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Post by toei on Jun 7, 2019 11:52:19 GMT -5
I'm not well versed in Irem's non-shooters, but its shmups aren't cheap at all, they are very fair. Yeah, they will kill you with some unpredictable stuff, but then you know to not die to that same thing? They are arcade games, after all, you aren't supposed to beat them in one or two goes. R-Type is actually quite fair even compared to other arcade games, its very consistent in what it does, its pretty slow-paced and its recovery points are very generous. Is Konami really that much more fair? Gradius is just as happy to wall you with bubbles or light-speed tunnel sections that are SUPER memorization-heavy, but with even more punishing checkpoints. Seibu's Raiden series is arguably even more cheap (Its not cheap though) since even once routed out the sniper tanks can just end a run. Toaplan's library, especially early on, was just as punishing and memo-heavy, with brutal checkpoints. And yet Irem, Konami, Seibu, and Toaplan were and are basically considered the gods of shmups in that era. I will say that Holy Diver is actually a cheap game, but thats because its poorly programmed. Its still fun though. Konami has had a much more diverse output, though, so even if they made a few games that are about as cheap, it's not a pervasive trait in their game design philosophy. Seibu and Toaplan were small companies who were only relevant to shmup fans. What makes many Irem games so bad is not that they require memorization to progress, but how much of it they require. Most hard games that aren't '80s shooters might feature *some* parts that need to be "mapped out", but they're much more sparse. Once you figure out the one or two tricky spots in the level, the rest can usually be dealt with just by being consistent or quick on your feet, and then maybe the final level will really step it up and you'll have to map out the whole thing. Irem frequently makes it so that even when you figure out how to get past a tricky part, you immediately run into another, over and over. All you do is die repeatedly from things you couldn't have predicted. It's a bad balance. Maybe you have enough patience that it doesn't bother you, but I don't, and I don't think most people do. It's probably part of the reason why all these companies died out or went dormant in the mid-'90s. And as an aside, R-Type's slow pace is another thing I hold against it. Even when you do see a shot coming, your damn ship is frequently too slow to get out of the way. This is another design element common to a lot of Irem's shooters - either the ship moves too slowly, or it's too big, making it unnecessarily difficult to dodge enemy shots. About the controls - I don't think the tentacles or the pod are particularly easy to control. You have to move forward to make them go forward and vice-versa, all the while your ship also moves. The angles and positions of the tentacles are weird and change as soon as you move, so you can't control them independently. Compare that to Whip Rush, where you can rotate the pods by 90 degrees intervals, and send them forward in the direction they're facing. That is a clean control scheme. The dragon in Dragon Breed is easy to control, the problem is that the human rider is too damn big and your firepower is too weak. Ex My point isn't that Irem is the only company that's ever made cheap games, it's that this is something they had a strong tendency to do, whereas these other companies didn't. For example, Sega made D.D. Crew, which is a crappy, broken beat-'em-up, but none of their other beat-'em-ups are. Out of that home list, Image Fight 2 is a bad rehash of the first game with awful music, Sol Moonarge is a RPG in Japanese, so it's hard to tell how good it might be, but it is ugly and has bad controls (seriously, just walk around town for a few minutes and you'll see what I mean). Steambot, Disaster Report and Polaroid Pete were made by the new Irem, Irem Software Engineering, which seems to have made very different games from the old Irem, apart from the R-Type sequels. Polaroid Pete's prequel was by a company called Tomcat System. Kickle Cubicle is a Tamtex game, as are most original NES and GB games published under Irem. I did specify that I was talking about the original, '79-'94 Irem as a developer, as Tamtex sometimes made good games, as did Nanao.
