I guess this kinda depends on one's definition of "beginner" - does it imply somebody who has zero experience with and/or evident interest in the genre and needs to be actively "roped in" by the existing fanbase, or someone who's already marginally familiar with it and is attempting on his/her own to learn more? As you detect, I'm leaning decidedly in the latter's direction, insofar as I'm assuming that most readers of the article will have at least played a handful of shooters and/or read a bit of other stuff about them at some point; Racketboy himself or someone else more familiar with his site's readership would have to confirm or deny those assumptions, but in a nutshell I'm keeping the article's "tone" (for lack of a better word) similar to that of my previous write-ups, which seems to be what he's looking for. Again, though, if he or someone similarly knowledgeable tells me otherwise I could certainly change that.Ed Oscuro wrote:I don't know many people really do scrupulously follow these recommendations unless they already like things, in which case this isn't for beginners but for intermediate players, and I don't think many people prefer to have a bunch of somebody else's preferences dropped on their nose when starting with any genre - just find out what appeals to people and then look for good options based on that.
In any event, you're correct that few if any will scrupulously copy down whatever list we come up with and say "I gotta play all of these" as opposed to going the "hey, that looks interesting" route, at least some of the time, and there's nothing wrong with that - that being said, it's already tough enough to quantifiably determine "beginner-friendliness" in terms of gameplay mechanics as we're attempting to do here, and all but impossible to come up with anything meaningful as far as something even more personal and unpredictable as "curb appeal" or whatever you might want to call it (i.e. one prospective player might crack up at Parodius, but be bored by Raiden, while the next might be the exact opposite. I daresay the same might well apply to Batrider and Bakraid when it comes to somebody who knows nothing about either...even then, you have to assume that the person is "shmup-friendly" enough to not just walk right past both). In my preliminary list above I have made mention of several games' themes and visuals as factors in their favor, but as I said I'm aiming primarily at players who are already at least somewhat interested in playing the games for reasons beyond just that.
Hopefully that at least partially addresses your concerns, but let me know if I'm glossing something important over.
