trap15 Shooting Game Tournament '15 (TRP-STGT 2015)

[Ikazu-san]

WHOA, my team ended up two places higher than expected!

[Illyrian]

WHOA, my team ended up two places higher than expected!

I did say top 10 was our objective

[msm]

Thanks for organising trap its interesting playing games I wouldn't usually, and i really enjoyed bee storm.

[Macias]

I think Gunnail’s scoring actually worked quite well with the stage over score ranking system. Or at least it allowed for interesting strategic considerations when going for the low scoring clear. You could get the second extend after 2nd / 3rd stage. Or wait with that until 5th boss, for a slightly better score. Or get it after 7th boss and clear the game with a 6,8 - 7 million score. Then, if you were feeling brave (I wasn’t) you could suicide all lives and try to get past the final stage on your last life for additional 10 million points. I had fun figuring out these possibilities.

Of course, at the top skill level there was only one way to play the game for maximum gains, and any failed run was worth less than the lowest clear, so I understand the criticism.

My ratings for all games would be:

Sand Scorpion - 4/10
DoDonPachi 2 - 8/10
Strikers 1945 - 10/10
Zing Zing Zip - 5/10
Gunnail - 7/10

Had we played Mad Shark (a very good Raiden clone developed by Allumer) + anything else, instead of a mediocre Allumer game + the worst of Raiden clones, it would have been a great tournament, from my perspective.

Still, it was fun, even if that was the worst time of the year for me to participate in such intense competition. Thanks for organizing it, trap15.

[resty]

Gunnail is not a proper game for players who wants to get some score but not to scoring every stage IMO.
The key is that for other game, when you want to partially score, you will choose to get more scores at some key part (and easier levels). But in this game, when you choose to get score at some point, you have to no miss the whole remain parts. So what you can decide is to score at stage 8 or stage 7-8 or stage 6-8, and so on.

For me, most of these game are fine, and ok to play. Only exception is the ZZZ in which enemies flashing badly when hit, making me not seeing anything and feeling real uncomfortable.

In the tournament, I had really good time in playing those games, and watching others streaming. Taking stages into consideration is though not best but a nice try. Maybe try [score] x [multiplier decided by stage] next time. Never consider myself an experienced player so I'm satisfied with the result (2nd place). Should own this to my great teammates gimebe and DKA.

Also thanks trap15 to host this great tournament.

[DocHauser]

Props to Nifty and Kyper. None of my scores counted this time around, so I was basically the the hype man/Flavor Flav of our team.

Still, at least I managed to 1cc a couple of the games, and I managed to get further in DDPII and Strikers than I'd done before, so it was all good.

Because of the scoring system being based around how far you got, I was expecting to see more Hisou Zame or Twin Cobra-type games, with the 'Area' reached making it easier to distinguish between different players. I was surprised there were no games like that...

[Squire Grooktook]

I'd rank the games as follows:

Strikers 1945:

Been meaning to sit down with this game for a while and see what the fuss was all about, and I'm glad the tournament gave me an excuse to do so. I still think the level design is a bit bland, but the boss patterns are clever and awesome IMO. There's a lot of subtle nuances going on that turn relatively simple patterns very "scary" and confusing, even before the speed starts to increase. As someone getting into shmup development, it's very inspiring and it's a game I'll probably look to for inspiration.

Bee Storm:

At the start of this game's week, somebody said something like "it's as if somebody who never saw a danmaku game made one based on a general description of the sub-genre", but I don't really agree. I think it's a generally entertaining little game despite some occasional wonkiness. If it had been a Raizing or Takumi game, I don't think it would have the kusoge reputation it does.

I wouldn't call it a great game, but there's enough interesting things going on (like the proto-psyvariar invincible grazing) to make it worth a shot and fairly entertaining while it lasts.

GunNail:

I ended up liking this game a lot less during the tournament then when I first tried it. A lot of little things that I didn't notice on the first few credits started to really bug me. I'd say that the combination of awkward "pushy" screen scrolling, non-normalized diagonal movement, and enemy's who love to point blank you make the game feel very "awkward" handling and playing. Still some cool stuff going on, some of the boss patterns are cool, and the art is great. OKAY game, wouldn't replay after clear.

Zing Zing Zip:

I didn't get far enough into this one to see what the kusoge screaming was about (I hit stage 5). Seems okay despite some weird difficulty balance. I personally didn't have any issues with bullet visibility. Found it unremarkable, otherwise though.

Sand Scorpion:

I was actually enjoying this at first, with the emphasis on aggressive point blanking (the opportunities for which are surprisingly lenient and well telegraphed), but it ultimately became my least favorite game when I realized that the first 4 stages are completely boring and worthless once memorized (also that stage 3 boss...), and everything afterwards is kind of a clusterfuck that usually cripples you permanently if you die.

[Shepardus]

Fun tournament, thanks for organizing it trap15! I would have participated more if it didn't fall during the weeks I was most busy with my classes.

I'm torn on the stage over score ranking, I think it worked fine for some games like Strikers 1945 but not others like Bee Storm, and for some like Sand Scorpion it didn't make much of a difference either way. When I didn't like the ranking of stage over score, it was because I felt like I had to play it safe to do well and had no reason to even learn anything about the scoring system, which made it feel like I wasn't getting all I could out of the game. I do appreciate that this system prevents the scoreboard from being dominated by people optimizing the first one or two stages rather than attempting to get through the whole game, but I'm not sure that was really an issue in any of these games except Bee Storm and maybe Gunnail. I also thought of the system resty proposed, score * (multiplier decided by stage), or score + stage * (multiplier decided per game), but it'd be difficult to tune without a bunch of people playing the games and pretty much impossible to balance for some games. Making the ranking score-based but changing the technical bonus to stage-based is another possibility.

Giving out incentives for choosing different ship types (like a bonus to the top score for each type) seems like it would be cool, but this year only Strikers 1945 had a wide range of ship choices and ship choices for that were already surprisingly diverse.

Sand Scorpion: The sound effects tell you all you need to know about this game. Too bad about the infinite exploit in Nostradamus, I bet that would have actually been pretty fun.

Bee Storm: Promising, but lacking in polish. The plethora of safespots is the most obvious hole in the game, but in addition to that the ludicrous amount of HP enemies tend to have from stage 4 onwards gets really aggravating, and I'm personally not a fan of how much dying screws over scoring and how few lives you get in the first place. You gotta give it credit for being good-looking, though - sure, most of the graphics are taken from DDP1, but the new graphics made for the game are nice too.

Strikers 1945: Not the best Psikyo game by a long shot, but still a good game. Probably my favorite game of the tournament along with Bee Storm (those two games were also the only two I had played before the tournament). Ranking stage over score for this game probably worked out well since the game is difficult enough that people weren't getting 2-ALLs during the week, and the scoring system is pretty lame.

Zing Zing Zip: I barely played this game, but the first few stages are pretty okay. The later stages and the second loop seem incredibly dickish though. At least it's got some nice sprites.

Gunnail: The scoring system and the scrolling behavior really suck the enjoyment out of this one, but other than that I don't have much to complain about. Not really my style, but not bad either. The pixel art is very good, which isn't surprising coming from NMK but is still worth noting.