SOS from Triangle Service

any dreamcast fans here?



http://www.triangleservice.co.jp/html/trizeal/sos/en.html

SOS from Triangle Service

I always find it poor form when a creator speaks out in media like magazines or somewhere, or at a place like this here. I often think this.

The quality of his work should be told by his hand, not his mouth. But my predicament doesn't allow for such ideals. It's a shame. And I know I'm being silly.

Arcade video game "TRIZEAL" It's fairly obvious to anybody going to amusement arcades that TRIZEAL has not been selling well. Terribly, in fact!

Was the timing bad? Is it too expensive? Various reasons come to mind, but... Wrong.

If TRIZEAL for Dreamcast doesn't sell well, we won't be able to produce the next one.

Frankly, I'm not sure if TRIZEAL for DC will even be displayed in game shops. Dreamcast in this day and age?! And a shooter at that?! No sane shopkeeper would even consider it!

But I'll tell you why we don't just put it up as a net-only release. I want TRIZEAL displayed in shops. A shopper takes one in his hand, takes a look at the package, thinks for a while, and then takes it to the check-out counter. I really want to provide scenes like this.

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well, i've already got mine preordered. sometimes i think shooter fans are too hard on developers that aren't cave. i wasn't fond of xii stag, but i'd certainly like to see triangle service stay in business, and that appeal to the fans has real pathos. psikyo's first couple games weren't that good either.
 
drohne said:
well, i've already got mine preordered. sometimes i think shooter fans are too hard on developers that aren't cave. i wasn't fond of xii stag, but i'd certainly like to see triangle service stay in business, and that appeal to the fans has real pathos. psikyo's first couple games weren't that good either.
If you don't mind telling, where did you preorder your copy?
 
You know... After reading this, I went back to XII Stag and...it's really not bad at all. My only problem after giving it a real shot was the fact that I don't play with a stick, and my thumb was sore from all that pad-jiggling after only one level. Still, though, it was pretty cool. Would really like to give it a shot with a stick to see if it holds up.
 
This is a good cause if i ever heard of one, while I can't afford it right now i'm gonna split it with someone. Its like the broke artist, these guys used everything they have to continue their passion in making games.
 
This is really old, but since this is the first time it popped up on GAF I'll address how I feel about this here.

I would like to ask everyone here, as shooter fans, what you really want out of shooters in the industry. I don't think we're "too hard" on shooters that aren't from Cave at all. I think Mars Matrix is the best shooter on the DC bar none and that's Takumi. At the same time I really dislike Gigawing which is also from Takumi. I enjoy Pskiyo shooters quite a bit, and I'm definitely looking forward to Senkou no Rondo from G-Rev. In fact I don't even really like Cave shooters much not because I think they suck but because I'm not a big fan of pure bulletdodging above everything else. What I want in a shooter is inventiveness, good level design and enemy patterns, non-repetive waves and awesome bosses. Good design, music and execution helps too. I consider myself a shooter fan but not a blind one. I expect the same out of shooters as I expect out of any other genre, a certain quality.

Now I have to ask all of you, are you a gaming charity service? Do you feel that you are obliged to support any developer that is in trouble as long as they ask nicely? If not then what draws you to buy a game? It would have to be quality wouldn't it. This is a very bad practice on Triangle Service's part. They play on the emotions and pity of shooter fans who know that the industry for shooters is no longer as hot or popular as the old days and there are those who cling on to every shooter released regardless of quality. As long as it's a DC game and a shooter, it's a buy. "Quality or otherwise we MUST keep the shooter genre alive!" Right? No, I would say wrong. This is this very attitude that causes many niche genres to be filled with crap and very few gems. Because the "fans" of that genre will buy anything anyway, so why try any harder?

XIIStag is a mediocre shooter by any stretch of the imagination. Trizeal isn't much better. I know friends in Japan who tried Trizeal out in the arcades and they weren't impressed at all. In fact the creator himself acknowledges that he feels that Trizeal's failure in the arcades is in part because they have failed to capture audiences' attention. That's just too bad isn't it? He claims that shooting love is not just any bluff at all. He claims that making shooters is his dream. He claims that he wants to make good shooters that he doesn't see anywhere else so he makes what he wants to play. Now based on all that talk, and based on the two shooters that he has actually made, I can only conclude that he's a man with a strong dream and desire who just isn't very good in his chosen field at all. That's really sad but that's also no reason for me to put money into that dream. We all have dreams, what makes him so special? I may sound really cold but that's the reality of the situation. He's playing with feelings and I don't like that. It's a business and if he isn't any good he should pull out before he incurs more losses.
 
