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I love a good classic shmup. I haven't tried V. If you would be so kind as to point me at a ROM (I'm sure I have the original "locked in a drawer somewhere" cough cough) I will most certainly check it out.KluYa wrote:Heh... this takes me way back. That game is older than the carton of chocolate milk sitting behind my computer tower.
Mildly amusing title but without the zomg pr0n factor it hasn't much going for it.
Any Gradius V fans here? Now that's a quality shmup.
Just sold my GameCube version of Ikaruga for $35 on eBay. About $5 short of what I paid for it. Fucking waste of money!Zeus wrote:I'm an enormous Treasure fan and only dabbled in Gradius 5 a bit. It's Treasure so I'm sure it'll be great (look how awesome Astro Boy for the GBA turned out). I'm still working on Ikaruga on and off. We can get to the start of Level 4.
The game is a waste of money? Are you kidding me, it's freakin' awesome.SineSwiper wrote:Just sold my GameCube version of Ikaruga for $35 on eBay. About $5 short of what I paid for it. Fucking waste of money!Zeus wrote:I'm an enormous Treasure fan and only dabbled in Gradius 5 a bit. It's Treasure so I'm sure it'll be great (look how awesome Astro Boy for the GBA turned out). I'm still working on Ikaruga on and off. We can get to the start of Level 4.
Don wrote:Gradius, though, has enemies that just keep on shoot you based on your position forever. They're clearly meant to be killed to reduce the bullets you have to face, which means on the converse if you failed to kill enough enemies it is entirely possible to have so many things shooting at you that there is no way to dodge it whatsoever. This is why if you die even once in Gradius you might as well start over because you can no longer suppress the enemy fire. Compared to this, even the worst bullet hell doesn't have this kind of game over mechanism. You might lose your firepower which means the boss will take longer to die, which means there's more chance for you to die, but the boss and the enemies will never fire an unavoidable pattern simply due to the virtue of being alive.
You can beat Ikaruga without killing a single enemy if you're good enough. You can do this for Touhou or Mushihimesame or any of the crazy shooters if you're good enough. But you cannot beat Gradius doing this no matter how good you are. At some point the density of the bullet becomes undodgeable.
This leads me to believe that your definition of "expert" is synonymous with the word "SkyNet". You make me feel very bad about myself every time I actually understand how much more "insane gamer feat" cred you have than all the rest of us.KluYa wrote:
Don, Gradius V can be cleared start to finish without firing a single bullet. I've done this personally (I actually did press the button only to go through the regenerating wall in stage 4) and I don't consider myself an expert.
Because there is nothing about Gradius (I'm referring to V specifically just to make certain I know exactly what I'm talking about) that makes it any more about firepower than all kinds of other shmups out there. The game becomes easier in some respects after a death. You almost always recover your options, and sucking it up briefly while you collect the other power ups is not the end of the world. Attack patterns and level design were carefully thought through, and always allow for an out. We're talking about Treasure here... it's their trademark. Only on the highest loops will a bullet stream become impenetrable, forcing you to either destroy the enemy or fly ahead quickly before the stream blocks your progress, but the high loops are only intended for players who've mastered the game under normal conditions and want a better challenge. The majority of gamers out there need not concern themselves with any of that.Don wrote:I don't see how you can say Gradius is not a shooter based solely on firepower.
I'm thinking this has something to do with the YouTube vid I linked to. That video isn't indicative of the kind of challenge the casual player can expect to face on a normal playthrough - it's high loop gameplay meaning unless you manage to play through the whole game a few times in a row while the difficulty gradually increases to get to that point, you won't have to worry about bullet fire anywhere near that dense. =pReplay wrote:This leads me to believe that your definition of "expert" is synonymous with the word "SkyNet". You make me feel very bad about myself every time I actually understand how much more "insane gamer feat" cred you have than all the rest of us.KluYa wrote:
Don, Gradius V can be cleared start to finish without firing a single bullet. I've done this personally (I actually did press the button only to go through the regenerating wall in stage 4) and I don't consider myself an expert.
No, I was standing there after dying a few times thinking "Is this it?" Yes, you have the whole black/white thing and well, that's it. That's the whole game.Zeus wrote:The game is a waste of money? Are you kidding me, it's freakin' awesome.
