Deathsmiles

[M'k'n'zy]

Anybody here who is a fan of a good bullet hell game should check this one out. I picked it up when it first came out and have greatly enjoyed it as well. One thing I really like is that each character has a clearly defined hit box which makes dodging much easier

[SineSwiper]

You damn geckos and your ability to see in two directions at once.

[Don]

I really don't like Cave games where it's hard to tell what the heck is going on in the screen, and it's hard to justify buying magical girl themed game when none of the girls look remotely attractive. Maybe it's the style.

[Zeus]

I'll wait 'til next year when they drop the limited edition to next to nothing. I can't justify $50 for any shooter anymore. I love 'em but not that much

[SineSwiper]

Especially when you can find about 10-20 good shooters for $1 each at the indie section.

[Don]

I looked up on some reviews and they basically say the same thing. And here selling shooters for like $20 or even $5 makes a lot of sense since it can't possibly cost very much to develop one of these games, so it's not like you have to worry about budgets. They even have build your own shooter engines that you can use. I mean some games like Ikaruga or Gradius V or Raiden at least looked like someone might have spent some time doing the graphics, but a lot of these games realy look like barely more advanced than the SNES era.

[SineSwiper]

Not to mention the ton of shooters from MAME.

[Zeus]

Especially when you can find about 10-20 good shooters for $1 each at the indie section.

There's an enormous difference between the indie shooters and games like Raiden. $30 is about right for a shooter now. It's like asking $60 for King of Fighters 12, it's just silly

[Don]

Raiden looks like it may have actually required someone on the graphics department to do. You can be pretty cheap on graphics with a shooter especially if you ended up making a game like the standard Cave shooter where it's not even possible to see what's going on including the boss so everything could've been just a single pixel and you'd never be able to tell the difference.

Of course I don't think Cave games are necessarily good shooters.

[SineSwiper]

What is a "cave shooter"? Are games like Life Force / Gradius "cave shooters" because you can hit the walls?

[Don]

Cave is one of the few companies that still make shooters, including the one mentioned in this thread. Their shooters seem to be characterized by having powerups/points in the same color as the bullets and in general being next to impossible to actually see what's going on. I pulled up some videos of Ikaruga again and you can clearly see most of the screen even with all the bullets so there's actually a reason to spend effort into making something that looks presentable.

Most Japanese bullet hell games just puts so much stuff on screen where it is no longer possible to yourself, the boss, or anything else and if you go that way you might as well go cheap on graphics since you'll never see it anyway. To even get a good screenshot of these games you have to use a bomb first to clear the bullets or you'l never get a good screenshot of whatever you're trying to capture that isn't the bullets.