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Post by dunpeal2064 on Jun 7, 2019 11:58:26 GMT -5
Yeah, admittedly my perspective is pretty heavily slanted towards shooters. I play beat em ups, but I haven't come close to clearing any in arcades on one credit, they all seem pretty brutal to me. So, I can only speak for their shmups, which is what I think Irem is most well known for. Outside of that, I will say I thought Ninja Spirit was also a fair game, other than one section where you have to blind fall between a bunch of falling ninjas. That part is dumb, but the rest of the game seemed on point. And as an aside, R-Type's slow pace is another thing I hold against it. Even when you do see a shot coming, your damn ship is frequently too slow to get out of the way. This is another design element common to a lot of Irem's shooters - either the ship moves too slowly, or it's too big, making it unnecessarily difficult to dodge enemy shots. You get speed ups in R-Type though, pretty early in the game. Personal preference for how fast you want to move, of course, but even at 2 speed ups I feel like the ship is flying, and I have to avoid the third or I can barely control it. If you die and have to recover, yeah, the slow speed hurts, but in a good run you can have the ship moving at whatever speed you like. This is a fair complaint, but its not an Irem in particular thing, any shmup with speedups usually has this complication. Gradius puts your speed way down and then makes you spend your only resource on getting it back up, leaving you with no weapon power, and it throws in sections that actually require speedups to get through! But also, why are you getting out of the way of bullets, your pod absorbs them dude! I don't think most people do. It's probably part of the reason why all these companies died out or went dormant in the mid-'90s. This is pretty far off the mark. People loved R-Type back in the day, it was Irem not making Metal Gears and Mega Mans that killed them, not that R-Type was bad. Hell, the kickstarter for a new R-Type just got fully funded in like 3 days. And Ex-Toaplan staff became CAVE and made games well past the 90s. Seibu even went into MOSS and kept making games, there's been a new Raiden pretty consistently, even up until recently. Also worth noting, people considered R-Type too easy when it came out, same with Gradius. Its a big part of why bullet hells eventually took over. Now, sure, I admit that this style isn't gonna be for everyone, but it obviously did well enough that its a bit misleading to imply that most people that would enjoy shmups wouldn't or didn't like R-Type. lol
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Post by Sarge on Jun 7, 2019 12:20:09 GMT -5
I'd love to see someone tackle Holy Diver for this. I don't know that it's that poorly programmed, but it does have one particular control quirk that is infuriating. If you press the jump button and a direction at the exact same time, it will drop the jump. You will die from this at some point. Whether it's falling into a bit, or not getting clear of an enemy in a quick reaction situation, it will kill you. The game still plays pretty well, though. Ex : Kickle Cubicle was one of my favorite semi-puzzlers from the NES era. Really fun stuff, and the advanced stages can be real head-scratchers. dunpeal2064 : Man, Gradius or R-Type too easy? I guess that's true if you can hang on to your power-ups, but Gradius will brick-wall you if you screw up. I actually haven't put a lot of time into R-Type, so I can really speak to that one. I kinda do agree that a lot of shmup fans (and gamers in general) were more tolerant of games that required copious memorization or were ridiculously hard.
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Post by dunpeal2064 on Jun 7, 2019 12:23:53 GMT -5
I'd love to see someone tackle Holy Diver for this. I don't know that it's that poorly programmed, but it does have one particular control quirk that is infuriating. If you press the jump button and a direction at the exact same time, it will drop the jump. You will die from this at some point. Whether it's falling into a bit, or not getting clear of an enemy in a quick reaction situation, it will kill you. The game still plays pretty well, though. Oh I agree, I don't think its unplayable, but yeah, it will kill you completely out of your control at points. The flicker gets a little ridiculous at times too, entire enemy sprites and projectiles practically turn invisible but will still kill you. Its a sweet game though, I've always wanted to give it a serious attempt, but its real tough. dunpeal2064 : Man, Gradius or R-Type too easy? I guess that's true if you can hang on to your power-ups, but Gradius will brick-wall you if you screw up. I actually haven't put a lot of time into R-Type, so I can really speak to that one. I think R-Type is about on difficulty with Gradius I, maybe a tad harder. But yeah, Gradius is definitely a 1-life sorta game, it gets drastically harder once you die. I imagine watching people play in arcades and talking about strategies tore these games down pretty fast though, and without any meaningful scoring system or anything, they just don't have much life to em outside of that. Apparently Gradius III was the result of complaints that the earlier Gradius games were too easy. That game is an absolute nightmare as a result.
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Post by Sarge on Jun 7, 2019 12:27:07 GMT -5
Real tough might be an understatement. It's downright brutal. Ironically, though, as hard as it is, there are really only two spots that really brick-walled me over and over. The stage 4 boss (the eyeball tower) and the stage 6 penultimate approach run with the wall faces that shoot stuff at you and an unkillable purple blob randomly darting around the screen are some of the toughest sequences in gaming.
