Has there been a good shoot 'em up made in the last 5 years?

[Don]

Talking about original releases here, so recycled games on Virtual Console or whatever doesn't count. I'm looking for something costing in the $20-30 that's actually beatable by normal people and a game that looks no worse than say Stargunner: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71wNGchneAQ released in 1996. Okay so Stargunner didn't have unlimited continues by default but there's always some cheat code you put in to get the equivalent and that's not very hard to find. Or how about something like Raiden where you at least have enough continues and bombs that you'll probably be able to beat one loop of the game even on a high difficulty level (won't have any score worth mentioning but you can probably bomb your way to victory)? Is it too much to ask for a game that you can actually beat? I mean most of the shooters have some kind of scoring system so repeatedly dying or just not beating it awesome enough isn't going to get you a good score anyway and that's fine with me. If the game is sufficiently good I might want to get better at it too but I think game makers have it backwards. It's not that I can't beat the game so I should want to play it more, it's that I should be able to beat the game on first try and if the game is good enough it'd make me want to try it on harder settings. The last shooter I bought with $ was Gradius V and I never got past stage 4 or whatever and it'd take 20 hours of gameplay to unlock unlimited continues. I tried to start it up and pause it for an hour but that didn't work so I never touched it again. When I had less things to do with my time I did work my way to the second to last level in Gradius 3 but honestly Gradius 3 wasn't that hard until you get to the second to last level where if you die once you might as well start over from the first stage again, but even despite that at least you could get to the second to last level.

[Zeus]

Have you tried Sine Mora or Deathsmiles? I haven't but I heard they're pretty solid

[Don]

Deathsmilies seems like a completely generic bullet hell and the other game doesn't seem to go far enough to innovate. I mean do either game even have unlimited continues? If I want a good shooter that I can't beat I'll stick to Touhou 6. I pretty much won't touch a shooter without unlimited continues because there had been exactly 2 shooters I've played in the last 10 years that's good enough where I want to learn to how to beat it instead of just play something else. The real problem I've with shooters now is that anything that's equivalent of 'normal' for a bullet hell you're likely to die on stage 2 or 3 or so assuming you don't play this all this time and the game assumes you think it's awesome enough that you ought to keep playing to get to the later stages but in this day and age there are generally way better games to just move onto instead. And it's not like we're talking about some earthshattering innovation here. A system like Touhou: Concealed the Conclusion where your performance determines how much time you have to beat the final boss (it can easily be 0, in fact 0 is likely the value you'll see the first few times you got there) and the game is very generous to ensure that you can definitely get to the final stage even on the hardest difficulty, but you'd just have absolutely no chance of earning enough time to even have a shot at the final boss without mastering the advanced mechanics. But you can see what the entire game has to offer on first try so you might actually want to learn how to get better at the game so you can go from 0 seconds on time gauge to the 6 minutes you need to actually beat the game.

Edit: I checked out the Youtube clip for Sine Mora and it says it has no rapid fire. I mean, seriously, what the heck? I thought we went backwards enough when certain shooters stopped having unlimited continues or continues for that matter (Touhou 10 and up) but it seems we didn't go further back into enough to the Stone Age for some developers. We don't even see games that match the quality of say Raiden 1 and 2, which isn't saying much since Raiden was always an overpriced shooters but at least you have like 9 continues to actually beat the game. There's really no reason to master the game but at least you might finish the game instead of just throwing it away like what I did with a lot of other shooters.

[SineSwiper]

Why don't they make shooters like Gradius and R-Type? I want to fucking bleed weapons.

[Don]

Why don't they make shooters like Gradius and R-Type? I want to fucking bleed weapons.

