As an interesting side note, back in the day, the consensus about japanese games appeared to be they had no original ideas, and were cliched, but extremely playable (that's what I read from the finnish gaming press).StrzxgvNuvWvfld wrote: ↑Wed Nov 19, 2025 2:21 pmI think Armalyte is generally pretty good fun. Making you build up your power-ups in each stage perhaps isn't the best approach, it makes every level a bit slow to get going, though it doesn't take them away when you die either, so no Gradius Syndrome. It also has decent hit detection with a box slightly smaller than your ship. Attack patterns are a little same-y, though it's gemerally pretty fair.
IO suffers from seriously under-powered pea-shooter syndrome, though is better once you're powered up (then you die and it takes them all away again).
Delta was way too dependant on having the right power-up which was never any fun. Great music mind you.
Salamander was good if it was all you had. The NES version is better overall, though I do think there are some things the C64 version does better.
Enforcer is another one that's pretty good fun, despite the familiar "energy bar".
I certainly wouldn't rave about these games today. The game design of many micro-computer games was definitely not as strong as what the best Japanese developers were doing, though I do sometimes think people are more willing to overlook certain flaws in Japanese games of the time that they would use to completely write off a micro-computer game.
I could say that lot of the european games had often lot of personality and character, and atmosphere that japanese counterparts often lacked, but the playability (that just happens to be the most important thing) was lacking. Also, back in the 80's, no one just simply KNEW how to make great games or what would even make game a great, everyone was making it up out of thin air as they went along.
But more often than not, if some cool coin op came along with a new idea, then everyone and their dog ran off to clone it. Twin Cobra (kyoukyou) was probably one of the most ripped off game, as was Tiger Heli, but it only occured to me after I had access to those in Mame.
Also, if you read the gaming press, they had this notion that quality of the game was if it had any "new ideas" (gimmicks that most often weren't even much fun to begin with) or "realism and depth" (read: endless amount of menus and options and tinkering that was never fun to begin with).
That does not change much in retrospect; if anything it increases my respect for japanese developers, because they made it all up from nothing - though there is no question that they probably also copied each other / were inspired from each other a lot. But then again they were living in ecosystem where they had access to each other's work. We had either bastarized conversions of their games, or EU versions of their PCB's which had difficulty changed and checkpoints removed - or other changes.
And, Bitmap Brothers still remains one of the few european developers who actually had some clue on how to make games - even if it's not that much by today's standards.
Anyway, that was my today's rant..
