[General Discussion] Top Down Shooters: A Lost Gaming Art Form

Ugh, Touhou. I nearly lost a close friend over that moronic game.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of SHMUPS, I just hate how every single top-down shooter made these days has to be a bullet hell, and in SHMUP communities you have to play them otherwise people think you're a weak little pansy who can't handle the spiciness of true challenge. The main problem with bullet hells is that they're less about strategically finding weak spots to shoot stuff and more about just surviving past a certain time limit, at which point the boss or whatever will be destroyed and you can move on. I'm just tired of seeing them. I firmly believe games like this can be challenging without being bullet hells; look at the Raiden series, for example. The main catch in that game is that your ship is extremely slow and you have to watch out for several targets that fire short-but-wide bursts of bullets, even during boss battles, instead of one single target that utterly covers the screen with bullets.

It's made even worse when that single target is a sappy, emotional and annoying loli anime girl. Rated U for "Ugh".

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Monkey King

"Classic" type shmups are every bit as much about memorization as "bullet hell" types, though. The former typically requires you to memorize what enemy pattern or giant attack is coming next, so you can avoid it in advance before it flies straight into you. A lot of those bosses tend to give you very little warning before their giant laser beams of death, which comes across to me as exceedingly cheap.

Taking your example, it sounds like the main survival strategy in Raiden is simply knowing in advance where to put your ponderous ship, since your slow speed precludes dodging those wide, short bursts if you don't know they're coming.

Actually, Raiden doesn't really depend heavily on memorization (or at least, not the ones I play). You can do a pretty good job at shooting the targets to smithereens before they open fire, you just have to remain really vigilant to see which targets come on screen, then shoot at them as soon as you see them. For example, once you see a vulcan turret or something, it starts rotating, and you're able to shoot it down before it makes your life miserable.

Originally Posted by Elixir

A person who likes shooters shouldn't provoke others who don't like certain types of shooters just because they don't play them - that's stupid.

No, it wasn't because I don't play/like bullet hells, it was just because... it's Touhou. My friend's idiotic narutard-esque fanboyism of that game was reaching critical levels and I just couldn't take it anymore. I wanted to remain friends.

Originally Posted by elixir

Also I'm guessing you haven't played dodonpachi daioujou, which REQUIRES you to know weak spots as well as dodging curtain fire plus chaining for lives you're going to be needing on stage 5.

Really? Yeah, I haven't played that game, and I've been meaning to, but from what the videos seen the bosses have no weak points. You just shoot at their huge bodies endlessly until they die. Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought that was the essence of bosses in bullet hells and CAVE games.

There's nowhere I can't reach.