Caltrops - Mischief Maker's Maker's Mark





	[quote name="Bananadine"][quote name="Mischief Maker"]Abstract Bullet Hell game by Kenta Cho. It has 4 different play styles, each with different bullet patterns, (Panic Bombing Normal mode, Bullet Scratching Psyviar mode, Color Changing Ikaruga mode, and Shield Charging Giga-Wing mode), and 10 levels of difficulty (in A, B, and C patterns plus random combintations of the 3) ranging from child's play to lunatic. If you ever wanted to get into Bullet Hell but felt you needed a game to ease yourself into it, this is it.[/quote] I see what you mean here--that game provides a long, smooth difficulty gradient and lets the player freely choose where to start in it. But for me, the least accessible aspect of those games isn't the bullet-dodging--it's the aesthetics. Ikaruga, by the standards of games in general, is super-hard (though I can't say where it falls on the bullet-hell difficulty scale), but it's easy for me to get into because it's gorgeous. Even when I'm getting my ass kicked in that game, I can enjoy the audiovisual coherence of it. rRootage, on the other hand, is pretty but random, and randomness is tedious. The gameplay is good but you have to be (I claim) already past a certain big difficult step along the bullet-hell acceptance path before you can play that game at length without tiring of it. And the couple of Shanghai Alice demos I've tried have been even worse in that regard. They remind me of World of Warcraft, oddly: Their mechanical aspects brim with detail and character... and then on top of that, for some reason, their creators have chosen to ladle a nasty syrup of shallow backstory and lame cartoon imagery. The bullet patterns are obviously the star--there aren't even obstacles to crash into in those games, are there? The enemies are sprites, but the sprites don't matter to the gameplay except insofar as they tell you where the enemy is, right? I mean their sizes and shapes and colors don't matter--they don't have special vulnerable sections or gun sections; they're just location-pointers. Yet for some reason they're all candied up as deformed anime girls who are always saying things to one another in Japanese, as if the game wants me to pay attention to them instead of to the thing that's actually interesting: those awesome bullet patterns! It just angers me, that something so clearly excellent would be hobbled with a weird fetishistic audiovisual design, as if the player can't be trusted to enjoy a thing unless it's full of pictures they can masturbate to. It's insulting. Yet how many people would have gotten into World of Warcraft if cactus had done the character and world designs for it, instead of the Tolkein-worshipping in-joke-mongers at Blizzard! (I would have. Oh damn that would be awesome!)[/quote]