The problem with those type of shooters is that it's pretty much one and done. If you ever die at any point you no longer have the firepower to suppress the enemy and then you just keep on dying. I remember on Gradius for the SNES you can basically not die until the second to last stage and if you die even once it's usually game over because you'll never get enough power ups to do anything useful unless you died on the boss gauntlet stage. So it's pretty cool while you have your power ups but once you lose it, it really sucks. Raiden I think had the right idea with the random full powerups that drop from enemies or from you dying so at least you have a shot at getting things under control again.

[Zeus]

Why don't they make shooters like Gradius and R-Type? I want to fucking bleed weapons.

Not flashy enough. That's important in shooters now.

[SineSwiper]

Why don't they make shooters like Gradius and R-Type? I want to fucking bleed weapons.

The problem with those type of shooters is that it's pretty much one and done. If you ever die at any point you no longer have the firepower to suppress the enemy and then you just keep on dying. I remember on Gradius for the SNES you can basically not die until the second to last stage and if you die even once it's usually game over because you'll never get enough power ups to do anything useful unless you died on the boss gauntlet stage. So it's pretty cool while you have your power ups but once you lose it, it really sucks. Raiden I think had the right idea with the random full powerups that drop from enemies or from you dying so at least you have a shot at getting things under control again.

So true. I remember playing the original R-Type (on a 800XL, actually) and a death meant an instant reboot. I played that game way more than I should.

Not flashy enough. That's important in shooters now.

Well, yeah, but where IS the flash? I see nothing like that in shooters. Most of them are "Hey, here's a ship and he shoots crap... oh, and the difficulty is ELEVEEENTY BILLION!!!ONE!!" In this day and age, it's like re-releasing Pong over and over again.

[Zeus]

Considering how hard-core the entire genre's become, if you make an "easy" game, it will be automatically dismissed unless it has a hook (like Retro/Grade; but that game's HARD on higher difficulties). No one wants Gradius V or R-Type Final, they want Ikaruga. That's the only way the genre survives now

[SineSwiper]

I blame xenoism.

[Don]

Shump being a hardcore genre is a myth. In the annual Touhou surveys conducted by the biggest fansite (they get 20K responses so it's a statistically significant sample) you'll see 40% of the people who responded never beat the game on a difficulty higher than easy, and depending on which game you're talking about it's not unusual to see 25% who never beat the game at all and that's only counting the guys who didn't lie about what they can beat. Extra mode usually hovers between 20-50% completion rate on these survey too, again varying widely depending on the actual game. If you look at most of the Youtube equivalent of stuff of the 'hard' games you'll see that the top players abuse game mechanics to the point it's almost like playing godmode. The least well received Touhou game on those survey is TH11 which is probably the hardest overall games (most of the bosses have ridiculously long lifebars) while the 'EZ-mode' TH8 is consistently rated the highest out of the Touhou series, by the Japanese.

Maybe it was okay 15 years ago to have a 'one and done' shmup but people don't got the time for that kind of thing. I don't mind if the last stage just utterly stomps you but don't make it take 15 minutes to get there and then you die with no chance of recovering. A stage select or say the ability to continue where you died instead of getting booted to whatever the last save point is would work. I remember getting to the second to last stage in Gradius with like 15 lives that accumulated and after you die once it's almost a bad thing to have so many lives because your chance of getting anywhere is practically 0 but you probably won't give up because you think you have 15 lives even though it could be 150 lives and it wouldn't make much of a difference. At the very least you should always be allowed the option to start at the last stage to practice because we all know stage 1 to n-1 pretty much is nothing in a shmup. I think most people forgot the fact that shmup used to have an arcade origin so the goal is suck up as many quarters as possible but that's totally unapplicable at home. There's no real reason why you shouldn't have unlimited continues or just unlimited lives. If you like the game you'll eventually get good to a point where you don't need them and if you don't like the game at least you might be able to finish it and less likely to tell other people how this game was a waste of money because you never got past stage 2 (you obviously wouldn't tell them that part of course). I started playign TIE Fighters on invulnerable mode and eventually beat the game getting almost everything on the regular mode, and on the hard missions it actually helps a lot to have god mode to see where you really have to be for objectives that you can't afford when you're not in godmode.

