BareknuckleRoo wrote:
It may have had a big budget, but all they spent their time on was making it look pretty. The gameplay, the interface, the scoring system, the horrible controls... everything is an unpolished, clearly rushed mess. It's 2013 - since when do modern shmups nowadays not let you customize the controls (you literally can only pick from 3 shitty presets last time I played the xbox version)?
It's actually more common than you'd think as Castle Crashers has the same problem, you're fucked if you want to map it to your arcade stick and are forced to use a pad where block which needs fast timing is locked to the R Trigger which has a large deadzone. It seems that most (western) devs think an arcade stick is only for FTGs rather than all arcade games.
As I beleive you mentioned elsewhere this game did have a number of us looking forward to release but had our hopes crushed when we finally played it. I think Reiker was either trying to make a STG that pleased both casual and semi hardcore (Jamestown proved the concept successfully) but was totally ignorant or plain just didn't care about some STG fundamentals. (Like how the game is semi broken when you take hit, no floating item rebounds or 2-3 sec invulnerability window)
I worry that the fallout from our response to SM has painted us in a bad light with the mainstream. IE stick in the muds that no western indie should ever pander too. Which while we are purists that isn't the case, SM is nigh on broken when your ship takes a hit that it's like a 10 sec stun block in a FTG, ppl who play FTG's wouldn't let shit like that fly just like we wouldn't with SM. Reiker also made the mistake of trying to shoehorn in a random number generator to level the playing field which while works in CoD doesn't in a STG imo.
nasty_wolverine wrote:Zaarock wrote:nasty_wolverine wrote:wait what? finely crafted 2d art with a perspective that would even make Escher proud is worse than generic fancy 3d graphics?
you must be joking sir.
Some of the pre-rendered sprites in AK don't look great or "2d art" to me. Sine Mora has some un-generic designs(mainly bosses) by the designers at Grasshopper which do look pretty cool IMO.
For me its not totally about the art, but the perspective. I learnt different kinds of perspectives which you can draw things in when i was learning arts. AKS just throws all the rules out the window and still makes it somehow work and look great. and just the amount of madness going onscreen at once, and also has the best bullet and laser sprites in a cave game IMO.
Yeah the perspective difference in AK between the ground, which is like a vert on it side, with the air elements that are straight hori is abit jarring in first impressions, I love it now though as it makes a refreshing change to a STD hori like DeathSmiles. Also Akia is a damn fine looking game though imo CAVE really went to town with the effects, ie the cherry blossoms, special attacks with gold filling the screen to the massive explosions which might be the best I've ever seen.
Sine Mora is one of the best looking 3D shmups around which adds to the frustration when playing it.