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Post by toei on Jun 7, 2019 12:27:48 GMT -5
dunpeal - Irem was stuck making R-Types forever because it was their only hit from the late '80s and on. They had a more diverse output than companies like Seibu or Toaplan, but aside from their one series with a dedicated fanbase tuned in to their design style, they weren't making enough money to keep going. It's crazy to imagine that a lot of people were put off by their difficulty. Ninja Spirit literally plays like a hardcore memo-heavy shmup, you have to map out all of it and losing your power-ups is a huge blow. Side-scroller fans are not used to that. That might have worked well enough in the late '80s, but if they'd kept making Ninja Spirit games, they'd have had to chill with that.
Likewise, Seibu just kept making Raiden games for a while, until it wasn't making enough money anymore. Shoot-'em-ups went from the biggest genre to a niche in part because they got too hardcore for too many people. Of course all genres fade from popularity eventually, but there's a reason why even a lot of retro gamers won't play shmups much, and it's largely because they're afraid of games like these. Of course, there are plenty of 8 and 16-bit shmups that are much easier than anything by Irem, but speaking as someone who didn't play shmups until recently, a lot of people don't know that's the case.
Also, difficulty in beat-'em-ups should not be evaluated in terms of one-credit runs. This is something that comes purely from the hardcore shmup fan's mentality, because shmups are often designed so that you kind of need to 1CC them anyway, since dying penalizes you so much. It took me life a week and a half to beat Psycho Chaser, but by the time I did, I was able to 1CC it right after, since I knew the whole game by heart. In a beat-'em-up, you're supposed to take damage along the way, it doesn't matter as long as you can beat the game within the number of credits at your disposal (or a reasonable amount of quarters if it's an arcade game). They don't usually force you to restart from a checkpoint or the beginning of the level when you die; they don't demand that you master every step of the way. They're just about becoming good enough at them that you can do well enough along the way to finish them. And by these standards, they are infinitely easier as a genre than shoot-'em-ups, or even platformers. Streets of Rage 1 and 3 are often called hard, but just beating them on default settings can be done within just a few sittings pretty easily. Double Dragon 3 NES is one of the rare ones that does take a lot of practice, but that's because you only get one extra life in the entire game, and you don't even start with it.
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Post by dunpeal2064 on Jun 7, 2019 12:32:55 GMT -5
Yeah, I mean, its hard to deny that the difficulty in shmups was what ended up making them far less appealing to the average gamer, even if it was what those that loved the genre wanted. Granted, I think thats more a sign of a poor audience than a poor game, personally. At least Compile games still exist for those people Interesting point about Beat Em Ups, and a reason why I've always had a hard time really digging into them. The "However many credits" approach is too loose to me, I like the methodical approach of games like R-Type, where I know how good I am at each section and progress accordingly. In a beat em up, I tend to just always clear, and then go "Oh cool I saved a quarter I guess". The console games are more enjoyable for me, since they often set a limit on credits and give me something to aim for. I have 1cc'd Streets of Rage 2, which wasn't too tough. I know a lot of arcade beat em ups CAN be 1cc'd, but the gameplay looks awfully dull when doing so (Lots of exploiting enemy patterns and such). The skill ceiling doesn't have the same appeal to me as shmups do, since those are generally designed around a 1cc. (Yes even bullet hells ) I still like beat em ups though! They are plenty fun, I guess I just look for that similar eventuality that shmups and rhythm games have, where you have a clear goal to reach, and maybe that isn't there.
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Post by Sarge on Jun 7, 2019 12:45:15 GMT -5
I've beaten the NES Double Dragon III quite a few times, and that game really demands excellent execution and health management. You basically get two extra lives in the form of the bosses you beat, and using them effectively to save Billy for the end proves the best strategy. The Cyclone Kick really ends up being the best attack, and baiting the last boss into approaching you from below works really well.
