I agree! I’ve talked to some gatekeeping motherfuckers who told me I was a fake Cave fan for only being able to beat the games on touchscreen, and while I do want to beat them on stick eventually, they sure were way more accessible when they were available on iOS and Android than they are being limited to a dwindling number of arcades and pricy imports
I am contractually obligated to shill for my friend’s game Blue Revolver which is a Cave-style STG with a beautiful color palette:
Yeah it’s really dead at this point. CAVE and G.Rev seem to be still alive just about; Deathsmiles 1 + 2 is coming over to switch (and PS4?) and G.Rev are supposedly still working on a new Radiant Silvergun / Ikaruga style game with Hiroshi Iuchi.
Did a quick scan of shmups forum but I couldn’t see anything new. It slightly pains me to say it but an Ikaruga 2 on Switch is probably the best hope for a Street Fighter 4 style revival.
Where do western devs figure into this? I feel like Luftrausers and a handful of others gained some decent traction.
I think games from western devs like like @Rudie and @Broco mentioned have helped bring a lot of different bullet patterns into the mainstream.
One aspect that hasn’t been brought over is the complex scoring system. The main progression for many of these western games is just to make it to the end. I wonder if scoring systems would find more traction if they were married to rogue-lites or if that would be seen as a distraction. It’s certainly one of the factors that helps me enjoy Downwell and Brough-likes. I know a lot of rogue-lites have leaderboards but I don’t know if the systems ever get as baroque as Guwange or whatever.
blue revolver is great
i think akai katana is probably the peak of the complex scoring-style stgs, and that was like, 2010/2011, right?
i wish we had had an additional decade of games with more and more complex mechanics after that. i can’t imagine what they’d be like.
eschatos was a massive leap forward in using 3d graphics in shooting games, but mechanically it was pretty simple iirc. also it was a japan-only 360 exclusive that was never an arcade game, so fewer people have played it than it deserves. (it wasn’t the first to use 3d graphics, of course, but it used them in way more exciting and imaginitive ways than anything else imo)
I think the game designs where a scoring system is actually motivating to players are narrow. It’s tied pretty tightly to the arcade game model where the entire game advances on a fixed clock. In any game where the player controls the pacing (which is almost all of them nowadays), score maximization degenerates into extremely cautious play and abuse of any repeated action that gives you score.
Spelunky is a roguelike where the score category (“gold”) is competitive on the leaderboards. The game design is thoughtful about it and added score-attack-oriented obscure high-risk mechanics, especially “ghosting” (although that proved more abusable than the design assumed it was – Spelunky 2 tried to fix it). But, even in Spelunky, the real interest is in the time-to-completion categories, which are pretty much the modern replacement for score.
These are good points.
I was thinking about my experience chasing high scores with friends and the most intense it ever got was with Guitar Hero. Later, I got personally invested in chasing scores in Thumper. Those are two examples that support pace-control being the crux of designing for score.
I kinda think the point of a scoring system is to motivate doing something that makes the game more interesting or fun, but you don’t explicitly need a scoring system to achieve that. I think more games manage to do this without a scoring system than with, even among stg, so I don’t think it’s a great loss that this has kinda gotten phased out, even though I’d love to see another cave style stg with some crazy thought out way to make points happen
points in shooting games should just be like an MP system that lets you use more powerful shots or something but then you lose the points as you use the power-ups, but you still want to finish the game with as high a score as possible.
or something.
Takumi’s reflect-em-ups with exponential scores are some of my favorites but yeah, those are 20 yrs old now. One of their last shmups, Night Raid, even punishes you for missing dropped collectibles and you can rack up an equally huge negative score.
night raid is hilarious because you can choose between going for positive or negative score, but both are really hard and you’ll most likely just end up hovering close to the 0
The first time I heard a varitation of this was in the 1998 Daytime Emmy Award-winning show Beast Wars: Transformers (something like the baddies approaching good guy HQ and saying “We come in peace” and the hero leader saying “You’ll leave in pieces”). That would be after Shining Force though. Any earlier examples? I must know.
Shakespeare makes a similar wordplay in Macbeth. The meaning is similar but the word piece is not part of the joke.
Macduff: The tyrant has not battered at their peace?
Ross: No; they were well at peace when I did leave 'em.
Not sure about the first peace/piece joke.
Eschatos is on Steam, just so you know.
can we have a DS / GBA thread again
Is there one we can resurrect? If not I say go for it, make a new one 
Is there a setting somewhere on Retroarch / Beetle PSX to keep music at 1x speed even when using fast forward? I’m guessing “no, absolutely not, no way that could possibly work” but I’ve been wanting to run through a bunch of old RPGs and other games but the garbled music is giving me a headache.
that won’t work but you could try overclocking both the CPU (if the game has slowdown) and the disc drive (if the loading is slow). there’s settings for both for that core
Does any emulator let you do this while playing through a hotkey or something? Would be pretty optimal just for skipping through random battles.
Actually, you know what would be great? If when fast forwarding an emulated game that instead of playing garbled music it would mute the game and start playing whatever you have loaded up on your computer’s music player. Then, as soon you stop fast forwarding your own music would pause and the game audio would resume. Could probably actually do that if you customized something like Foobar2000 to respond to custom hotkeys even when not in focus.
