Never mind the review. Instead, I've come to the realization that there are two types of shooting game. I guess I always knew, but the past day has really driven it home.
It goes without saying that I'm terrible at
Little Red Barrel. It's part of my physical inheritance -- I am genetically ill-suited to play shooting games. My reflexes are essentially nonexistent, my eyes tend to water if I stare at something too long, strings of motor commands tend to get scrambled, and I'm insanely distractable.
It's a mystery why I enjoy the genre so much.
Anyway, I haven't managed to get past the third stage of
Little Red Barrel in normal mode. And for all that, I don't think it's actually that tough a game. It just exploits my biggest weakness: I can't dodge and do anything else at the same time.
In a way, there are two types of shooting games: those where dodging is the only important thing, and those that emphasize something else. Touhou games are about dodging. Cave games are mostly about dodging. Sometimes you want to kill enemies to cancel bullets, sometimes you want to space things out to keep a combo going, but mostly you can just dodge. Treasure games, with the combo system, aren't about dodging at all. (
Bangai-O, in fact, is all about charging directly into the bullets.)
Ikaruga and
Radiant Silvergun both expect you to be extremely careful about which enemies you kill, and woe betide the player whose errant shot kills an enemy of the wrong color. (I'm sure there are games out there that combine a bunch of these mechanics. Something that required, say, graze, combo, chain, and powerups would probably cause my head to explode.)
And then there's
Little Red Barrel. In this game, you want to get your combo meter up and keep it up. Enemies release more coins, which enable you to keep your combo going by firing more missiles and killing more enemies, which gives you more points, which gives you more lives, which is almost superfluous considering that you're ideally firing off enough missiles to turn anything that floats onscreen into a shower of coins.
The problem is that if you lose your combo, life turns bad very fast, and can stay that way for a very long time. Keeping the combo going requires precise aim and a steady pace, along with the ability to move across the screen at speed while looking for targets.
I always run straight into a bullet when I try to do it. Like I said, two types of shooting game.
words from chris, 2009-10-03 05:00:57, los angeles
