A Black Falcon
Member
ghibli99 said:
I did have a bit of Apple II experience, because they had them in our elementary school (of course) and I knew one person with one, but other than that, and this one guy whose family had a Tandy for a while, it was all Mac and PC. I'm not sure if I'd even heard of Commodore until much later...
We got our first PC in early '92 as I think I said, but it wasn't exactly up-to-date. 20Mhz 386, no sound card, no CD drive, just 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" floppy drives. 100MB HDD. DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.0 (Reversi, not Minesweeper!)...
When we got a new computer in early '95, which was a Pentium 90 with a CD drive and SB16 card, it was pretty amazing... came with three amazing Lucasarts CD games too, Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and Star Wars: Rebel Assault. I still like Rebel Assault, probably because it was one of the first CD games I owned... kind of hard to nail to one genre though, it covers a whole bunch of different kinds of shooting games in the various levels.
Apogee always had a policy that all of their games would have saving. Even from the beginning, with their ASCII-art Kingdom of Kroz, you could save... great idea really, there's absolutely no sane reason why every PC game doesn't have saving. The games are on a hard drive, after all! Plenty of space for a small little save file!
I still absolutely think that any good shmup should, at minimum, have a level select. Unlock the additional levels as you reach them for play whenever you want. A great example of that would be in Gradius Galaxies on GBA... it was done perfectly there. You could even choose the checkpoints within levels in that game... R-Type DX had level select too, but there you could only start from the beginning of a stage. Still, it should be a standard feature in the genre. 1CC is nice and all, but that's incredibly hard in many cases... there's nothing wrong with wanting to actually finish a game without having to perfect every second of it (under penalty of restarting the whole thing if you mess up at all), or just play the parts you like the most.
I like Raptor's save system a lot too, because you chose to save, it wasn't an autosave. As a result, if you wanted to challenge yourself and try to get through an entire quadrant (that is, one of the three campaigns in the game) without saving, you could. But you could also save between missions, if you wanted to do it that way. Ideal, pretty much. It let me save often when I needed it, while I was still getting good at the game, but also lets me challenge myself by playing whole campaigns without saving, something that is difficult even with the best weapon...
All games should all have some form of save system, whether it's for stats or progress. The fact that many don't is really one of the big downsides of console games from before the 32/64-bit era, unless you're playing on an emulator of course. That's not to say every game is best with save anywhere, it does make sense to keep it out of games like shmups, but stuff like level select and high-score save? Absolutely. Having features like that just improves games. Of course beating a game that way isn't quite the accomplishment that beating it from the beginning in one try is (as I said earlier in this thread, beating (ie getting past level 100 in) Llamatron was a great accomplishment for me...), but saying "this is the only way you should play the game" just doesn't make sense. What about people who just don't have the skill to beat it without saving, but want to see the end? Gradius Galaxies isn't a worse shmup because it has a nice continue system.
MightyHedgehog said:Well, in that case, I'd disagree that Turbo-Duo had a better lineup of shooters than that of the Genny's.
TurboDuo has more shmups than Genesis, and they're on at least as high a quality level.
My favorite shmup of the generation is probably Gradius III on SNES, but the TurboDuo has an absolutely amazing lineup, once you look at its incredible import shmup list... probably is the best of the three. But SNES, Genesis/Sega CD/32X, and Turbografx/Turbo CD all have very, VERY good shmup lineups.
