Any good 2d shoot-em-ups?

[J_C]

- usually very slow scrolling which makes the added environmental factors feel more static than something to be very careful of
- health bars in conjunction with unavoidable damage. Basically it's not the fact that the game has health bars in themselves that make the euroshmup what it is, it's the fact that they add the mechanic because the devs are unable to come up with thoughtful level design and patterns and inevitably introduce damage that is just not avoidable.
- more time spent on adding crappy gimmicks like adding mechanics to purchase weapons in lieu of polishing the core gameplay
- thoughtless placement of enemies, absence of distinctive flow/interesting routing to think of across levels, which ties to point 2 with healthbars. Barely any attempt at making level designs beyond of having to kill a specific turret or large enemy occasionally while the screen scrolls slowly. In japanese shmups, learning routes to preemptively kill enemies is vital. There are full sequences where things get very hairy if you're not already pre-positioning to hit before spawns.
- no concept of pacing, large quantities of enemies with inflated hp coupled with little player power progression (oh you can customize your weapons and buy new ones! but things will still die slowly no matter what).
- controls that feature gravity/inertia
- smudgy pseudo-realistic busy artstyles that detract from the focus on the core of noticing patterns and dodging them.

euroshmup wankery at its finest :

brown shitvomit covered in fog

No game exhibit every single symptom listed, but if you hit more than 3 chances are it's just euroshmup trash.

The TL;DR is that euroshmups are made by developers who try hard and stray as far as they can from the very essence of shmups : shooting and dodging. The design philosophy is to keep throwing stuff at the wall and hoping it sticks.

Thanks for the insight.

 

[Haba]

detract from the focus on the core of noticing patterns and dodging them.

Please remove yourself from the gene pool.

Seriously, modern Japanese concepts are absolutely degenerate trash. Learning out patterns by heart is not fun by any means.

Shmups used to be fun. Instead of having more games where we can enjoy greater deal of reactivity and environmental destruction, we get this:



I'm not a huge fun of the 3D effects and clutter, but I'll still rather play a game that was designed with the idea of having fun rather than one that is pure masochism and pattern memorization.

 

[Siveon]

Oh right, this is Japanese, but Darius Burst for PC is more Gradius than Touhou (bullethell). I personally love it.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Bought Jet's'n'Guns.
Earmarked DARIUSBURST Chronicle Saviours and Jamestown for later.

Edit. And Raptor too. It's been a while.

 

[RuySan]

Bought Jet's'n'Guns.
Earmarked DARIUSBURST Chronicle Saviours and Jamestown for later.

Edit. And Raptor too. It's been a while.

If you bought Jets n' Guns before Jamestown i hope it was a lot cheaper. Because that's the only excuse you'll have.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Bought Jet's'n'Guns.
Earmarked DARIUSBURST Chronicle Saviours and Jamestown for later.

Edit. And Raptor too. It's been a while.

If you bought Jets n' Guns before Jamestown i hope it was a lot cheaper. Because that's the only excuse you'll have.

Jets'n'Guns Gold 6,99€.
Jamestown 9,99€.
Liked Jets'n'Guns soundtrack more.

 

[J_C]

Was not aware about Jets'n'Guns, but man this looks and sounds gorgeous. Added to my wishlist.

 

[Durandal]

I enjoy killing lots of enemies and having upgrades to choose from, while not dying from one enemy bullet. This is what euroshumps are for me. I'm not saying they need to be easy, Hydorah being a good example of a hard shmup.

For me, japanese shumps are more about "git gud" to rank high in score. Not very fun.

/monocle engaged

It took me a while to realize that the reason for the rampant shit taste in this thread (save for a few posts) was because I was posting on the RPGCodex, where Tyrian, Raptor, and Chicken Invaders are considered the epitome of shoot 'em up game design (the shmup equivalents of Dragon Age: Origins and Oblivion to RPGs), quicksaving around every corner is considered the norm, and e-penii are measured by upgrades and levels instead of score and skill.

