Doomworld's list of videogames that are just plain unfair

[Grain of Salt]

13 hours ago, Daytime Waitress said:

Yuge has said that Same3's brutality was the result of pressure from arcade operators, not just Toaplan overcompensating for player skill (vid link timestamped; quote will pop up after a couple of seconds of preamble/context from Junkie).

 

That sounds similar to what iirc Yagawa said about the rank system in Garegga, that it was more prompted by arcade owners telling them they needed to make games harder than by their own difficulty preferences.

 

I definitely remember hearing some anecdote about a tester of Samesame saying that they could not accept such an easy game as the successor to Hishouzame... but idk, maybe that's just apocryphal. And there's a huge leap between "easier than hishouzame" and the arcade version of samesame. It's like going from plutonia to untitled2.

 

I agree with this video in that I find Samesame quite fun to just dip into without having any expectation of 1ccing or even being able to get through most whole stages. It's kinda like Dangun Feveron in that the intense bullet speed makes it a lot of fun when you're actually managing to stay alive. When you discover that you can consistently dodge a certain fast pattern by nipping into a specific spot, it's awesome.

 

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I'm as in the dark on Tatsujin Ou as you, though: it appeared to be a bit of a fuck you to hyper skilled players lmao.

 

One thing about Tatsujin Ou is it was apparently completed in a bit of a rush -- as evidenced by the fact that after a certain point (stage 3 maybe??) the bosses stop giving you bonuses for killing them (like you just get 0 points when they die iirc). However, clearly the pixel art alone represents a ton of work, so it's not like the whole game could've been made in a rush... surely.

 

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If the density and intensity of projectiles weren't enough, you also had to contend with a power-up system similar to that of Kyuukyoku Tiger/Twin Cobra, where you'd spend an inordinate amount of time dodging weapon swaps to not kill your upgrades.

 

Oh yeah I forgot about that, heh. Iirc they even made the weapon pickups you don't want to get last longer onscreen than the one you do. It does lead to some interesting meta though, like that thing where people pick up the red(?) weapon before the segments of those medium-sized ships that all drop weapon powerups, so that they all drop the powerup you actually can pick up and you're not dodging green weapon pickups for the next two minutes.

 

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I feel like I'm cherry-picking by talking about Toaplan, because they were a shining exemplar of "best practice", but I feel like discussing them is important when getting back to what Lamby said above:

 

Although I like and admire Toaplan, I've never been able to fully get into their style outside of a few specific games (ktiger is great for example), because of a few key gameplay things that I dislike, like speed pickups, roving enemies that can easily collide with you if you don't know their path, overly repetitive/tedious sections, overly orthogonal/symmetrical stage layouts.....

 

When it comes to 90s style shmups I generally prefer Raiden... which is weird because Raiden is supposedly a ripoff of the Toaplan style, and yet it doesn't have several key elements of Toaplan gameplay. I won't argue that Raiden is as "fair" as similar Toaplan games though... the final boss of Raiden 1 seems to be designed around saving up all your bombs and using them there (if you don't know the random safe spot). And of course Raiden 1 checkpoints are ridiculous. And in Raiden stuff a pixel away from you that you can barely see will fire at you point blank and you'll be like "what even killed me". And every boss after stage 2 has attacks that are just too fast for me to react to. Hm.

 

This is great, we should only discuss shmups on this forum. Who cares about doom.

Edited May 25 by Grain of Salt

[Daytime Waitress]

3 hours ago, Grain of Salt said:

I agree with this video in that I find Samesame quite fun to just dip into without having any expectation of 1ccing or even being able to get through most whole stages. It's kinda like Dangun Feveron in that the intense bullet speed makes it a lot of fun when you're actually managing to stay alive. When you discover that you can consistently dodge a certain fast pattern by nipping into a specific spot, it's awesome.

 

Yeah, for all its bastardry, Same3 still feels like an evolution of Toaplan's style: you're slow in comparison to enemy bullets, but you're trying to even those odds with a combination of consistent movement and sheer firepower - the screen-filling flamethrower is still awesome 35 years on! The intense bullet speed is absolutely integral to repeated play, too: in some STGs you can find yourself nodding off once you've mastered the first few levels, but even the lowliest Toaplan zako will catch you if you napping.

 

3 hours ago, Grain of Salt said:

One thing about Tatsujin Ou is it was apparently completed in a bit of a rush -- as evidenced by the fact that after a certain point (stage 3 maybe??) the bosses stop giving you bonuses for killing them (like you just get 0 points when they die iirc). However, clearly the pixel art alone represents a ton of work, so it's not like the whole game could've been made in a rush... surely.

 

Not too certain about its development history, but it's not unreasonable to think that maybe the people responsible for the graphics had all their stuff ready to go, and the programmers could get that in, but not tie everything together. Although I don't know if labour was so heavily divided and categorised at that time...

 

3 hours ago, Grain of Salt said:

Oh yeah I forgot about that, heh. Iirc they even made the weapon pickups you don't want to get last longer onscreen than the one you do. It does lead to some interesting meta though, like that thing where people pick up the red(?) weapon before the segments of those medium-sized ships that all drop weapon powerups, so that they all drop the powerup you actually can pick up and you're not dodging green weapon pickups for the next two minutes.

 

Another reason I love the M2 ports: allowing you see under the hood and making clear what other poor bastards had to suss out through many hours of dedicated play!

 

3 hours ago, Grain of Salt said:

Although I like and admire Toaplan, I've never been able to fully get into their style outside of a few specific games (ktiger is great for example), because of a few key gameplay things that I dislike, like speed pickups, roving enemies that can easily collide with you if you don't know their path, overly repetitive/tedious sections, overly orthogonal/symmetrical stage layouts.....

 

I think the frustration born of the latter two criticisms definitely contributed to Ikeda/Cave in general's ethos of stripping out any "dead air" and making all their games full throttle all the time.

 

Personally, at my current skill level, I find both KTiger and Same3 are just that little bit too close to endurance tests. I can appreciate the evolution of the company's style, especially in regards to higher skilled players, but for me HSZ is just so tightly designed that it's damn near perfect. I know a lot of folks would bounce off of it for not being as flashy as anything in the genre since (or even contemporaneously?), but it's so good at what it does.

 

3 hours ago, Grain of Salt said:

And of course Raiden 1 checkpoints are ridiculous. And in Raiden stuff a pixel away from you that you can barely see will fire at you point blank and you'll be like "what even killed me".

 

Once you've recognised those characteristics, it definitely makes you appreciate how much thought Toaplan put into those aspects compared to everyone else! But for whatever faults it possesses, Raiden definitely takes a lot of Toaplan DNA and does a lot of good with it. As I mentioned of Toaplan at the top of this post, Raiden, too, makes practically everything lethal until you learn how to deal with it effectively, and that's absolutely key to its longevity and all 'round ability to be enjoyed.

[Archvile Hunter]

On 5/15/2024 at 11:47 AM, DynamiteKaitorn said:

Muse Dash - Any 8+ star difficulty track. Some songs go so mental with the amount of notes you need to hit even the autoplay mode looks like it is having a seizure trying to keep up with the game.

You know that music games universally have a very high skill ceiling, right? If you sat someone who's never played Doom before down in front of Alien Vendetta, it's going to seem impossible, even though Alien Vendetta isn't even near the peak of difficulty in Doom.