won't work, but those are my ideas. Oh, and we could add some cutscenes(blech).
Some of my ideas, some of them won't be to our liking, but they (theoretically) will sell more:
Design the game around it's story, it means masking the shmup as a cinematic game, while making the player think about the stages as story progression.
Let's say the regular swarm of enemy ships appears, make it more dramatic followed by comments by the pilot or assistant and maybe a short cutscene introducing the enemy type, everything must be engaging and epic.
Forget about credits, while special achievements will encourage players to become good at it, the game shouldn't punish the players for not being good enough, maybe adding a checkpoint system that saves at key moments.
Redesign how stages work, when a stage is scrolling in one direction it will automatically make casual players think it's a game with old design directly making them think "It's like in my childhood=not good enough", still trying to figure how to make it seem less linear (I hope 8way is not the only way), maybe using larger stages with a map and roaming.
Add an extensive tutorial that teaches you all the techniques the "regular" difficulty requires (aimed for newer players), what it means is that in that difficulty level while the game gets harder, the tutorial will teach you how to deal with almost every situation in that difficulty.
BeruBeru wrote:Some of my ideas, some of them won't be to our liking, but they (theoretically) will sell more:
Design the game around it's story, it means masking the shmup as a cinematic game, while making the player think about the stages as story progression.
Let's say the regular swarm of enemy ships appears, make it more dramatic followed by comments by the pilot or assistant and maybe a short cutscene introducing the enemy type, everything must be engaging and epic.
Forget about credits, while special achievements will encourage players to become good at it, the game shouldn't punish the players for not being good enough, maybe adding a checkpoint system that saves at key moments.
Redesign how stages work, when a stage is scrolling in one direction it will automatically make casual players think it's a game with old design directly making them think "It's like in my childhood=not good enough", still trying to figure how to make it seem less linear (I hope 8way is not the only way), maybe using larger stages with a map and roaming.
Add an extensive tutorial that teaches you all the techniques the "regular" difficulty requires (aimed for newer players), what it means is that in that difficulty level while the game gets harder, the tutorial will teach you how to deal with almost every situation in that difficulty.
For story I think the way Heaven's Variant & Sina Mora does it with comms chatter is a much better than the use of cutscenes or text dialog. (EDIT saying that Ether Vapor does it quite well) But the problem is the langauge barrier which in Futari' case is really bloody annoying which that high pitched voice.
But yeah CAVE's novice modes are a tad too easy imo
BTW what happened to Xona Games and their 4 player co-op shmup?
Estebang wrote:This is exactly what the original Xbox version of Metal Slug 3 does, and people bitched and moaned about it to an unbelievable degree because they couldn't continue. I don't think it's a viable solution, either.
Well, obviously you would need to balance the difficulty of each level so it was beatable. I also suggested not requiring every level to be completed to complete the game. This allows players to selectively ignore levels that are too difficult for them. Did Metal Slug 3 include such a feature?
The last level in Metal slug 3 is amazingly long and very difficult, which may have something to do with the griping about that port. A new game structured this way would probably have shorter stages.
Finally, for people that want the "arcade experience" you could always add an arcade mode that allows the player to queue up a few or all of the stages at the beginning of the run, Thunder Force style, and then run them all seamlessly.
Maybe the developers should just troll their audience and demand a micropayment of 25 cents for every DLC continue credit =D.
BeruBeru wrote:Some of my ideas, some of them won't be to our liking, but they (theoretically) will sell more:
Design the game around it's story, it means masking the shmup as a cinematic game, while making the player think about the stages as story progression.
Let's say the regular swarm of enemy ships appears, make it more dramatic followed by comments by the pilot or assistant and maybe a short cutscene introducing the enemy type, everything must be engaging and epic.
Forget about credits, while special achievements will encourage players to become good at it, the game shouldn't punish the players for not being good enough, maybe adding a checkpoint system that saves at key moments.
Redesign how stages work, when a stage is scrolling in one direction it will automatically make casual players think it's a game with old design directly making them think "It's like in my childhood=not good enough", still trying to figure how to make it seem less linear (I hope 8way is not the only way), maybe using larger stages with a map and roaming.
Add an extensive tutorial that teaches you all the techniques the "regular" difficulty requires (aimed for newer players), what it means is that in that difficulty level while the game gets harder, the tutorial will teach you how to deal with almost every situation in that difficulty.
"some of them won't be to our liking, but they (theoretically) will sell more"
I felt ashamed writing that post, but if you think about money (and selling your soul for it while you try to make it), a much bigger audience would find it interesting, and that's pretty much what happened with every genre in the past 10 years, selling your soul and aiming toward the lowest common denominator, and that's the purpose of the thread.
Of course this only applies for western casual gamers.
No. It IS possible to add features to a shmup that will make it enjoyable for more audiences without sacrificing what the so called 'hardcore' audience wants. I like the idea of implementing a separate 'training mode' in some games that actually helps to teach you how to dodge stuff properly. I don't agree that the main game itself should be somehow 'nerfed' to make it easier to beat in 1 credit.
The key here is OPTIONS. Different difficulties and modes. You don't have to sell your soul to make a game more accessible.
IseeThings wrote:This relegates them to a league known as 'casual games' which is a big genre in it's own right (lots of puzzle games, online games etc.) These are games which you're meant to be able to pick up and play for a bit, then put down.
So do it all as boss rush or one stage at a time. Make a stage hard and then it allows you to unlock the next. To be quite honest, I rather wish shooters allowed this in general, rather than demanding marathon, perfect runs every time you play.
The majority of mainstream audiences today care more about story and plot than they do gameplay, they want games where you're always seeing something new (content rich) even if you're not actually experiencing anything new in terms of the gameplay.
This is directly contradicted by what you wrote immediately before...
2) They're inherently '2D'
Sure you can do '3D' graphics, and it's been done to death, but the gameplay is still 2D and mainstream audiences still associate that with previous generations. Put a shooter on and you'll get people thinking you're playing a Megadrive game. Enough has been said about Sony not allowing 2D, Sony not allowing anything without a widescreen mode etc. They've drawn the same conclusions, it makes your systems look 'previous gen'
The Future Is Now
Look, all games (besides a few research projects with super expensive equipmen) are inherently 2D, period. Your line of thought isn't totally off-base, but I would point out that 3D alone is not enough for many people, but they're more likely to be the people complaining about TES V: Skyrim than they are the people playing Angry Birds. And speaking of which, Angry Birds may be the most-downloaded game of all time by a wide margin, and it's pretty much a pure "physics-based" game. The 2D versus 3D "debate" may still hold some cachet in some circles, but I think it's played out and players are going to start paying more attention to the quality of the interaction rather than just the graphics. We already saw this start to happen in the 3D FPS area, especially with titles like Half-Life 2 adding "physics-based gameplay" that got people thinking less about "how realistic does it look" and more about "what cool new things can I do?"
Now ITT, not understanding the concept of "separate from the arcade game".
We got enough ballbusters to last us lifetimes; why it would it kill us if there existed one entry-level game, or even one game with some entry-level features on the side, I have no idea.