Fret not, not everyone can understand the joy of Arcade Gaming at first, or the underrated design brilliance of the Japanese Arcade Grandmasters. It is a path of determination and self-improvement one must walk on their own, for it requires intense practice and self-restraint to achieve the fabled 1-continue-clear for your game of choice. You may think that it's laughable to NOT use continues given their infinite nature and the perceived bullshit nature of Arcade Gaming, but the truth is that a 1cc is what most 90's era arcade games were essentially designed around. One of the reasons being that your score resets or is frozen when you use a continue, and the other being that creditfeeding robs any game of its intended challenge. It's about the same as savescumming your way through Max Payne. There is nothing preventing you from doing so and the game only autosaving during chapter starts does instill savescumming as a habit, but anyone would call you a kusoplayer if they saw your kusoplay of quicksaving with a 733Mhz frequency. Heck, Postal 2 even mocks you if you save too often.

There are a lot of different shoot 'em up subgenres, but because the "uuuuugh, WEEABOO" alert kicks in whenever a Codexer sees more than six bullets on screen, I'll try to keep the examples to more CASAUL-friendly and not as bullet-intensive for the retards who believe the absence of stage hazards in favor of enemy positioning and bullet streams as means of attacks to dodge doesn't constitute actual stage design.

KAMUI


The first game from the Tale of ALLTYNEX trilogy, and also a spiritual successor of RayForce (or by extent Soukyugurentai). The core of its gameplay centers around the lock-on system. Whereas RayForce could only lock-on to ships whenever you hovered the small crosshair in front of your ship over them and Soukyugurentai could only lock on to enemies within range of the ship, in Kamui you can lock-on to enemies across the entire screen, as long as they are flying beneath you. This is also what the scoring system is centered around. The power of your lock-on is tied to an energy bar which depletes whenever you activate your lock-on attack. The higher the energy bar is whenever you activate your lock-on the more ships you can lock-on to and the more damage you can deal, while also increasing the score multiplier which applies to each ship destroyed. Meaning that you can only get the maximum score if you don't spam the lock-on button and only use it when the energy bar is completely full, meaning you have to hold off on killing enemies if you want to get the most score, but spamming the lock-on only sends out a weak strike which can only destroy one or two ships at a time.

On top of that, you have your regular shot, but also the Thunder Blade. The Thunder Blade is a massive beam which CANCELS any bullet it hits, making it a lifesaver for getting out of sticky situations while dealing shittons of damage, but it must be used carefully. Using your Thunder Blade doesn
't consume energy, but rather it quickly overheats your energy bar, temporarily reducing the maximum energy level your energy bar can reach. The energy for your lock-on regenerates faster than it can cool down after using the Thunder Blade, meaning you can't use your lock-on at maximum power or for maximum score as long as the heat persists, so careful energy management is required. Using the Thunder Blade too much might get you out of sticky patterns, but it will gimp your lock-on and reduce scoring opportunities, and having your lock-on gimped might prove disadvantageous if you're facing ground enemies or ships flying beneath you which can't be reached with your normal shot while they can shoot you from any position.

Aside from the bullet canceling beam, Kamui also proves a little forgiving (some say TOO forgiving) by giving you a shield which can absorb 4 bullets (plus one if you count your hull) per LIFE (and you have two extra, coming down to around fifteen-twenty hits per run you can tank), on top of some shield pick-ups which allow you to tank one more. It's probably because of this that there are no extends tied to scoring, meaning scoring isn't essential for gaining more lives, but why wouldn't you try to get a better score anyways? The stages are well designed and so are the bosses, as getting the most points requires you to destroy their parts with your lock-on when they are changing height levels. The music is kick ass, and also has a MIDI version for nostalgiafags given that KAMUI is an old doujin game. The difficulty is forgiving enough that anyone should be able to beat it with some practice.

