Shmup pet peeves?

[Rastan78]

@heli pet peeve means a specific thing you always find very annoying.

[XoPachi]

I never saw an issue with bomb punishment. Especially with all the other tools most modern STG's give you to survive. I feel like it just builds better general habits for me. I don't have a real preference on it though. As long as the game is designed around whatever philosophy they decide on dropping bombs.

[xxx1993]

I remembered another one: speed powerups. Do not want. Either have a single speed or let me cycle through the available speed settings without having to pick up speed powerups.

That’s exactly why I don’t grab too much speed in Gradius.

Yeah, you end up crashing into stuff and the only way to become slower is to die and lose all of your speed, which leads to the other problem with speed powerups: they also sometimes make checkpoint recovery range from difficult to impossible when you lose all of your speed just because your ship speed is likely now agonizingly slow.

I remember playing Gradius Galaxies at one point, when I got to the Speed area, I could never recover from it and I just gave up entirely.

[heli]

The biggest disapointment in any game is free play.
No reward with free play, 9CC is a good challenge with a bit of luck.
Those saturn games are really fun compared to PS4.

[SPM]

Non-normalized movement speed (i.e. faster diagonals than vertical/horizontal movements).
It has to be an oversight right? or do some devs design movement like this on purpose?

I'm currently playing (and enjoying a lot) Caladrius Blaze and I swear I cannot dodge some patterns from the later bosses. It's driving me crazy! This also happens in Raiden IV.

Some older games share this "mechanic" but it's not too bad when there's plenty of space to move around, but as soon as tight corridors/dense patterns happen it becomes infuriating.

I will probably start playing with the arcade stick for extra precision (this weird speed + the Joy-Con stick isn't the best combination)

[Rastan78]

9CC is a good challenge with a bit of luck.

[MidnightWolf]

Zero gravity and other gimmicks that change ship handling half-way through the game, purely to cause cheap deaths. Couple that with intentionally bad enemy placement at respawn points, and it's a one-way trip to Game Over.

Anybody who played Air Buster knows what I'm talking about.

[Steven]

Something I forgot to mention last time: vertical games that scroll horizontally and to a lesser extent horizontal games that scroll vertically. Just show me the whole screen at once. I always feel like I'm missing something. In the case of verticals, there's always some tank or something sitting there just off screen waiting to point-blank you the instant you dare to scroll the screen.

[jehu]

Playing Fighting Hawk has really reminded me of one of my biggest pet peeves: when your plane / character isn't able to fly right up to the edges of the screen because of an arbitrary invisible wall that frames the play area. It's so much better when you're allowed to run your hitbox right up to the bottom and sides, even if part of your sprite is off the screen a little. I've run into a handful of deaths in Fighting Hawk just because I constantly misjudge the space I have to dodge the bullets. No thank you - this one is the STG equivalent of watching someone get their nails pryed off.

Something I forgot to mention last time: vertical games that scroll horizontally and to a lesser extent horizontal games that scroll vertically. Just show me the whole screen at once. I always feel like I'm missing something. In the case of verticals, there's always some tank or something sitting there just off screen waiting to point-blank you the instant you dare to scroll the screen.

I respect the opinion, but I actually feel the opposite. Playing 2P Same! and (again) Fighting Hawk recently, I've been thinking that there's something about the locked screen that feels excessively static and rigid. Scrolling screens and sniper tanks are an infuriating combo, I agree, but the expanded play area enhances the experience more than it detracts from it for me. Especially with thoughtful background design, the flexibility of the play area gives the stages a more fully realized sense of place.

And, most importantly of all, shifting play areas provide a lot of opportunity for various routing strategies and for risk-taking scoring plays if you're willing to fly into danger. And there's the added layer of strategy that comes with dragging enemies off-screen so they can't shoot you. I'm a fan.

Zero gravity and other gimmicks that change ship handling half-way through the game, purely to cause cheap deaths. Couple that with intentionally bad enemy placement at respawn points, and it's a one-way trip to Game Over.

Anybody who played Air Buster knows what I'm talking about.

I like Air Buster's early stages, but yeah - this ruins it for me, too. It's certainly 'interesting' but I don't think I've ever heard from anyone who actually enjoys it.

[Steven]

I respect the opinion, but I actually feel the opposite. Playing 2P Same! and (again) Fighting Hawk recently, I've been thinking that there's something about the locked screen that feels excessively static and rigid. Scrolling screens and sniper tanks are an infuriating combo, I agree, but the expanded play area enhances the experience more than it detracts from it for me. Especially with thoughtful background design, the flexibility of the play area gives the stages a more fully realized sense of place.

And, most importantly of all, shifting play areas provide a lot of opportunity for various routing strategies and for risk-taking scoring plays if you're willing to fly into danger. And there's the added layer of strategy that comes with dragging enemies off-screen so they can't shoot you. I'm a fan.

Same! Same! Same! was designed to scroll horizontally, and it does definitely feel a bit cramped in the 2P version because they removed this, especially since a lot of the enemies are in exactly the same places as in the 1P version, so it's like they took the game and just chopped the sides off and left it as it is for the most part. Some stuff is in different places, like a lot of those lightning bolts that are called targets for some reason, but a lot of things are unchanged and it feels super weird if you've played the 1P or Mega Drive/Genesis version a lot.