Shmups with life bars/ non-1 hit kills - thoughts

[Terramax]

Heya,

I've been thinking that recently I don't like nearly any shmup that has life bars/ takes multiple hits for your character to die.

Reason being, many of these games are programmed that way because the hit boxes are always a little on the ropey side, or the bullet patterns and level design are much to be desired. There are the exceptions, i.e. Lords of Thunder on the Sega Mega CD (IMO), and I guess Death Smiles, but overall, I tend to get a little dubious if this is the case.

What are your thoughts?

[Kollision]

I think the problem isn't so much about life bars.
What wrecks some of these games is how these life bars are so easily refilled/preserved throughout a run, e.g. full recovery in-between stages.

[ptoing]

^
True

It depends how you handle it I think.

If you look at the ESP games by Cave, in those the lives basically are "life bars". If you get hit you lose a heart and some powerups, but you stay where you are, no respawn at bottom of the screen. Also the way the lives are counted are so that when the last heart goes away you are dead, unlike all their other games.

Multiple hits can work too, all depending. Like the shield system in Chorensha 68K. If you wanna score decent you wanna make sure not to get hit because you will get more points when picking up all 3 powerups and you will get a decent bonus for the shield at the end of the level.

I am sure there are other ways to make lifebars/multiple hits work, but the lazy way of euroshmups is not it.

[nasty_wolverine]

guwange's life bar system, i think its the best one by far...
different size bullets do different damange, but there is only so much your character can take.

[Udderdude]

The way Cave did it with Deathsmiles is the best you're going to get.

[ptoing]

What they did in Akai Katana works quite well too.

[BIL]

A few shooters I enjoy allow you to take some hits before losing a life, like Kamui (PC) and Steel Empire (MD), but inevitably they're well-designed enough to be entirely no-missable and would simply be harder without the hitpoints. Of course if the lifebar is just there to make up for shitty game design, that's something else entirely. I can't remember the last time I attempted to play a shooter like that.

[iconoclast]

Akai Katana's life bar is great. Getting hit by a laser refills your energy gauge slightly, so you can basically trade some health for score if you plan around it. It's one of the few instances in a Cave game where a glitch actually makes it better (although the lasers should've done more damage in the arcade version).

[ptoing]

How do you know it's a glitch and not on purpose?

[iconoclast]

—I think it was a superb adjustment to have the guiding gauge recover when a red laser hits.

Koizumi: To tell you the truth, the part of the gauge recovering was not intentional...

Yagawa: Why are you revealing that?! So much for me keeping quiet about it! (laughs). Well, we had already decided to incorporate a damage system at the coordination stage, and later on we realized that the number of gauges was steadily increasing (laughs).

http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?t=38826

+ Cave can't release a new game without glitches (AK has at least 3 - dying during the final boss negates your entire end bonus and the 'speed recharge' with Type C being the other two)

[ptoing]

Hah, that's quite funny.

[Mortificator]

What I hate are life bars that steadily deplete even when you're not shot. (1943, Carrier Air Wing)

If a life bar's divided into discrete segments, though, and everything's dodgeable, it's not really different from having multiple lives.

[trap15]

Dragon Spirit and Dragon Saber have multi-part lives. Not very easy to replenish either.

[BulletMagnet]

What tends to annoy me about life bars is that there's very rarely any invincibility upon taking a hit, which means that if you get caught up in a thick-enough bullet barrage or a head-on charge by a large enemy most or all of the bar can be drained in one fell swoop; in a game balanced around one-hit kills you're usually offered a clean way out of such situations, but in a game which presumably expects you to take a few hits and keep going it can be frustrating.

That being said, I did pick up Soldner-X 2 when it was on sale recently, and am having a decent if not exceptional time with it.

[shmuppyLove]

You know when you think about it logically, a life bar makes a whole lot more sense than "lives", in that you can imagine a space ship or fighter craft being able to sustain a certain amount of damage before being destroyed.

Especially when the plot is the usual generic "blah blah blah super weapon Earth/humanity's last and only hope etc", there would only be 1 of these ships, not 3 (or more - extends!)

Batrider is kind of unique in this respect (if you're using team mode), where if one member of the team gets shot down, the next member takes his or her place, until you've lost all 3.

However hardly any other STG mechanics stand up to any kind of logic anyway, so it's a bit moot.

To sum it up, play more Mars Matrix!

[Mero]

Rabio Lepus is a good game that let's you take several hits per life, challenging too.

[Terramax]

What tends to annoy me about life bars is that there's very rarely any invincibility upon taking a hit, which means that if you get caught up in a thick-enough bullet barrage or a head-on charge by a large enemy most or all of the bar can be drained in one fell swoop; in a game balanced around one-hit kills you're usually offered a clean way out of such situations, but in a game which presumably expects you to take a few hits and keep going it can be frustrating.

Yes, this is what I'm talking about!

[SuperSoaker360]

I like life bars if it's an excuse to put more bullets on the screen.

[danbo]

my guessing is that guwange got the life bar as a concession to the terrain aspect of the game. it works well, i always wonder if the "random ass bullet hanging out in the middle of nowhere that you smacked your stupid ass into" scenario should result in the same penalty as completely misreading a pattern - guwange seperates between the two pretty well

but most games with lifebars are sloppily designed because you can tank a coupla hits here and there