I don't even think Ikaruga is necessarily that hard in terms of the crazy shmups coming out of Japan, but it's one where memorization seems 100% necessary because you can't expect to out-reflex anything given the game is designed that you're supposed to be in the right polarity to not instantly die. It's not this is inherently bad but shooters should not be 100% memorization. The old Gradius/R-Type you can pretty much just wing it until you get to the bulldozer stages. You don't need to memorize anything with your max power R type laser that shoots 8 different directions or a standard 4 option laser because everything sort of just melts when they pop up on the screen and that's perfectly fine.

I think with the bullet hell games you start having games more about what the enemy is shooting at you, not what you're shooting at the enemy with. For a game focused around player's power you also have huge issues with suppression. Gradius's E. Laser can pretty much one shot a boss when you got 4 options firing at the same time and that's not very fun either. Part of the reason why Gradius/R Type games are impossible once you die is because the game is built around you suppressing everything, and even the bosses you pretty much kill them in 20 seconds with your max powerups and that's usually short enough of a time for most people to dodge the stuff. It's no coincidence the bulldozer stage in Gradius is the spider mech where you can't just easily (if at all) with lasers. Of course 75% of the bullet hell games can't even have stuff shooting at you while still allowing you to keep track of where your ship is and that's a huge problem when you die because you have no idea where your ship is anymore. For all the talk about Ikaruga's bullet density (which isn't even very high compared to a bullet hell), consider that you're always immune to at least half of the stuff on the screen once you know the polarity patterns, there's actually a lot of breathing room, and most importantly you can also see where you are fairly reliably.

[SineSwiper]

I think with the bullet hell games you start having games more about what the enemy is shooting at you, not what you're shooting at the enemy with. For a game focused around player's power you also have huge issues with suppression. Gradius's E. Laser can pretty much one shot a boss when you got 4 options firing at the same time and that's not very fun either. Part of the reason why Gradius/R Type games are impossible once you die is because the game is built around you suppressing everything, and even the bosses you pretty much kill them in 20 seconds with your max powerups and that's usually short enough of a time for most people to dodge the stuff. It's no coincidence the bulldozer stage in Gradius is the spider mech where you can't just easily (if at all) with lasers. Of course 75% of the bullet hell games can't even have stuff shooting at you while still allowing you to keep track of where your ship is and that's a huge problem when you die because you have no idea where your ship is anymore. For all the talk about Ikaruga's bullet density (which isn't even very high compared to a bullet hell), consider that you're always immune to at least half of the stuff on the screen once you know the polarity patterns, there's actually a lot of breathing room, and most importantly you can also see where you are fairly reliably.

That's my biggest gripe: I shouldn't be staring at my ship all the time. It's mostly about looking at the situation of enemies and occasionally making sure you're not in big trouble with bullets.

I think Rez did this very well with its perspective. Why oh why did the sequel have to suck so much...?

[Don]

At some point in time it seems to be decreed that you can't ever have a 'clear' screen in a shmup without using a bomb. I hate using bombs because they pretty much are never balanced (almost always do way too much damage and invariably encourages dying as a way of beating the game, and often you even get a better score that way). I shouldn't have to be constantly moving beyond just patrolling the top/bottom of the screen if I have 4 options with a laser out in Gradius. Your generic enemies shouldn't even have a chance to shoot at you in these conditions and that's fine. It's also equally fine that you enter the action packed part and you get owned, but I'd like to do something beyond constantly dodging stuff for 15 or 30 minutes. If you look at a game like Gradius or Raiden, the non boss stuff is generally very low intensity outside of a few special cases and I think that's what made it great. You don't have to be on your A game while plowing through a bunch of stuff that really shouldn't be a threat to you. That's probably why even though you know the R-Type/Gradius system is one and done and frankly stupid you can actually bear with it because there's a lot of garbage time going from stage 1 to n-1 where you're just piling up the powerup, points and extra lives. It's pretty much a warmup and you can sort of just screw around until the game merciless beats you down. In a modern bullet hell game if you try to take it easy you'll probably die by stage 3 and even if you didn't screw up spectucularly bad, getting to the last stage with 2 lives is probably not going to cut it. I know I always had a ton of lives before I die in R-Type or Gradius, not even because I'm good, but it's more like if you can't casually rack up 10 lives you probably have no chance of beating the final stage, and sure those extra lives really don't help you much but it's still better than going in there with only one life, even if it's almost exactly the same thing.