RefleX


You'd think that if Ikaruga's popularity resulted from an innovative gameplay mechanic whose workings were obvious from the surface and made it stand out from its peers, that the same would count for RefleX, but it's not like anyone pays attention to doujin games anyways.
Enter RefleX, the sequel to Kamui, featuring entirely different gameplay to boot. The main draw of the game is its reflecting shield mechanic, which renders you invincible to bullets as long as your shield is active and reflect bullets BACK to the enemy. The scoring is also centered around reflecting bullets and beams on top of keeping up a chain. The more enemies you can destroy with a single reflected bullet or homing beam, the higher your score multiplier gets. Your score multiplier drops really quickly when you aren't killing things, but you can at least prevent the combo from going to zero by continuously killing things with your normal shot whenever possible.
The amount of bullets you can reflect is tied to your energy bar. The more you reflect, the more it gets depleted. It can be recharged by not being used, but can be recharged faster by not shooting at all. This creates an interesting dynamic of shifting between offense and defense as you can't keep up your shield indefinitely, but you also can't shoot while your shield is activated. Meaning if you use it too much the amount of enemies on screen might overwhelm you if your shield is depleted, as not every single bullet type can be reflected, but all of them can be canceled (the shield won't protect you from colliding with other ships and missiles, however).

What's also great is its presentation, further aided by its excellent music. It's way more dramatic than Kamui or any other shmup where you fly in a straight line while killing waves of enemies interspersed by boss fights, RefleX is one of the better examples of telling a story through a shmup without (completely) resorting to cutscenes. Especially the last stage is quite brilliant, as I hesitate to spoil it. It's not some massive plot twist, but you'll know what I mean once you see it. It's also why you should probably play Kamui before RefleX as there's many references to Kamui in RefleX which you might miss out on otherwise. Here you can tank about seven hits before your ship is destroyed, but your ship gets repaired halfway through and one more time before the last stage. If you try hard enough, you can do it.

ALLTYNEX Second


WOAH SHIT SON, THREE DEE
Compared to the other two ALLTYNEX games (RefleX and Kamui), Second is a much tighter and refined experience. It doesn't have the presentation of RefleX or the originality of Kamui, but what it has is balls-to-the-walls aggression. The ALLTYNEX AI destroyed about 90% of humanity, so the human resistance slapped as much weapons as possible on your ship and sent you on a suicide mission to destroy the core. If you're wondering why the third game in the series is called ALLTYNEX SECOND, it's because this is actually a remake of the original ALLTYNEX game for the FM Towns and is actually a prequel to both Kamui and RefleX.
Your ship has your usual spread shot, but it has also a close-range sword attack that strikes nearby enemies and slashes away nearby bullets, it has homing missiles, and it has a massive Buster Beam which pushes back all bullets on screen whenever its fired while firing a massive beam that deals massive damage, all of which is tied to your energy bar. Using the Buster Beam and homing missile consumes energy, and your energy bar can charge several levels up to five. With each level the power (and more importantly) the width of your main shot is increased. The energy bar slowly regenerates, but it can also be filled up by energy chips dropped by killing enemies, which automatically home in towards you when you aren't using your swords.

The scoring system is also one of my favourites, as it requires you that you use all your weapons to your disposal, and this time around you do get extra lives for each seven million points you get. There's two main methods to scoring. Killing enemies with your sword or Buster Beam applies the current combo multiplier to the enemy's score value, and even if your combo is at 1x, killing an enemy with sword/Buster will always net you a x2 multiplier. The other is chaining popcorn enemies. If you kill several enemies in quick succession, an additional point bonus will be applied for each kill that increases with each kill up to an extra 25600 pts for each enemy. Each time you kill an enemy during the chain, your combo multiplier increases by one, but it doesn't apply to enemies killed during a chain. A chain drops very quickly, so if a second passes without killing anything, your chain is reset to 0, but your combo multiplier remains. Your combo multiplier also slowly decreases by one over time.

Popcorn enemies can be easily killed with your main shot and homing missiles, whereas larger enemies will go down within a few melee strikes. This creates an interesting dynamic where you first raise your multiplier by chaining as much popcorn enemies as possible while keeping up that chain, and then cashing your multiplier in by killing larger enemies with your sword/buster as they have a larger base point value. This is further enforced by the fact that your main shot is worse at killing large enemies than your sword/Buster, which is especially notable for bosses as you really have to get close and strike them with your blades to actually damage them. Your swords cancel bullets whenever they swing so you won't get raped from up close, but there is a small delay between the swings of your swords which may allow bullets to creep in, so caution is advised.

