Ikaruga

[Mental]

...is like screaming punishment from God. No, I don't want to save the replay, I want to bury it in an unmarked grave in a disused cemetary in the middle of a flooded marsh at midnight. Why? Why the pain?

[SineSwiper]

MOTHERFUCKING THIS!!! So much THIS!

[Chris]

FOREHEAD DICKS! TACO SALAD! STRANGE MEATSACK!

[Mental]

...huh? O_o

[SineSwiper]

I would counteract with something, but I don't want to stoop to his level.

[Zeus]

But you know you can't stop playing due to the sheer awesomeness of the game....

[SineSwiper]

Goddammit, something that difficult is NOT awesome!

[Chris]

Goddammit, something that difficult is NOT awesome!

it's awesome. It's a bit like having your teeth pulled out with no drugs combined with awesome

[Zeus]

Goddammit, something that difficult is NOT awesome!

Again, it's not THAT horribly difficult. It's very tough, yes, but never to the point of being unfair.....as long as you're willing to work at and actually want to overcome the challenge.

[Don]

I just go to Youtube and find someone who can beat it on ultra super hard and imagine that was me. Lets you see the whole game without the hassle.

[Mental]

hahahahahahahahahahaha

[Don]

Goddammit, something that difficult is NOT awesome!

Again, it's not THAT horribly difficult. It's very tough, yes, but never to the point of being unfair.....as long as you're willing to work at and actually want to overcome the challenge.

I don't get how a shooter can be 'hard but not unfair'. You either can do it or you cannot. And overcome challenge doesn't mean 'keep playing until you win'. I know people rack up a hundred of hours of play time to beat Touhou on some of the harder modes and that's not just 'willing to work'. I don't know of anything besides MMORPG that has a longer time needed to just beat the game.

[Kupek]

I don't get how a shooter can be 'hard but not unfair'.

When advancing requires improving your skill at playing the game, it's always possible to avoid getting hit/dying/having bad things happen, and the game never violates its own rules.

[Don]

I don't get how a shooter can be 'hard but not unfair'.

When advancing requires improving your skill at playing the game, it's always possible to avoid getting hit/dying/having bad things happen, and the game never violates its own rules.

Ever seen one of those TAS Super Mario levels? Technically you could just play until you're so good that you can beat a level that needs to be slowed to 1/10 of its original speed to be beaten.

Just because something isn't impossible does not imply it is probable.

[Kupek]

And I would still call that fair - just brutally hard, and probably only fun for a handful of people.

[Don]

By your definition the only thing that'd be unfair is if you play a Super Mario level where it just dropped you into a pit and you died right away. I don't find that to be a very useful definition when discussing if a game is 'fair' or not.

[Kupek]

I would call that unfair, but it's not the only circumstance. If it's literally impossible to avoid getting hit, then I call that unfair. That sounds like a low bar, but many games fail to meet it. For example, I'm playing through Dawn of Sorrow on the DS, and there's a section with spinning blades. I'm not sure, but from what I can figure out, it's impossible to make it through the section without getting hit. I consider that unfair. (If it is in fact possible, and I'm just not good enough, then I'd consider that section "hard.")

As the complication of level design, enemy interactions and character abilities increases, it becomes increasingly harder to guarantee that your game is "fair."

[Zeus]

I don't get how a shooter can be 'hard but not unfair'.

When advancing requires improving your skill at playing the game, it's always possible to avoid getting hit/dying/having bad things happen, and the game never violates its own rules.

I would also add that it doesn't require an unrealistic improvement of your skill in too many intervals as well. If you have to get that much better at the game just to make it past a section of a level and have to do it again and again just to get through one of five levels, I would deem it to be unfair.

And Ikaruga doesn't require you to get THAT much better just to make it past the next section of a level. You do have to work at it for sure but it never felt unfair to me.

[Kupek]

I wouldn't call that unfair, but rather a poor difficulty curve. It's still bad design, just a different kind.

Also note that my definition allows for unfair but easy games. If designers realize their game is unfair, they can compensate by making some consequences less severe. That does not, however, address the fundamental design problem.

[Mental]

You do have to work at it for sure but it never felt unfair to me.

