I’ll commend XCOM 2 for demanding almost wildly varying tactics between its difficulty levels
You can be reckless on veteran
You have to be conservative on commander
The key to legendary is to be conservatively reckless
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This is always the correct way to play a scrolling shooter, but doubly so for Cave games. You are playing the way one is supposed to.
The reason why is that bullet hell games in particular test your foresight more than your reflexes. Your goal is not to dodge one-million impossible bullets (although sometimes you have to!), it’s to look ahead and predict where empty spots will be. If you’re always dodging bullets as they approach you, instead of before they are fired, eventually you will be overwhelmed and die. This usually comes into play in later stages, where bullets exhibit odd behaviors and the patterns and “lanes” (what I personally call those aforementioned spaces) become more complex.
The rhythm game comparison is actually spot on in this respect. Memorization works, of course, but like rhythm games there’s also an element of “sight-reading”, and each stage is like a song (or, in some cases, quite literally; looking at you Mushihimesama stage 3)
Or, to use a half-remembered idiom: You never have to sharpen a cleaver as long as it slips between the gaps in the bones.
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As a fairly experienced rhythm game player back in the arcades, beginners observing me always seemed to assume I had it mostly memorized and I would explain no, it’s 90% sight reading. On an individual song basis, memorization mostly comes into anticipating upcoming changes in the pattern to be ready to switch up my posture and tempo as soon as it arrives. I saw a showoff play blindfolded once and obviously he had it memorized but that’s about it
They make the notes move very fast on the screen to make it look impossible/impressive, but the volume of them per second never far exceeds piano sheet music. I guess it’s a similar principle to bullet hell which is meant to make you go “whoa! hundreds of bullets!” but most of the time you can treat it as like 4 circles and 3 rays
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I think this is why I prefer Cave to other shooter devs. You’re pretty much only gonna die from bullets rather than obstacles/crashing into an enemy, it is almost always clear what I need to respond to, I can hop between games pretty freely cuz the major differences come from interacting with the scoring mechanics. I don’t enjoy many shooters with, like, “action game” level/encounter design, where novelty and variety is a priority. I really don’t wanna do anything but shoot and dodge but I also want a game that ends and has you on some kind of journey and has some kind of character to the graphics and music so thanks Cave, you were the best aside from some of the bad bits.
I do think liberally bombing actually helped me improve as a player; getting deeper and deeper into the game helped keep them fresh and less likely to get hung up on early roadblocks.
It took forever to get over that hump though and now that I rarely play shooters I’ve totally lost that fearlessness when it comes to bombing.
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Analogously this is weirdly something I have learned from MMOs, to blow your cooldowns liberally and often and to take the time to protect yourself rather than eke out that last 1% of damage (or score or whatever) - the way it’s classically put in those gameterms is, “A dead character has a DPS of zero.”
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You miss 100% of the bombs you don’t bomb
That’s the biggest no-miss of all
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Rightly or wrongly I’ve always been in the too-proud-to-bomb camp, and the bomb button being hard to reach on iPad ports of Cave games (which is my favorite way to play them nowadays) has only reinforced that tendency
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what was the first game with an auto bomb setting
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I don’t remember autobomb prior to the iOS Cave ports but it must have existed prior to that
Hm
Oh wait Espgaluda had it
I think I may die if there’s a feminised weed named Espgaluda so I will not search the internet for confirmation of its existence, will not continue searching for the true answer to this question
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PS2 Mushihimesama Arrange mode has it IIRC?
I’ve definitely played on a Saidaioujou cab with auto bomb enabled before
the story mode in sakura wars columns 2 is cute. the haracters are all competing for better parts in their newest play, so when you beat an opponent, the victory sceen shows them cast as random inanimate objects
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batrider’s training mode has autobomb
thanks for all the tips y’all. i’ve never beaten a shooter and don’t think i will anytime soon but i am happy to learn from those who are way better than me. especially @Tegiminis for letting me know i’m barking up the right tree with regards to how to read the screen.
someday i’ll get that 1cc. it takes a village!
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If you can stomach the aesthetic (and no blame if you can’t) and don’t mind hori Cave, Deathsmiles has the selectable level difficulties that are really nice for learning the game. As you get better at a stage, you can crank the difficulty up more to get more of a challenge, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to. This is why DS 2X is the only Cave game I have 1cc’ed.
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Oh, also I played Toy Story because I saw a streamer was trying to beat it for 7 days and I went “I literally speedran this as a child after beating it while renting it” and I beat it after a few tries, that was fun
Also also fuck that telekinesis wolf motherfucker from High Seas Havoc, he can go magically float a stone up his ass
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If you’re interested in a relatively forgiving vertical bullet hell to try 1ccing, I recommend Crimzon Clover World Ignition. It’s very newbie friendly in a lot of ways, and plays very similar to DoDonPachi Resurrection.
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all this talk of shmups makes me miss having an easy way to play shmups (RIP 360 era).
what’s the way, these days? emulation? Steam?
i know there’s been a few PS4 releases like Ketsui, but yeah…has Cave ported all their stuff to PC, yet?
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Steam for some, emulator for the rest.
i curated a little set of shmups with the latest version of groovymame earlier this year, it should be pretty much ready to go
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I am gradually becoming more and more fixated on BulletGarden. The stages get really hard and interesting, asking you to do stuff like “survive a bunch of waves while your only weapon is a Mist that just makes enemies hard to see”. And I’m starting to get some really silly weapons that could ON THEIR OWN be the focus of a whole polished bullet hell game.
If this was just the arcade mode of random/customized loadouts, I don’t think I would like it nearly as much. Providing me with a way to explore curated loadouts and challenges to learn the full breadth of the game’s armory was exactly needed to keep my interest. A lesson modern roguelites could learn, I think. And also a testament to the developer’s design sense.
I looked up the developer’s page and apparently they make vocaloid music. I kinda like this track.
Anyway, it’s up there with Cruelty Squad in terms of “2021 games that have wormed their way into my brain”. If you have any interest in action games or shooters I beg you to play this game.
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