it’s so cool they made a whole game about being a godlike musician and all the music is just pentatonic wank
“yeah your protagonist is basically the jacob collier of knowing exactly one scale”
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I remember trying to introduce a casual puzzle gamer to Portal, watching them struggle with the camera, and realizing on that day that Goldeneye’s single stick control was always better
This is where my head always goes when I try to think about the unique merits in video games, that they can emulate learning processes, isolate them, shrink them down, and let people play around with them in a limited and comfortable way.
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what are the best shumps for someone who doesn’t really play shumps
i love the vibe of radiant silvergun, find ikaruga extremely spare, jamestown slows down my computer and im not really into the colonialism stuff, sine mora doesn’t grab me… i miss playing Raiden on the atari jaguar
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halo combat evolved has so much to answer for… it’s kind of funny to realize with our modern FPS eyes that goldeneye controls are probably equally as ‘intuitive’ to a non-gamer
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dodonpachi is the best intro to shmups imo… it has a gentler curve than subsequent cave games like ketsui / ddp doj (games where i have not beaten the stage 3 midbosses lol) and is unique in their softography for being mostly pixel art rather than pre-rendered sprites
(along with, i guess donpachi which is not really interesting or good or notable in any way, and esp.ra.de and dangun feveron which are both sick but also just dont rlly make good introductory titles—i think most fans would put dodonpachi in a top 5 cave softography tho)
and is systemically much simpler (‘chain shot to have some fun’ is abt as complex as it gets). it looks and feels great and it’s like… there are shmups before dodonpachi and shmups after it. u could call it the loveless of the genre maybe.
i think getting thru stage 3 in ddp is what made the genre click for me in general, as someone who has always found r-type or gradius v or ikaruga a little slow… dont get me wrong i respect and enjoy a lot of those games immensely but dodonpachi and battle garegga are the first genre titles that i think truly won my heart
idk i was really really into raizing / cave stuff last year and totally came to understand why genre enthusiasts basically adore them above all other devs besides treasure (who feel more like they do their own stuff whereas the post-toaplan stuff is kind of its own little scene) i think my favs of what ive played are mars matrix / battle garegga / dodonpachi (in no particular order) and i’m not like, an expert at these games by any means and only got into them last year after making it a point to do so
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the thing i think about is the following:
for any combo in a training mode, the game could easily tell you: you input this button too early, or that one too late, etc.
here is a very simple example from a completely different genre: when you try to time your swing in Cricket 22 it gives you this little thing at the bottom of the screen: “Footwork: Okay; Timing: Early; Shot Selection: Good” (or whatever, I don’t have a screenshot right now)
why has no fighting game i’ve ever played actually attempted to teach moves in this way? rather it’s just a pass-fail gate like you say, with obscured info about why you failed. If you enable input display, that’s one step forward. But the game could still be telling you, “QCF: Slow; Punch: Early” or whatever. And then you can learn how to do that move, more complex moves, extend that idea to combos, etc.
I think it’s just a lack of caring about it, I dunno. I’m sure it’s complex to code but I don’t see how it could be more complex than like, everything else in the game. It is really a question of pedagogy yeah.
i take your point about focusing on normal moves rather than the flashy specials, of course the special moves are the game’s selling point. part of it is that the normal moves have either a hit or a whiff right? and the hit can’t look too flashy otherwise it clutters up the screen. what if there was a “standard” hit and a flashier “perfect hit” for every normal? timing wise, spacing wise, etc… incentivize working on the normal game, incentivize getting those perfect hits. Have your whole tutorial focus on just normals for like, a whole narrative arc before you even bring in the special moves.
idk just thinking out loud. this is all about getting a player over the initial hump. if we think of it as ‘learning a musical instrument’ this is the period in guitar playing known as ‘ow my fingers hurty :(’. if you can get people past that then they are in a stabler place to come up with their own goals.
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i dunno, personally whenever i think about learning a fighting game i just think ‘i would be happier overall practicing my instrument’ which is what it is as well.
i wouldn’t have learned guitar without a thorough and in depth tutorial that allowed me to get to a place where i could set my own goals
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Gradius 5
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dodonpachi is like the dynasty warriors of shooting games. you easily blast lots of enemies and feel like a big shot
if there were still people playing it, i would also recommend raiden v on ps4. it had a cool mechanic where anyone who was playing at the same time as you could see when anyone else achieved something, like killing a boss or beating their personal best score. you had a button to cheer them on when this happened, which would charge up both players’ special weapons slightly faster
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Played Boneraiser Minions and I love it. Have become pure Caiysware stan. This game’s progression is not as good as Spirits Abyss IMO–I believe I have completed all available gold upgrades within my first two days of casual play–but it’s fun! I have no serious experience-ruining complaints and I have enjoyed everything I’ve done.
I think this dev is super cool and I want to meet them someday, haha. The whole vibe in these two games is very carefully assembled, and it’s delightful to see them reusing assets so effectively and consistently between two games. It really does feel like two weird fucked arcadey visions from the same world of squirming wretches. I love the writing… the voice is exactly as frivolous and slight as it needs to be. It’s hard to make anything sound this incoherent while still making it basically clear and easy to understand. Comparing the writing in these games to the dev’s patch notes:
//misc
- Increased the chance of Bonemeldus Destineous minion being offered in the Endless Skirmish game mode.
- Increased the Meldus Flame relic’s chance to offer a Bonemeldus Destineous minion.
- When choosing a boneraise, level up items now display the minion amount that you have at that exact level.