Your main shot is used for destroying zakos and maintaing your chain, homing missiles are used to keep up your chain by destroying enemies outside of your range, melee attacks are for dealing massive damage and the Buster Beam is for bullet canceling and destroying enemies at range for the multiplier bonus. The weapons are all quite well balanced out, and over-use of homing missiles and the Buster is punished on harder difficulties where they consume much more energy at the expense of your main shot.

It's also noticeably harder than the other ALLTYNEX games. Your only main means of defense is a protective shield which absorbs one additional hit per life, your swords which can slash away bullets at the expense of moving slowly, and the Buster which pushes back all bullets whenever activated. The close-range nature of the game might cause you to often crash into things or get killed by beams or bullets which just spawned (you can't cancel beams), and the game doesn't give you a guaranteed amount of extra lives as you're expected to score to last longer. But to me, this is my favourite in the ALLTYNEX trilogy. Later bosses can get quite devious as well, and there's a lot more score routes involved here. I think it just hits that hotspot where you just want to creditfeed it every now and then because of how fun the base mechanics are. As usual, the music kicks ass.

 

[warpig]

Install a PSX emulator and play Einhander.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Some of the hardest but best games are the Raiden Fighters series by Seibu Kaihatsu. Sadly the Steam version is shit because of timing issues (the arcade boards ran at a specific timing that's not accurately represented in the Steam emulation), but you can emulate it pretty well with Mame. Definitely recommended.

On the subject of Raiden, a fairly recent port of Raiden IV for steam is pretty good. It's not as good as the Raiden Fighters series but it's pretty decent on its own and runs pretty much flawlessly with no hassle.


I'm a fan of Raizing/Eighting shmups - Mahou Daisakusen (Sorcer Striker in the west), Armed Police Batrider, Dimahoo - these strike a nice balance between frantic action and bullet spam wankery. The games feature nice backgrounds that you actually kind of have to navigate (something usually reserved for horizontal shmups). Try it sometime.

I also like Toaplan proto-cave stuff like Batsugun and Dogyunn. Even early cave is decent with Donpachi. Later Cave is degenerate self-serving bullshit that people fool themselves into believing they like because they cream over Superplay videos and try to replicate everything.

 

[Durandal]

ESCHATOS


Eschatos is about as straightforward as it gets. Kill everything, and kill everything as fast as possible. You've got your powerful straight shot and a close-range wide shot, on top of being able to use a shield that cancels bullets. On top of that, you've got great usage of 3D graphics (aside from some annoying perspective screws) and a LEGENDARY SOUNDTRACK, so that's covered.

Stage design is more akin to older shmups which involves creative enemy design and enemy layouts, on top of a bullet hell. Thankfully your shield can absorb most bullets up to a certain point, but your shield can also be used to collide with enemies to kill them quicker. Note that your shield only protects you from the front and not from your sides, and thus won't save you from all collisions.

The scoring system is rather harsh, fully destroying two enemy waves increases your score multiplier by one while letting a single enemy slip by decreases it by one. It requires total destruction, and figuring out how to completely destroy each wave takes some practices. The timr it took to destroy each wave also affects your score.
There are no score extends here though, 1-ups are fixed drops and you get seven lives in total per run.

Eschatos can be quite challenging to get the hang of, but it's still very good.

Euroshmupfags should also try checking out Ginga Force for the 360 which is a shmup made by the same devs (and same composer), and features weapon loadouts in a shmup done right from what little I could tell. Don't mind the shitty character art too much, though.

