Scrolling shooters are one of the oldest types of video games, generally pitting a single player controlled ship against huge numbers of computer controlled enemies.
The classic shooter R-Type has a false etymology that suggests the name derives from the r/K selection theory of ecology, in which r selection involves a large number of offspring, each with a relatively small chance of survival, and K selection involves a small numer of offspring, each given as much chance of survival as possible.
The idea is that the player is K selected, facing an army of r selected enemies alone (or in a small group, depending on how you interpret the lives mechanic).
Apparently the R in R-Type is for the player ship's light ray weaponry and has nothing to do with ecology, but it's a fitting interpretation of the genre nonetheless.
You could argue that the game would be more appropriately titled K-Type, since the player controls a single carefully nurtured craft to defeat innumerable expendable enemy pawns.
Another way of looking at it, at least when I'm in control, would see the dozens/hundreds of player craft sacrificed to the attempt to get good enough to beat the game as the r-selected side of the equation, and the carefully crafted set of stages as K-selected.
As a video-game playing child of the eighties and nineties, I played plenty of shooters.
I was terrible at them, and eventually gave up on the format.
The typical game starts off hard but doable, then escalates to all-but-impossible.
The idea of actually beating one seemed absurd, and the way the difficulty would increase if you were bad at the game (because a better player would be able to get and keep more power ups) seemed unfair.
Occasionally I'd put in a coin at an arcade and quickly reach a game over screen, and I had a few console games, like Action Fighter for the SMS (to this day I don't think I've beaten the first level) and Bio Hazard Battle on the Mega Drive (which I think I did beat as a kid, or at least got several stages into), but for the most part I thought shmups were not for me.
A few years ago I started to turn this around. I got Espgaluda II for my phone.
On the surface, a bullet hell shooter doesn't seem like a good way to acclimatise to the genre, but the iphone port's touch controls and option to just credit feed through the game made it more accessible than my previous shooter experiences.
I played through several times, aiming to reduce the number of continues I used rather than to try for score or a 1CC - to this day I don't think I've ever 1CC'd a shooter.
A bit later I started getting back into the Master System and Mega Drive, and enjoying the challenge of taking on old games on the original hardware.
Early on I got an SMS copy of Sagaia, but wound up save-stating my way through it. I could never recover from death, and had no chance of making it through the game without dying at all.
I took a break from shooters for a while, but in that time I played games like Rolling Thunder one and two and Metal Slug - challenging games that required repeated play to get better at and eventually beat.
When I picked up SMS R-Type, I was primed to really get into the game and stick with it to the end (greatly aided by the generous extra continues cheat).
My early runs ended in the first or second stage, and I got stuck for a long time on the fourth stage boss.
Before long, it was rare for me to lose a life in the early stages, and bosses that had seemed impossible, like stage four's, became speed bumps at worst.
Stage seven was particularly hard, especially because of the game's checkpoint system. The back half of stage seven is pretty ridiculous, but after who knows how many attempts I found a route (not the one in the linked video) that got me to the boss some of the time. Once I managed to beat the boss, I stuck with stage eight until I beat it, which took a lot less time than stage seven. I'd beat a foundational shooter!
The reward, after the ending, was the same game with the difficulty turned up. Thanks, but no thanks.
From there I toned things down a little, playing Steel Empire for Mega Drive and Cotton for NGPC, relatively easy games that still took me some work to overcome.
Then it was back to the SMS for Power Strike II, a tougher game that I eventually cleared on the back of its unlimited continues.
A word on credit feeding: different games have different approaches to lives and continues. Some will allow you to respawn where you died, even after continuing.
Under this system, the only thing between you and the end of the game is how many credits you're prepared to put in. On a home console, continues will often be limited. I'm not a huge fan of this system, because either I'll just credit feed through, or I'll run out of continues and get frustrated.
Other games take you back to a checkpoint, either after every death or after continuing.
Broadly speaking, this system, combined with unlimited continues, is what I prefer - you still have to get through every segment of the game without dying in it (or at least not dying too much), but you're not thrown back to the start after an arbitrary number of fails.
You do still have to replay the early stages at the start of each play session, though, which allows you to appreciate how easy those once-impossible areas seem after taking on the later levels.
But to each their own - "real" STGers don't continue anyway, or so I hear.
Gameplay-wise, there are two basic things you need to do in a shooter - kill the enemy and avoid getting killed. Often only the latter is actually required, and many games' bosses will die or depart automatically after enough time has passed to prevent players leaving them alive to accumulate unlimited point scores, but taking out enemies as quickly as possible generally makes not getting killed a lot easier.
Besides those basics, the third thing is to power up - you'll start off underpowered, and end up overpowered.
The rub, though, is that you're usually only overpowered until you screw up. Lose a life, and your upgrades go with it.
It's a regressive difficulty curve - the game is easier for better players.
Part of what makes these games compelling, though, is the combination of blitzing through enemies, particularly in stages that have otherwise been difficult, and the knowledge that a moment of error can and will take it all away.
The prolonged concentration, combined with the need to be watching where your ship is, where the enemies are, and where the enemy fire is, and to try to anticipate what's coming up, can be draining.
Sometimes, though, it comes together and you find yourself feeling invincible, killing every enemy almost before they appear, dodging each bullet perfectly, grabbing each power-up, and getting further than you've gotten before.
And then you die.
The spell is broken, and before you know it you've lost all your lives.
But the next time you play it's a bit easier. You know where to go and what to do.
The early stages, once absurd challenges, become a pleasant sight-seeing trip.
