Shmups you love/respect, but never play?

[Jonpachi]

any given psikyo game i reckon. seems like they'd be exactly my thing i just haven't given any the time they deserve

no more! i will play strikers 2

A great base to start from, and the game I consider to be the point at which Psikyo truly “found their voice.” I’d consider trying Gunbird 2 once you get a feel for it, as it takes a lot of what works in Strikers II but adds a bit more scoring depth and incentive to be aggressive in your play style.

[BIL]

yknow. one thing i really like about psikyo games. no horizontal panning. i can see everything thats happening, all the time

Yeah, I've gone from ambivalent to decidedly preferring locked horizontal. It sandblasts off a degree of rote, particularly in snipier games. Nice n' clean, and Psikyo's games certainly aren't any easier for banishing the fog of war. Thunder Dragon 2 got this right too, after TD1 and Macross.

Granted, some games are worse than others about panning. I thoroughly enjoy Trigon, Final Star Force, and Gunnail, but all of 'em have the worst sort: where you have to "press" your ship against the screen edge, all but hanging your ass out the cockpit and mooning any lurking snipers. Reckless! Raiden and most/all other Seibus will at least start panning well before you're near the screen edge.

There's a few manual scrollers seriously marred by bad panning, too. Namely Guevara and Jackal, where you'll eat endless blindsides at pointblank while mapping stages. Again, not entirely the panning's fault; Search And Rescue roams all over the place and plays sublimely, as does Shock Troopers, both framing the player properly. Unsurprisingly, despite Guevara's final two stages being the technically hardest, their returning to Ikari/Dogo locked pan makes them far less aggravating to nail down.

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Incidentally, returning to the non-panning Raiden III via Mikado Maniax was interesting. I think I get why its ship seemed much slower to me than Raiden 1's, BITD. I suspect Raiden 1's scrolling creates a parallax impression of much greater ship speed, despite Raiden III's actually being very close. Raiden 1's ship reaches its furthest scroll point just ~3f before Raiden III's reaches its equivalent.

(IV has both panning and non-panning areas. Stage 1's panning playfield is much narrower than R1's. Altogether, IV's fast ship unfurls its playfield a sleek .25sec or ~15f faster than R1+RIII. Its strong-ass slow ship, otoh, falls the same interval behind them. Raiden III's locked playfield is even thinner than IV's. I'm guessing Moss didn't want to pull Raiden III's camera too far out to display an R1-wide playfield. Raiden V had other plans )

I didn't notice the difference between R1 and Raiden III nearly as much this time around, via Mikado Maniax. (which I'm assuming is Type X-perfect, at least on PS4) In any case, I decidedly prefer Raiden III's Video System/Psikyo approach. Camera framing is second only to bullet contrast, imo.

[Hyperspace]

What's yours?


Well even though I can’t afford these arcade boards that I see a lot on here. I think it would have to be grind stormer or V.V on mame. I had to use hundreds of save states just to complete this game. After I finished it, I never touched it again.