Strania -The Stella Machina-


If you've played Einhänder, you might like this. It's a shmup where knowing what weapon to use during certain situations is what defines your success. There are several weapons, of which you can use two at a time while keeping one in reserve and being able to rotate your weapon order. Some weapons like Side (which fires only horizontally) or Bomb (which fires only backwards) can be very situational, but also more useful than your usual straight Vulcan. The Side is actually one of the most useful weapons in the game. The stage design is also rather unorthodox as it aims to make all weapons useful to some extent, meaning less bullet spam but more "actual level design" so to speak.

However, sticking to one weapon is a bad idea in this game. Different situations require different weapons to deal with, and the scoring system encourages you to use as many weapons as possible for the most points. Each weapon can be leveled up by killing things with it, but leveling up only gives you a score bonus that gets higher with each level as opposed to upgrading shot strength. It's more profitable to level up as many weapons as possible, as the exp requirements for higher-level weapons can be quite high while the score rewards don't increase after level 10.

On top of that you have the Overdose System, which is charged by just destroying things. Activating it makes you temporarily invincible, and applies a score multiplier which increases up to 2.0x the closer the invincibility is about to run out, and it's especially important to use for finishing off bosses as you can double the point value they hold.

Because it's made by G.rev from Border Down and Under Defeat fame, the 3D graphics look quite fancy. If you like mecha anime, you'll like this one.

It has a generous extend rate, and even though the bullet count isn't THAT high, you do have a very tiny hitbox. The first two stages are practically tutorial stages, but to make up for that the PC port includes the Vower Side DLC which adds seven new stages on top of the seven existing ones where you play as the rival pilot from the main story, playing through the story in reverse order while the main character from the main campaign is the reocurring boss this time around. Vower Side is also more challenging in general and features some new cool music. IMO I prefer Vower Side more, but you gotta start off somewhere.

Cho Ren Sha 68k


A legend amongst amongst doujin circles, CRS68k was made entirely by one guy as freeware homebrew for the Sharp X68000 with another guy doing the well-known soundtrack, and it got ported to Windows in 2001.

What makes this shmup good is EVERYTHING. While the gameplay is about as simple as it gets, the stage design is fucking excellent. The music is great. The difficulty curve is smooth, starting from doable at first to challenging later on without being impossible. The enemy sprites and boss designs look on par with arcade games of its era, the only shame is the same background being used for every stage.

What makes this shmup so beginner-friendly is the frequency of power-up carriers, which drop a triangle of pick-ups (a shot power-up, a bomb which cancels bullets when used, and a shield which absorbs one hit when you get hit), so you can repair your mistakes somewhat. However, it's also possible to get all three at once by weaving into the middle of the triangle and staying there, but it's tricky to pull off as the triangle is moving downwards meaning you need to keep that in mind, while enemies may be firing at you at the same time. This trick is also the main draw of the scoring system, as each time you grab a pick-up for a category you already maxed out, you get a point bonus instead which increases for every maxed-out pick-up up to 25600 points, while getting all three at once speeds up the process and gives you thrice as much points. Every 1 million points the next shield drop as part of the triangle is changed into a 1-up (provided you already have an active shield), which you can pull off the trick on at the risk of grabbing the wrong power-up.

It's not an understatement to say how great the stage design is. Every stage introduces a new type of enemy and enemy encounter, and mixes this up to its logical extreme until the stage ends, providing a great sense of pacing. All the bosses are incredibly inventive as well, one has you face off against a rush of giant airships which are as wide as the entire screen and require you to destroy at least part of them to get past unscathed, the first boss can be speedkilled by tricking the two enemies into firing their charged shots at eachother, while the true final boss is a massive boss version of your own ship.

Though there are a lot of bullets and your hitbox is quite forgiving, CRS68k is more about macrododging than micrododging, and has you use all your screen space to its fullest extent. With enough practice, anyone should be able to 1cc CRS68K. One thing of note for people with RSI is that CRS has no autofire, it demands that you tap the fire button repeatedly for developer-admitted nostalgia reasons, though achieving the maximum fire rate isn't too much of a problem. You can set up an AutoHotkey script if that bothers you too much. Aside from that there are some sound glitches on moderm systems which can be fixed by running the game on XP compatibility mode.