You slip up somewhere, but you're able to adjust your approach to compensate for the lack of power, or for having a different weapon to what you'd usually be using.
Eventually, knuckles white on the controller, you reach the end. Euphoria!
For some people, this is the time to start trying for a 1CC, or playing for score.
For me, it's time to move on.
I'm not great at shooters, even if I do think I've been getting better. The 44 deaths shown so far in this update are not even close to the full number I've had getting to this point, and I'm sure some readers of my little essay on the nature of shmups are shaking their heads at my ignorance of the genre. But whatever: it's a game, I'm enjoying it, who cares if I'm doing it well or right. PR3 is pretty tough. I can usually get through the first stage of a shooter a bit quicker than this. Still, that's given me plenty of time to develop my approach. In the early part of the stage, before the ground appears, I take two ZOOOM!!s, then two MISSILE!!s, then another ZOOOM!!, then DOUBLE!!, and then an OPTION!! which I have just enough power-ups to claim at the point reached in the fourth screenshot here. That gives me a fair bit of firepower.
The next thing I want is second OPTION!!. Taking the lower route here gets me the power-up I need to make it happen, though the face appearing over my HUD doesn't allow me to confirm that I have the right number straight away. The face seems to appear when I shoot all five of the fish. What's it saying?
よっしゃ よっしゃ ボーナスや! 5000
Yossha yossha boonasuya! 5000
I'm pretty sure ボーナス is "Bonus", and wiktionary gives yossha as "alright". や might mean "is", which would make it "Alright alright, bonus is 5000!". I do seem to get a points boost from this.
I find DOUBLE!! quite useful in the early part of the stage, when its 45 degree upward shot can clear enemies above me, but past the checkpoint the walls really close in and I'm tending to switch to the FAMICOM!! laser, which gives increased firepower in a narrower spread.
Then disaster strikes: I pick up a randomised power-up. The problem with these is that you can't get rid of them until you activate them, but doing so risks losing all your power-ups. I can't afford to take my eye off the play area long enough to try to time my button press to get what I want, and I wind up hitting "WHAT TH-!!", which puts me back to the base ship. This was a silly mistake, really - I was already at full power, aside from not having a BARRIER!!. I should have just played the rest of the life with what I had rather than risk losing it. BARRIER!!, although it seems like it would be the most useful item, has not been a priority for me. It only defends the front of the ship, and it has a much bigger hitbox than the ship, so it winds up absorbing a lot of fire that would otherwise have passed by harmlessly. I'm sure it has saved me a few times, but it's not to be relied upon.
Deprived of my firepower and with my movement speed reduced, I actually make it pretty far considering, but it's not to last.
Starting in the middle of the stage in the weak default state is hard.
The next life starts off a little better. I've been avoiding the first power-up here because it's a random one - in retrospect, since my ship isn't powered up yet, I probably should just take it. Worst case, I don't get anything from it, but there's nothing to lose yet.
My earlier attempts at getting through this bit from the checkpoint focussed on trying to get DOUBLE!! to take out the four heads in the narrow passage, but at some point I realised there's an enemy dropping a bomb that can do it for me, which takes the pressure off the early power-ups.
I wait to activate this bomb until everything I want to blow up is on-screen, then cruise freely to the power-up.
There might be enough power-ups to get back to full power before the end of the stage, but a fair number of them are randomisers that I don't want to risk collecting. I know one of the two I'm not getting in this GIF is, but not which one, so I avoid both.
My main goal is to double my firepower with an OPTION!!, as I do here. Another one would be nice...
BARRIER!! is a pretty good outcome from a randomiser, even if it's not the OPTION!! I wanted.
Near the end of the stage, the screen stops scrolling and the music changes to Aram Khachaturian's Sabre Dance.
Winged monsters (mechs?) start appearing from the right. Left alive long enough, they'll charge across the screen.
If they make it, they'll fire a heap of missiles at my ship. One of them comes extremely close to taking me out.
This goes on for a while, but just as it's getting overwhelming the screen starts to scroll. What now?
A peaceful looking figure on a not-so-peaceful dragon appears. Both fire at me, and I seem to be able to hit both by aiming for their faces.
There's writing on the beam fired by the humanoid figure:
メイリウ の (バ/パ)オラ
Meiriu no (ba/pa)ora
I'm struggling with this. Meiri apparently means "fame and fortune", no is a possessive marker, and オラ can be a first person pronoun, so perhaps this is "Fame and fortune are mine", but that ignores two characters. It's probably something else. Also, の is a hiragana character and the rest are katakana. I thought maybe the katakana version was too complicated to draw in this tiny font, but it's ノ, which seems doable. Iunno.
Sensenic:
It's "Meisou no Paola" (katakana ri and so are easy to mistake one for the other) = "Meditating Paola".
If she's a reference, no idea to whom.
A bit of googling led me to the 2nd Salamander OVA, called indeed: "Meditating Paola".
Although there's a fair bit of stuff on-screen, both of the boss' attacks are pretty easy to avoid.
Mostly. Here's the BARRIER!! that I recently derided as not very useful and only got by chance very definitely saving my ship.
It takes a little while and the attacks get faster, but I manage to beat it! Yes!
Oh man, that was just stage one? There's more?
I guess not. The game crashes. Looks like I just completed my first 1CC!
Xelpud has no comment on my amazing feat, but I save anyway to lock in my high score (actually obtained on an earlier, unsuccessful run), and quit. Phew!
To-Do:
-
Map:
PR3:
Next Time:
Part 48: The Mother Has Been Waiting
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