[Don]

I think one of the biggest culprit for the stagnation of the genre is the bomb. I'm not sure which game came up with this, but it's probably Raiden, or at least that's the one I remember seeing in the arcade. Raiden is a standard suppression type shooter where if you died once you're probably doomed, so they throw you in some bombs so you can at least make some attempt at a comeback and it works well enough, though even there you start seeing problems as on the harder stages you basically just drop your 3 bombs and then immediately die and get 3 more bombs and that's a far more effective way of beating the stage than actually trying to avoid the stuff.

But in the newer games you basically have bombs as a 'rich gets richer' deal. This is even true in Ikaruga where you'll see the top video plays makes heavy use of the charged shot (equivalent of the bomb) since it does massive damage and there's really no reason to not use it, though at least it didn't make you invulnerable. This means if you're good enough the game actually becomes easier. On the other hand for someone struggling to figure out how to soak up enough bullets to charge up the shot you might never fill your meter before you die, and then you decide to look to see how the expert do it and it's not unusual to see a replay where a guy has the charged shot fully charged at all times. There are way too many bullet hell games where you can see top level playing all revolve around abusing bombs, and makes you wonder why you're trying to get good at this shooter and learning the patterns when you see the top players just keep on chug bombs in the general direction on the enemy. I assume there are two primary motivation for playing a shmup:

1. Blow a lot of stuff up.
2. Dodge stuff with mad skills.

For #1 you don't need the bomb because your generic power up system has more than enough for that. For #2 you obviously aren't dodging anything when you get a screen clearing bomb. It's funny that people into these genre seems to frown on god mode and yet you'll see a replay of a top player just drop a bomb on the boss, hug it and use the invulerability frame to kill the boss before the invulnerability frame ran out, which takes no skill at all beyond knowing how much health the boss has so whether your invulnerability frame lasts long enough to take out the boss or not. Honestly I think people just aren't as good as they think they are. Just like in Civ 5 everyone says they cleared it on Deity but the achievement shows only 1% did it, I'm hard pressed to find most people can even clear the 'normal' setting of a modern bullet hell game even with your standard 3 continues let alone without. But you can do it if you abuse the bomb and since the average bomb in the average bullet hell games does at least 20% of the final boss's health bar and you start with 3 of them, this means the game gets stupidly hard assuming you'll just bomb nonstop and I really don't think that's how a serious shmup player would play the game. It's probably not a coincidence that all the Touhou challenge levels, especially the fan made ones, has boss that start with complete bomb immunity because otherwise anybody could complete them on one credit.

They really need to back to stuff where you could get powerups like Gradius/RType as long as the game has a reasonable mechanism to ensure you shouldn't immediately restart your game if you die even once. Sure, the bomb is one way to solve this, but it's just not a good way to solve it, especially when you've the standard '3 bombs per life' game where you'll commonly see people simply die to get more bombs because it saves time and usually gets you more score anyway for killing the boss faster. UN Squadron had one Mega Crush you can use (2 if you bought the super plane) and that seems about right for the number of emergency bailouts. You didn't use the Mega Crush unless you're about to die or you just need to do a ton of damage immediately and that's how bombs should be used, not something where you just drop 3 of them as soon as the boss becomes vulnerable.