As it's freeware, you can download it here at the developer's site.

 

[Durandal]

detract from the focus on the core of noticing patterns and dodging them.

Please remove yourself from the gene pool.

Seriously, modern Japanese concepts are absolutely degenerate trash. Learning out patterns by heart is not fun by any means.

Shmups used to be fun. Instead of having more games where we can enjoy greater deal of reactivity and environmental destruction, we get this:

That is because you're the very definition of a pleb who considers Touhou indicative of modern (Japanese) shmups as a whole and needs fancy graphics and instant gratification to have fun only to never look back after 'finishing' it. You only glanced at the surface and judged an entire genre by a series of games whose main draw and cause for popularity isn't even the gameplay itself. You willfully cast your ignorant opinions on anything modern Japanese as 'absolute degenerate trash' without any understanding of the underlying game design or their appeal, merely believing anything that involves a high bullet count is all about tapdodging a zillion bullets while memorizing entire bullet patterns. Last year alone did we see the (Western) releases of Mecha Ritz: Steel Rondo, Raiden V, Sora, RefRain ~prism memories~, Wolflame, Dariusburst Chronicle Saviours in 2015 on top of Zangeki Warp this year and the PS4 port of Battle Garegga, all of which don't subscribe to your usual modern CAVE-style scoring and bullet patterns while managing to be original and innovative to a large extent (aside from Wolflame which is more or less ASTRO PORT's take on Raiden much like Satazius was on Gradius and Gigantic Army on Cybernator).

Instead the grandmasters of shmup design appear to be Nordic demosceners trying to emulate other classics, offering little in terms of mechanic depth and challenge but being all about making the player feel like a badass whether he actually deserves it. Euroshmups are treated like trash for good reason, many of them were developed during the era of the Amiga where developers were rather focusing on flexing their coding muscles and making all kinds of fancy shit happen on screen instead of making anything coherent mechanically, being only able to ape Japanese arcade classics without any understanding of why and how they work, aside from the genres pioneered by Western developers like point 'n click adventures and RPGs. Even today that cancerous philosophy shows its tendrils with crap like Soldner X-2 and Sine Mora. There's the occasional example of an euroshmup being able to elevate itself from the cesspool to being 'alright' like with Tyrian, but that's rather the exception than it is the standard. To make an ACTUALLY GOOD euroshmup like Ginga Force you need some base understanding of game design and not trying to fit as much viscera on the screen as possible, though it's possible to do both.

Had this not been the RPGCodex, you would have been justly laughed out of the thread and raised on top of the flagpole by your pants, but instead you seem to take pride into spreading decline wherever you go.

 

[RuySan]

Don't know how can tyrian can be objectively "alright". I'd rather have Apydia .

Sine Mora is indeed terrible, but while I never played ginga force, Jamestown is a great example of a well made western shmup

 

[Sykar]

SNES: Super Turrican, R-Type III, Super R-Type, Contra III, Sunset Riders, Megaman X, Super Metroid
DL the emulator and the ROMs from some page and have fun

I also played Katakis on C64 back in the day, but I have no idea if there are emulators available or the game itself.

 

[Crospy]

I do enjoy bullet hell games a lot, but japanese shmups is a pretty diverse and great genre and none of my recommended games are bullet hell so I don't know where this fag got the idea of mentioning touhou. OP specifically mentioned he doesn't want bullet hell games and my reading comprehension is clearly not as terrible as Haba's poor ability to understand human speech so I abstained from proselyting something OP has no care for.

Jap shmups have a core gameplay diversity that euroshmups couldn't even dream of despite all the gimmicks they pile on top. Just look at one of the most recommended one here, Jet N Guns, still exhibiting all the terrible traits down to super slow scrolling and even one level featuring screen covering fog.

This :


(the screen is barely legible too. Eurotrash love their mudbrown vomit stages and overall artstyles. Yellow bullets on the front, diarrhea in the background, what could go wrong?)

Versus :



With the detachable bullet cancelling laser ship :



I know which one I'd spend hours mastering the mechanics of.