What didn't you like? Was it too hard for you? Did you curl up in the fetal position in the corner licking your palms after playing it? :-)
Loops 31 to 256 are identical, and are also virtually the same as loops 11 to 30. There are japanese players who play on loop 256 "just to be sure", but the gameplay is more or less the same as loop 10 or 11. For the rest of you, as you put it, there's no point in wetting your pants over the difficulty on the higher loops if you're not good enough to get there in the first place. Stick to what you can handle. Considering that a piece of scotch tape over the X button can beat this game in like 80 minutes or so, I can't imagine it taking you too much longer than it takes the scotch tape. But, if you have better things to do with your time than play video games, more power to ya.Don wrote:If I recall 'high loop' refers to loop 255, like after beating the game continously for 254 times.
This conversation reminds me of the "Touhou for the rest of us" thread on the Chinese boards. A guy who is said to be 'not an expert' set out to capture Mokou Fujiwara's Imperishable Shooting in TH8, the final pattern of what is probably the easiest optional boss in the series. It took him something like 300 hours to capture Imperishable Shooting on a normal gameplay. If you're willing to spend that much time on a shooter you can eventually do it, but the rest of us generally have better things to do with our time.
Actually, since once there are no contiguous holes in the bullet pattern left for you to fly a ship through you generally DO die, and since having programmed these kinds of systems I know that there's no magical algorithm whatsoever that guarantees you that those holes are going to exist at any given second, I would say that's an accurate assessment.Don wrote:I think the hacked version of Touhou are even worse. They're described as having this wall of moving death coming in your general direction and when it reaches you, you die, even if you slowed down the game to 1/2 or more (nobody actually plays them at normal speed). Maybe if you've like DBZ powers to see what the eye cannot see you could play them... but other than that, they're clearly not meant to be played by normal humans.
I remember I had a hacked version of Super Mario Brothers. There's one stage where you start on top of a pit, and you just fall into it and die. There's no way to not die. That's what some of these games feel like.
Have there been any bullet-hell related hardcore "die of dehydration" deaths in Japan at this point? It seems reasonable to assume so given the information you're giving us on the genre.KluYa wrote:
Loops 31 to 256 are identical, and are also virtually the same as loops 11 to 30. There are japanese players who play on loop 256 "just to be sure",
All great games have simple concepts with excellent execution. If you make things too complicated it becomes a chore for the player rather than fun. Unless you're talking about the strategy and RTS crowd on the PC but they're crazy people :-)SineSwiper wrote:No, I was standing there after dying a few times thinking "Is this it?" Yes, you have the whole black/white thing and well, that's it. That's the whole game.Zeus wrote:The game is a waste of money? Are you kidding me, it's freakin' awesome.
What didn't you like? Was it too hard for you? Did you curl up in the fetal position in the corner licking your palms after playing it? :-)
Plus, what Don said about these games rings true. If only the experts can beat the game, then only the experts will bother playing the game. Sure, I'd like to have some hard strategy games sometimes, but at least I'm using my brain. And Ninja Gaiden was hard. But it was rewarding. When you finally got how to play, you got to see wicked combos and fun gameplay.
Bullet hell games are just mindnumbing and boring and insanely frustrating. I don't consider that "fun".
This is I think why I consider Gradius V one of the best shmups I've played. You said it yourself by pointing out that:Don wrote:There's nothing particular deep about memorizing certain patterns.
This IMO adds a lot to the replayability of the game, because there are many areas and enemies where you can't much rely on predictability. The area select and boss rush modes add a lot too.Don wrote:With the exception of Gradius series, just about every bullet hell game has a pattern that is always avoidable.
I don't see Ikaruga and Radiant that way at all. The level of depth comes in the fact that you can take it to a whole new level if you're good enough. But you don't have to beat it. You can memorize the patterns to a certain extent and you have many ways to make it through but the depth comes in mastering the gameplay techniques to make it much easier on yourself on the way through. When I played both Ikaruga and Radiant I noticed myself getting better and better at it and learned better and easier ways to make it through levels. Then you watch the masters who can control 2 ships at once and pull of crazy precise shit and you can see what you can really do with the mechanics.Don wrote:There's nothing particular deep about memorizing certain patterns.
GV is good because the game is about collecting power ups, and having a wide array of selection for those power ups. And it's about killing enemies, not dodging bullets. After all, Gaxalican and Galaga were never about dodging bullets, but killing enemies.KluYa wrote:This is I think why I consider Gradius V one of the best shmups I've played. You said it yourself by pointing out that:
