Mario is a puzzle game where you have to press a button to switch forms between jumping and not jumping
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In all seriousness, I think itâs common for people try to compare ikaruga and puzzle games. I wonât speak for boojiboy, but I think itâs the literal-ness of having two different colors assigned to everything that reminds people of puzzle games, and reinforces the idea that thereâs only one optimal path through the game.
To take my joke post further, this would be like if every time Mario jumped he turned blue, and a bunch of platforms and enemies in the game were also blue. That would suck and be weird. But shooting games have a really limited verb set! Your ship is just like a little cursor you can move in 8 directions. Ikaruga is great and seminal(?) because it invented a new verb, and also has levels designed to seemly exhaust every possible cool new thing you can do with that verb. That verb (color change) is what it specifically means to me when I say ikaruga transcends the genre (not speaking for meauxdal either)
Alternate post: if somebody made a shooting game where you pressed a button to toggle altitude between 2 different planes, in order to dodge attacks and shoot different groups of enemies, would you call that a puzzle game? The answer is nobody would ever make a game like that, because with top down vertical shooters, visually that would be impossible to pull off (âare those tiny enemies or are they below me?â Etc) You would have to color code them to make the game playable.
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d-force on snes is a game like that
itâs not a popular game
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vertical force on the virtual boy did that, and it worked really well because you could see the different planes. cool game.
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Also liked Raycrisisâ wildly varied minimal/ambient/jazzy soundtrack that changed motifs depending on the order of levels you picked, which also mixes up enemy formations and level graphics. The ps1 version was broken up by loading screens so you lose that seamless transition concept-album effect of the whole thing that the original arcade cab had going between levels and bosses but they restored it for the mobile port. Itâs just really hard to play with your fingers obscuring parts of the screen, kind of like the Cave ports. I got the SN30âs bluetooth working with it but there was way too much lag for it to work for me.
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Hell yeah Iâve messed around with all 3. Like you said though your ship is constrained. I think my favorite is raystorm because itâs so watery. Two back to back water levels to start out!
I actually had g-darius on my ballot which I consider the best of those low poly shooters. This boss intro (timestamped at 2:40) is one of the most aesthetically confident and overwhelming moments in video games imo.
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hot take all shooting games are puzzle games
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perhaps the etc etc
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no no, some are dungeon games and some are war games
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Are pinball machines dungeon games?
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i donât think so?
Those would be puzzles, buck-o.
That makes sense but I feel like the answer is not so obvious, if only because of the gravity and entropy at play
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All vidcons can be defined by a Punnett square with synchronous/asynchronous on one side and math/no math on the other
No I will not be taking questions
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the pinball table invites us to build a new morality around the sacred orb
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I move to rename this whole forum Puzzle Pavilion and rename the puzzle game topic âShmuppyLandâ.
Ikaruga has puzzle elements but less of them than other games which we donât âaccuseâ of being puzzle games in a way that feels vaguely dismissive. Out of This World/Another World is probably more of a puzzle game than Ikaruga and I donât think there are people going out of their way to question its worthiness as a platformer or adventure game.
Also⌠as someone who played a ton of Ikaruga when it was released in the States because of its built in high score competition and also posted in a bunch of places where people were also doing that and talking about it the notion that it was âsolvedâ before its release is kinda bonkers? There was a ton of sharing of techniques and vid clips trying to figure out the various ways of dealing with just about every encounter in the game, and seeing the high score from Japan (where it was released earlier) and trying to figure out how the hell that person pulled it off.
Even now if it is currently âsolvedâ in an optimal way of the many thousands and thousands of people who have played the game there is maybe⌠ten who can actually pull it off? I admit to not following closely in many years but there are a few places in the game where the optimal technique is so absurd (and possibly beyond the intentions of those who designed it) that people who lived and breathed the game can only barely approach it for the most part. For the other 99% it is finding a less absurd more usable approach through the gameâs various challenges. Some parts are rather rote in that theyâll be approached by most in a very similar way but hell, thatâs true for most other games we nominated as well. Still there are many areas such as the first half of stage 4 where a dozen people may approach it in a dozen different ways.
Really what worked for me in Ikaruga is that⌠it is hard but you have a lot of control over how hard. I donât think the player can make it easy but in most encounters you can choose to just try to survive, to get some easy combos, to get more combos up until a theoretical âIâm gonna chain every enemy and eat as many bullets as possible while setting myself up perfectly for the next sectionâ. In many games when you learn a section it gets easier or even boring. In Ikaruga once you learn a section you realize how much harder it can be, and if you wish to go down that path you are really only at the beginning at that point instead of near the end.
It took me probably a hundred hours to finally beat Ikaruga, one of three 1CC I have in the genre (maybe four, I canât recall if I did so in Jamestown on one of the lower difficulty levels). Do you know how I finally managed it? I realized I could just take it easy in the few parts that killed me more often than not. There are a few parts in stage 3 that even with tons of practice were so hard to do in a high level way; I realized that I could just not shoot during them and concentrate on dodging and not only did I live more frequently but my chain wasnât broken either. Thatâs how I âsolvedâ the game.
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I mean, the DC release literally had a super play DVD with it showing how to do most of it, including I think the guy who played both shups simultaneously 1cc, so thatâs part of what Iâm referring to.
I need to stop posting about this though because the dog pile feeling is getting real (weâre up to like five or six people jumping in now) and maybe I should just have nothing to do with this list. I will not reply any more. Please do not quote me or reply directly to me. Iâm sorry if I talked derisively about the only shooter that seems to matter to people.
And my votes!
SUPER STREET FIGHTER II TURBO wins over Minecraft
I would still enjoy playing this game with a friend, even if itâs not really among the best of the genre anymore.
I find Minecraft boring.
CRAZY TAXI wins over Metal Slug 6
I recognize all the defects of Metal Slug 3, but apart from the funny idea, I donât think the romhack would fix it. Metal Slug X would have won this one.
PUYO PUYO series wins over Everybody Votes
Puyo Puyo is fun! Never heard about everybody votes, and democracy is already dead.
CONTRA: HARD CORPS wins over Street fighter 3
Very hard choice.
Very unfair bracket, SF3 should go ahead instead of SF2.
YAKUZA 0 wins over Super Metroid
Yakuza is a much more interesting game.
I think Super Metroid is too slow today, and there are tons of Metroidvanias that are better games. Hollow Knight is the best super metroid!
NIGHTS INTO DREAMS wins over Sonic 2
Nights is magical.
DEUS EX wins over Game Boy Camera
Yeah, Deus Ex graphics might suck (although the game is still super interesting).
But how many of us would play Game Boy Camera today?!
IKARUGA wins over FF14
Ikaruga is great, i even bought the Switch Flip Grip to play it vertically on the Switch!
FF14 is not my thing.
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