Eurotrash players never even attempt trying to do no-damage challenge clears of their games like this :

(dude is also using a ship with no laser (which can clear be used for clearing bullets in detached modes, or for counterburst megadamage when timed against enemy's laser, and he doesn't use bombs)
Because the base mechanics are not sound enough to allow it. And it is one of the great depths found in a game like Darius, where you can first start playing with the arguably most newbie friendly ship, abuse the lasers, then get used to things like counterbursting, then decide to attempt a boss without ever taking damage/dying, then doing it without the laser, without counterbursting, without bombs on ships that can bomb etc. Then maybe you might end up trying to do an entire level like that. For some of the godliest of players, doing the entire game with no damage in a single sitting (Arcade mode). Other people will focus on how to more efficiently master the mechanics that lead to high scoring. Such games have infinite staying power. When you enjoy them you always find something new to try. Maybe you won't succeed, but it's about the journey and the fun it provides.

The only respectable euro games are the ones that actually seem to have learned a little from the japanese, like Jamestown. It was clearly made by someone who actually did look at japanese shmups before making it, or even maybe played them. It shows already as soon as you notice how clearly well defined bullets/generally dangerous things on the screen are and the overall great amount of contrast. With that said, it's still nowhere near the level of quality of the japanese classics. If it had been released by a jap dev it'd be considered average, worth playing a few times then putting on the shelves to go back to getting better at another game instead. For a western dev that means getting 10/10.

 

[Great Deceiver]

I generally what agree with what you're saying Crospy but even some classic jap shmups like Garegga have their very real problems - shitstain colour bullets and rank, namely, but mostly the bullet colour. That's not solely the domain of eurotrash. Early Raidens also have very difficult to read bullets...

 

[Crospy]

Which is why Bakraid did none of those things. Because some devs eventually learn. With that said, Garegga's only exhibiting one of the humongous list of faults of euroshmups so you're just nitpicking one single point of criticism. If every euroshmups could be even as close as to be as well designed as Garegga and only show one fault or two the name euroshmup wouldn't even exist as a derogatory designation.

 

[Durandal]

I generally what agree with what you're saying Crospy but even some classic jap shmups like Garegga have their very real problems - shitstain colour bullets and rank, namely, but mostly the bullet colour. That's not solely the domain of eurotrash. Early Raidens also have very difficult to read bullets...

Though I think discerning bullet color is more or less a personal (non-existing) problem as I never had this problem with Raiden at all, in the case of Battle Garegga you can change the bullet colors in the PS4 version.

and rank

The rank system in Battle Garegga is what comprises the deeper layer of its mechanics and the reason why Battle Garegga became such a classic. Watch this annotated superplay for more details.

 

[Great Deceiver]

That's debatable, to my mind rank is a coin-operated mechanism designed to give coin operators more money - as a former arcade owner, I can tell you that there's nothing that was less lucrative than one skilled player hogging the shmup cabinet all day long on two quarters. A close second would be a Pinball expert hogging the machine all day on two quarters.

The fact that people were willing to derive enjoyment from such a transparent moneygrubbing tactic boggles the mind, but autism has no limits I guess. It's easy to extol the virtues of a perceived brilliant system when you're in the comfort of your home with limitless time for practice.

 

[Crospy]

That's debatable, to my mind rank is a coin-operated mechanism designed to give coin operators more money

There is something deeply, deeply important to note about the rank system and regional differences that you may have overlooked if you only discovered this game on MAME and how much variation in difficulty it will induce. In its homeland, the game was not meant to be played the way it plays when you use the default settings of a western rom in MAME.

It is very important to note that Garegga has a very unusual game options setup as opposed to most other shootemups. Besides the standard control configuration of SHOT, SPECIAL WEAPON and OPTION (which can be mapped according to the player's preferences), and 3 LIVES (two in stock plus one active at start), the default Extend setting is at 1,000,000pts PER EXTEND.