Let me ask you a question - if a large man came to your house, and beat you with a stick repeatedly, and by the end of it the beating hurt a tiny bit less because you'd learned how to block the stick with your forearms or your back instead of taking it full-on, would you consider that "fair"? Because based on my experience with this game that seems like something you might enjoy.

I beat Viewtiful Joe with Joe and Sylvia and got all the way up to Fire Leo (beating all the bosses and then the stone bosses) with Alastor and that NEVER felt as punishing as the first two levels of Ikaruga.

[Don]

I saw a Youtube video of a Korean grinder take on the vertical shooter genre that features a boss with something like 100 lifebars. The last stage took 2 hours to beat, but you got unlimited continues and the guy must have died several hundred times before beating it, and he wasn't even very good at the shooter genre.

And yet that'd probably be a 'fairer' game compared to most games of the bullet hell genre because unlimited continues goes a long way to balance insanity. Sure you can argue a boss that takes 2 hours to beat is insane but it could actually be done by anybody as long as you got enough patience.

I'm guessing Ikaruga has limited continues or possibly none?

[Zeus]

You do have to work at it for sure but it never felt unfair to me.

Let me ask you a question - if a large man came to your house, and beat you with a stick repeatedly, and by the end of it the beating hurt a tiny bit less because you'd learned how to block the stick with your forearms or your back instead of taking it full-on, would you consider that "fair"? Because based on my experience with this game that seems like something you might enjoy.

I beat Viewtiful Joe with Joe and Sylvia and got all the way up to Fire Leo (beating all the bosses and then the stone bosses) with Alastor and that NEVER felt as punishing as the first two levels of Ikaruga.

I beat Viewtiful with Joe and felt that its difficulty, even on Kids, was equal to that of Ikaruga. We made it to level 3 in a couple of hours and when I had my DC version, I made it to level 5 on my own. It's not impossible, you just have to work at it. There were some parts of Viewtiful that were as hard as anything I played in Ikaruga

[SineSwiper]

Uhhh...no. Viewtiful difficulty was easier than Ikaruga.

[Zeus]

Uhhh...no. Viewtiful difficulty was easier than Ikaruga.

Not much. It was fucking hard, even on Kids

[Mental]

It is ,much harder with Sylvia. You take double damage normally and quadruple damage while out of V-Power. Against King Blue, running out of V-Power is more or less certain death. According to GameFAQs, she's much faster and her VFX lasts longer, but I found these to be paltry advantages compared to getting clobbered by everything

Now, Alastor, he has to *spend* V-Power just to gain his special abilities. While you're in V-mode, your bar constantly drains. Once you're back to normal, you have to wait for your bar to charge all the way up again. This means you spend a good part of the game in "normal" mode. You get better sword combos than Joe plus a double jump (Alastor can float after jumps in VFX mode), but again, the fact that you get double damage half the time with him makes those advantages a bit hard to love. I will let you all ruminate on how hard you think it was to get all the way past the first five levels and past the stone bosses with that dude. At Fire Leo, I eventually just gave up.

If you beat it with Alastor, you get Captain Blue, who has a cool jump and hover ability but never sees any skull markers (the same as Ultra-FX mode). Ever, on any mode. This makes dodging a real, real bitch.

Viewtiful Joe is one of those games that just never stopped getting harder, and it was hard to *start* with. Anyone who beat it with Blue has accomplished something as hard as probably exists in videogaming generally.

[Eric]

WoW decided they liked Ikagura too. Check out the encounter

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4q750BwHws&hd=1

[Don]

I don't think Ikagura has a patent on 'two opposite elements where you absorb one but not the other.' That's probably where they got the idea but the resemblance is fairly superficial relative to MMORPG mechanics.

I guess it's better than calling any adventure game with a large world without stages to be copied from Castlevania, though.

[Don]

I remember there was a video on youtube on the best of Touhou, and it started with a warning sign that says:: "Gameplay is done by professional players. Do not try this at home." It's funny and yet surprising true. The chance of an average person getting to a lunatic Scarlet Fantasy let alone clearing it isn't really that much better than the chance of that same guy doing some kind of death defying motorcycle stunt.