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

Originally Posted by PsychoJosh

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.

"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. It's more about rote memorization than flying skill.

This would be why a lot of people consider those massive bullet spread games to require more skill. You may very well know what's coming, but it's not just a matter of parking your ship in the right spot ahead of time; you still have to have the evasion skill to get through all that. And sometimes it really is kind of rough to safely land a hit on the boss.

Different strokes for different folks. I've personally come to really hate "traditional" horizontal shmups because of their infuriating habit of having enemies come at you from behind, where you can't shoot them at all.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Sword Familiar

It's funny how most of the points I tried to make about Ikaruga were lost in the other thread and reappear in here. Sure, I exaggerated by referring to it as "bullet hell", but I made points about memorisation that went unnoticed. Overall, you seem to share the same opinions about shooters as I do. I could have phrased it a hell of a lot better, but my focus really wasn't on discussing shmups in general.

I guess I just wanted to say that I like "shooters with atmosphere" better than those that rely on memorisation. The Gradius games always did it for me, especially "Gradius Gaiden", where the atmospheric experience itself, and the nostalgia, is more important than earning the top score.

I'd still argue that the "other" kind of shooters require way more memorization than "bullet hell". If you don't know what giant assfuck attack is coming when the boss waves his claws around in circles, there's still the chance that you can pull through by the skin of your teeth with some fancy flying. I like that a lot better than SURPRISE SCREEN-FILLING LASER BEAM, if for nothing else than the illusion that I have a prayer.

I do dig neat atmosphere in a game, of course. Darius Gaiden is one of the ones I've been having fun flying through. I still find it irritating how the game is also a cheap son of a bitch, even though MAME means never having to spend real quarters. Do the two really have to be mutually exclusive with one another, though? Maybe it's just a matter of pacing.

Also, Qwarky is dead on about the games' individual gimmicks varying wildly. Sometimes it's neat, and sometimes it's Guwange with its stupidly cumbersome spirit bomber thingy. Some bullet hell games are just not fun, whether you like the genre or not.

How ya doing, buddy?