Sega Saturn players don't need to mess with the options screen as the game defaults to this Extend setting automatically. However, MAME players will need to get both battleg (Garegga parent set) and battlega (Asian territories set). Load battlega in MAME, and when the game appears, press the TAB button, and negotiate to the Dipswitches menu. From here, change the Region to JAPAN, and the Bonus Lives option to NONE, then reset the emulation via the main TAB menu.

When the game reloads itself, check the copyright screen. If it says "This game is only for use in NIPPON..." then the Region setting changes have worked. Then wait until the title screen appears, and see if it says "1,000,000 Per Extend" at the bottom. If it does, then you're all set!

There is one way to make the rank go down - by dying. It creates some ridiculous scenarios where players will intentionally suicide at points to make the difficulty manageable, and can only properly clear it by scoring high enough to rack up extra lives. Then again, the non-Japanese arcade board removes the extend feature, screwing this all up rather royally.

What you said is very much true of the destiny that awaited this game in western arcades. A bit less so in the homeland that developed it in the first place. Not to mention, there is almost no such a thing as credit feeding in the Japanese arcade culture. Lines behind the cabs were large and it was customary to go back to the queue after either losing all lives in a run or finishing a 1cc. People learned the more intricate bits of the more complex arcade games by watching each other play and exchanging tips. They didn't sit all day long playing the game over and over until exhaustion.

And this is how I mostly approach arcade games at home too. I almost never play more than an hour of shmups in one sitting, most of the good games require a lot of concentration to play and like a real world sport, you don't get better by continuing to do attempts over and over 24h a day. And I spend probably as much time watching some of the super players recordings than I actually play.

The result is that most of the 1cc I got in shmups were had during my very first attempt of the day. I rarely got them on the few times I played endless fruitless sessions.

A very important thing to understand how to approach arcade games in general, and that includes Garegga, is to never continue. Period. You lost? either take some rest, light a smoke, or if you wanna keep playing, restart the game. No. Continue. Ever. It's 100% wasted time. You continue because you were not good enough in the last levels you reached to keep enough resources (lives, bombs, whatever) to keep you there. If you continue, you enter uncharted territories that will make you even more mad and it will teach you nothing about how to 1cc because the parts of the game you need to master a 1cc were the ones you just failed before continuing in the first place! Credit-feeding is an inherently wrong approach to arcade games.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Well, yes, but I don't know where you got the idea that I in any way do or support credit-feeding. I don't, and to this day I still quit any arcade game of this kind once my lives are up - I don't continue.

My post was from the perspective of an owned of a coin-operated establishment - you want people to keep pumping quarters into your machines, and I'm sure the makers of arcade boards also wanted the same thing.

Very much agree on short sessions and so on. It's part of the reason these types of games will never be reviewed well or understood by most people.

 

[The Fish]

I have to say, I'm really enjoying the snobbishness of jap schmup exponents here. I mean that seriously. We need to ridicule those who exhibit any plebish behaviour to have any chance of pushing back the wave of decline towards the witcher/bethesda containment forums.

 

[J_C]

A question to you guys: how do you perfer to control your shmups? I've been playing Tyrian and I find it impossible to play unless you use a mouse. You have to be so fast and precise, that a controller or keyboard does not suffice.

Jamestown is quite good with a controller, but a mouse is also a better choice there.

 

[orcinator]

Arcade culture is serious business.

Shame it's hard to find similar attitudes in many other places since everyone is used to having skill trees that allow you to improve your ammo storage capacity by 10% and turn your reticule red if you hover over an enemy's head (in addition to gameplay for bebies).


Now if only I could 1cc anything (got close to with contra:ss I guess)

 

[Durandal]

A question to you guys: how do you perfer to control your shmups? I've been playing Tyrian and I find it impossible to play unless you use a mouse. You have to be so fast and precise, that a controller or keyboard does not suffice.

Jamestown is quite good with a controller, but a mouse is also a better choice there.

Mouse controls? Most shmups don't support mouse control to begin with, as most shmups are balanced around fixed movement speeds whereas fluid mouse input requires your ship being able to dash around the screen at a moment's notice.
You're better off playing with keyboard or an arcade stick.