- The Liche Necromance’s Companion Chum meta now reduces your maximum health by -10.
//bug fixes
- The button prompts for the number pad keys (1,3,7,9) was showing an empty button.
- Sealing boneraise items that level up minions wasn’t working correctly.
- Sealing a boneraise item that removed minions (eg deamon) could remove the wrong minion or cause a crash.
The terrible olden timey english is just endlessly amusing to me in ways that this joke generally isn’t. I love when rats come to gnaw on thy bone, or when the “bustling diaper” description is full of small singluar/plural disagreements, or whatever. It’s cute and I like it!
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been meaning to try dodonpachi for a while… guess it’s time to learn MAME… thx
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yeah u might consider eumlating it in final burn neo as well, which is ime like wayyyy easier to use!
also i cant speak to the accuracy of their drivers but they currently support sh3 cave board emulation (so like, the mushi games, deathsmiles, the more recent stuff) which mame deliberately does not… but yeah setting up fbn + mame is your gateway to like, 90% of the genre and 99% of what’s worth playing within it
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I think Mortal Kombat 11 had a feature like this to teach combo rhythm with visuals.
Can’t seem to find video of it 
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the Super Metroid practice rom has a built-in trainer for shortcharging that tells you how good your timing is and can highlight samus on the frames you need to tap the run button
(i don’t know if it has an audio metronome or not, tho)
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I suspect it’s very much not easy. This request is intuitive enough and training modes in fighting games are so feature-rich I’m sure this has been thought of, but the result might be insufficient to rely on.
Off the top of my head, maybe the biggest problem is that it’s common to mash a button during combos and then you are both early and late at the same time. There’s also flex timing windows where you can correct for defects in previous inputs by being deliberately late/early on the rest. Let’s say you drop combo due to early on move #3. In that case, was the problem that move #2 was too early, or that move #3 was too early? The reality might be that both of them were only half-early.
“OK”, you might say, “just give me a really basic version of it.” But as you probably know, we kind of have that, it’s dummy opponent after-hit countermove programming plus the messages “reversal” and “counter”. And it’s actually easier to use these universal indicators rather than an explicit combo early/late indicator because you just need to change one or two settings and it gives you the info for most any combo, instead of needing to preregister your intended inputs (I hated the inflexibility of preregistered combos and almost never trained with them).
I do agree with captainlove’s idea that fighting games could do try harder to suggest common uses of dummy programming like this. But more generally, I don’t know, fighting games are nothing but “humps” one after the other, so to me the current training mode featureset where you can figure it out by collating several sources of indirectly related technical information seems fine. I even found it really satisfying to puzzle through the thought process above about how to gather this information to practice more efficiently.
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Personal answer: the game that got me into shmups was Guwange because it’s weird and gimmicky as hell. It sounds like your problem with shmups comes down to “doesn’t grab me” so consider it maybe. Not that it usually makes it into many “best shmups” lists, and maybe it doesn’t deserve to, but I love it anyways.
The shmup that I ended up playing the most was Dodonpachi Resurrection on my iPad. The iPad part is important, as IMO (again nobody will tell you this except me but) touchscreen is the ultimate input method for shmups and makes them much more playable and satisfying.
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i only know how to say swear words as my street fighter mains
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I only know how to say “totsugeki!”
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Cosigning and am still mindboggled that none of the switch shmups ports 5 years on have made use of the touchscreen. Just wtf. It really feels good to drag your way across bullet patterns and it should be embraced whenever possible…just I don’t have the skill or will to be porting these myself…
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yeah i have thought a huge amount about what fighting games could do to ease acclimation (as someone who made a similar concentrated effort to get into the genre several years ago as i did with shmups last year) bc i think there is stuff the genre could do in terms of audiovisual feedback that gave any indication as to what is even going on behind the sprites so to speak, and i think this and good tutorializing do far more for acclimation than some simplified smash bros. or (ugh) fantasy strike control scheme. bc once you get past inputting fireball, which is the absolute first hump of the genre and basically the only one that an “easy operation” control scheme gets you past i think, then it’s like ok cool… now me and my opponent are just spamming fireball at each other, what happens next???
(also bc a lot of those concepts like i-frames or blockstun or frame advantage are what’s going on behind the scenes in like, fromsoft and platinum games which certainly do not lack for popularity and if 10 million gamers or however many can literoll thru godrick the grafted combos or w/e you can probs get people to understand normal → special cancels)
none of this is easy i think, or it would be done more… but it’s worth considering why the genre might seem so stuck in its ways? like yeah street fighter ii + mortal kombat were full-blown pop cultural phenomena… but idt most people got into them beyond button mashing or accidentally doing specials on occasion and nothing since either has come close to that level of popularity.
basically like, a developer like arcsys is from a particular arcade scene and (like cave) not rlly comparable to triple a game development (unlike mortal kombat) a lot of like annapurna-published stuff probably has a bigger dev team than idk, guilty gear xx accent core or mushihimesama futari or w/e extremely opaque arcade game you could name did. the players whose input they probably heard most of were like, japanese arcade location test delightful weirdo enthusiasts. i imagine that since xrd the situation is much different… but this is where they might be coming from as a developer, and the development staff of guilty gear strive or w/e is probably a lot of the same people as uhhhh the hokuto no ken game (i.e. people who have been at the company for maybe decades):
wikis and youtube tutorials are great too… but its a genre of rlly social games where for decades the primary audience for them was arcade / fgc local i.e. scenes where a lot of knowledge abt them basically spread thru word of mouth
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