for a cave game, i’d go with dodonpachi: saidaioujou for being their final arcade release
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Space Invaders Extreme, for symmetry!
(Cave games are a better idea probably)
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One of iOS ports of Cave games particularly as touch control shmupping works very well on an iPad
Also, on the beginning side, consider SpaceWar instead
… Although maybe it makes more sense to contain your history to Japanese 2d arcade games otherwise you can start including all kinds of games.
Espgaluda II Black Label, which is among the most complex and beautiful of Cave’s and also the best game featuring genderfluid playable characters.
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Gonna say Ikaruga because a human can look at Ikaruga and kind of get what is going on.
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On the topic of STGs, can anyone comment on Ginga Force? Kinda keen on playing through the Qute/M-KAI back catalogue. I still reckon Judgement Silverword is a masterpiece, and Eschatos is brilliant, but not so sure about Ginga Force. Tbh I’m a bit thrown by the crappy character art.
i have it, but i unfortuantely got it only a short time before my 360 died, so i didn’t get to play it much.
from what i remember, it’s not a pure arcade-style stg, you’re meant to play it over and over and gradually upgrade your ships like an rpg.
it’s not awful, but it’s definitely far from essential.
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is there a flashpoint in history where industrial game development became more studio based instead of like 1, 2, or 3 MIT geeks making virtual dungeons and dragons/arcade alien shooting and selling it nationwide
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Probably you want to separate it by market segment. Arcade production is studio-based from the get-go though games are still coded by very small numbers of people, you need capital to assemble cabinets and market them so you end up with a few dozen companies. You do have a pirate board scene that’s closer to bedroom-style (Ms. Pac-Man, for example). Microcomputer games are predominantly this until the rise of Origin and similar companies in the late '80s, but the shareware scene kept the bedroom coder alive. It was nearly extinguished in the late '90s, though, dormant until digital distribution.
Console games were always locked-down as that was their business model, though there are surprisingly tiny studios scattered through NES days in Japan and the US existing as subcontractors on licensed games.
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Some people in game development talk about a shift from programmer-centric development to ‘content-centric’ development, which happens in the early 90s. i.e. while in the 80s it was feasible for a handful of programmers to do all the code, design, art, management, etc, in the early 90s games start becoming more content-heavy, such that design and art constitute the bulk of the development process, rather than just programming. So game companies had to start establishing ‘tool chains’ and ‘pipelines’ to not only manage and discretise all these separate components of development, but also to patent their development processes. So I dunno, maybe a flashpoint would be something like the DOOM engine in 93? Though that seems a bit late.
But yeah, agree w/ @BustedAstromech that you probably want to think about separate markets, and also separate regions. There were plenty of pirate-based industries in operation well into the 90s around the world.
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Skip the game, grab the absolutely stellar soundtrack.
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Anybody know of any decent, non-evil and free e-mail services? Don’t even need a lot of fancy features.
i would have put it at the change from computers to consoles, since anyone could release a computer game they made, while releasing console games requires licensing agreements and publishers and all kinds of other complications that took it out of the reach of hobbyists
I know some folks that used https://riseup.net/ a few years ago, but they’ve all now switched to Gmail.
https://disroot.org is free (donation-based), good, privacy-focused email & cloud stuff. ProtonMail also is free and privacy-centric but has some quirks to it due to its focus on privacy.
I use Posteo which is 12€ per year. It’s been around for nearly a decade, has good privacy practices, clean energy practices, labor practices, etc.
Leaving GMail has been fantastic, tbh. Using a native mail client is much, much faster than a contemporary overstuffed web app and, IDK, it just feels good? E-mail is the last broad decentralized Internet tool and I care about preserving that.
you don’t have to leave gmail to use a native client though, the one I use even has gmail keyboard shortcuts as a banner feature https://getmailspring.com/
Yeah, I know GMail has IMAP support (I have to use it for my New School account) but for many people the fear of switching to another email provider is that, at best, they’re using a fork of Roundcube, necessitating a switch to native clients for primary access.
Thanks. Looking forward to them now announcing a new Switch game within the next week.
i wouldn’t even be mad