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Post by toei on Jun 7, 2019 12:45:19 GMT -5
Yeah, I mean, its hard to deny that the difficulty in shmups was what ended up making them far less appealing to the average gamer, even if it was what those that loved the genre wanted. Granted, I think thats more a sign of a poor audience than a poor game, personally. Interesting point about Beat Em Ups, and a reason why I've always had a hard time really digging into them. The "However many credits" approach is too loose to me, I like the methodical approach of games like R-Type, where I know how good I am at each section and progress accordingly. In a beat em up, I tend to just always clear, and then go "Oh cool I saved a quarter I guess". The console games are more enjoyable for me, since they often set a limit on credits and give me something to aim for. I have 1cc'd Streets of Rage 2, which wasn't too tough. I know a lot of arcade beat em ups CAN be 1cc'd, but the gameplay looks awfully dull when doing so (Lots of exploiting enemy patterns and such). The skill ceiling doesn't have the same appeal to me as shmups do, since those are generally designed around a 1cc. (Yes even bullet hells ) I still like beat em ups though! They are plenty fun, I guess I just look for that similar eventuality that shmups and rhythm games have, where you have a clear goal to reach, and maybe that isn't there. Think of it like this: shmups, and harder platformers, are section-based games. You have to master each section to beat the game at all (except for very forgiving shooters like Coryoon or a lot of Compile's games). Beat-'em-ups are one long stretch. Credits are not something you use when you fail - they're a resource. You're supposed to use some. As you get better at the game, you use fewer of them to get further, until you can beat the game. That's how you know you're improving. However, they have to be limited, or it's harder to motivate yourself to play at your best, and that's boring - it's like having infinite HP in a RPG. So if you're playing an arcade beat-'em-up on MAME or whatever, set a limit for yourself. Sarge I had a pretty elaborate strategy for DD3 NES at the time, though I don't remember all of it. I remember Chin Fu (I think that's his name)'s basic punch combo was the strongest in the game, and it could kill some of the strongest enemies in one combo, which made him perfect for a particular level (the one that starts with a bunch of giant muscle dudes running towards you), but he could get killed really easily in some parts, so he was better used sparingly. The cyclone kick is a bit too unreliable - it's generally better to start things off with a kick, which has more range than punches, then move in to knock the enemy down with punches or grab them and throw them. You're also invincible when you grab an enemy, which is very useful to know. Though I think the cyclone kick was great for one of the final boss' forms. The biggest roadblock in DD3 for me was a part where you're fighting on platforms where there's no Y Axis in the next-to-last level. It was very hard to be consistent there.
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Post by dunpeal2064 on Jun 7, 2019 12:54:49 GMT -5
Think of it like this: shmups, and harder platformers, are section-based games. You have to master each section to beat the game at all (except for very forgiving shooters like Coryoon or a lot of Compile's games). Beat-'em-ups are one long stretch. Credits are not something you use when you fail - they're a resource. You're supposed to use some. As you get better at the game, you use fewer of them to get further, until you can beat the game. That's how you know you're improving. However, they have to be limited, or it's harder to motivate yourself to play at your best, and that's boring - it's like having infinite HP in a RPG. So if you're playing an arcade beat-'em-up on MAME or whatever, set a limit for yourself. Yeah, that makes sense, and its always kinda how I've approached the genre. I think my qualm is that I have to manually set the difficulty by picking an arbitrary number of credits, and that number changes wildly between games in the genre. And, there is no real way to know what that limit should be until after playing the game, so even when I want a challenge, its like I have to play the RPG with infinite HP first, and then go back. For Shmups, you can just aim for a 1cc no matter the game or developer, 99% of the time they are 1cc'able, and designed to be played that way, so I never have to guess at a difficulty. It doesn't stop me from enjoying the genre, per se, but I definitely don't take them as seriously as shmups, because I never found them to be as finely tuned in that department. Like you've said, though, they don't have the same goals, so they aren't being tuned in the same way, and approaching beat em ups and shmups in the same way has always seemed like it didn't work. It still feels odd, though. Outside of shmups, plenty of arcade games still feel like a 1cc is the goal. Ghouls n Ghosts, Metal Slug, Daytona, Beatmania, they all have this clear "This is what you are aiming for" that beat em ups just seem to lack. Admittedly I've not spent much time with the NES Double Dragon games, they sound like fun though, might have to give em a try!
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