I hate to agree with duckroll's COLD, HARD analysis but...yeah. If this guy was making great, undernourished shooters, then by all means he should be supported, but from all accounts of people in the know this company's shooters just don't deliver the goods. I'm all for supporting the little guy who deserves it, but it's not my job to subsidize every underachiever's dream. Supporting mediocrity just compounds the problem. Sorry!
 
duckroll said:
What I want in a shooter is inventiveness, good level design and enemy patterns, non-repetive waves and awesome bosses. Good design, music and execution helps too.
I realize this is beside the point, but I do find it funny that you just provided a perfect description of a Cave shooter, yet you claim not to like them.

Anyway. Yes, we'll buy anything. And, yes, maybe you're right that means they can lower the bar intentionally. Or maybe it's just as likely that shooter producers will try that much harder to get shooters back in the spotlight, or just to get their game seen in the sea of Cave dominance. (It is still possible. R-Type Final made the top 10 in sales in Japan, at least for a few weeks. Oh, and by the way, that was something like 40-50k in sales. XII Stag sold like less than 1k in its first week. So much for your theory...)

At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter at all what your friends in Tokyo arcades are saying. They have Mushihimesama, Ibara, Raiden 3 and Gigawing Generations right beside Trizeal. We, in the west, most definitely do not. Trizeal might not be that bad when taken out of that context. I think it actually looks pretty good.

And, yes, I don't mind being a charity service for shooters at all. Because, as implied above, I don't really buy your lowering-the-bar theory. Cave keeps blowing my mind with every title they produce, Border Down was fuckin' amazing and Gradius 5 was also great. XII Stag wasn't as great, but as seen above I've come to realize that it really isn't that bad.
 
I'm not saying that it'll lower the bar. I'm saying that it is unfair to developers who actually DO TRY HARD to impress us if we're so easily willing to support any Tom, Dick or Harry who makes an amateur shooter and demands 60 bucks for it. If you want to be a charity service, that's your choice. I'm saying it's bad form for developers to become begging dogs.

As for the description of Cave games, I've also stated why I don't like them that much, I suck at pure unadulterated bullet hell dodging. :lol
 
duckroll said:
I'm saying it's bad form for developers to become begging dogs.
What, in effect, is advertising then? They're all begging dogs. At least this one is honest about it. I'm having real trouble thinking that this is some big manipulative scheme. I just think it sounds like one shooter lover asking others for help, and I don't think that's so wrong.

Maybe I'm being too nice after going back and realizing XII wasn't as bad as I first thought, I don't know. I think there's room for Triangle S. in the business, though, and I do hope they make it. If only because I think there's, at the very least, some potential there. Now, if it were Psikyo, on the other hand, I would've laughed and told them to fuck off. :P
 
my taste in shooters is idiosyncratic, and i don't want every shooter to be an elegant, assured, arcade scoring challenge, even if those are the ones i like best. i think it's essential to the health of the genre that shooters remain various, even if that admits a certain amount of mediocrity. it's reasonable to talk about "the health of the genre" as if it were sick, and i doubt i need to remind anyone that raizing and psikyo are essentially dead.

if you're still a shooter fan, you've probably become something of a connoisseur, and it's fine to discriminate. but i still don't understand this absolute intolerance of tyro efforts -- most developers don't spring into the world fully formed (cave is a happy exception). i wonder whether the spoiled new shooter fan sitting on piles of roms would have dismissed tecnosoft after thunderforce II. or after thunderforce III, even, which was still amateurish next to r type or gradius. it's also bothers me that so many people dismiss xii stag and trizeal based on some nebulous "consensus," but that problem isn't unique to shooters or indeed to games.

my only real objection to xii stag was that stick-wiggling nonsense, and i think trizeal looks promising in its own right. i'd probably buy it even if it didn't look promising, but i'm not buying it out of pity.
 
I initially posted my rationalization for supporting Triangle and my later retracted it after seeing what the shooters shown at this year's AOU had to offer. I was reminded of what I like in modern shooters: innovation, abstraction, synthesis of old ideas into new ones, and controlled sensory overload. Trizeal looks like none of that...it looks like an anemic PCE HuCARD shooter, and I have no desire to spend $60 on something like that, even if it means helping save the guy's company. aku:jiki says "They have Mushihimesama, Ibara, Raiden 3 and Gigawing Generations right beside Trizeal. We, in the west, most definitely do not." - but GW Generations will be out on PS2 in a few weeks, Dragon Blaze a week after that, Senkou no Ronde will be coming to DC, ports will likely be announced for the others (as well as the other shooters shown at AOU), and I'm still playing Espgaluda, Border Down, and Gradius V. I have so much choice and variety in exactly the kind of shooter I want to play - which certainly isn't limited to the Cave style - that I see no need to stoop to mediocrity for something different, especially when it's an example of what the genre moved past more than a decade ago.

I keep getting the feeling that TriServ would have been better off making doujin-shooters and honing their skills before betting the farm on commercial products.
 
If anything if you reading the responses of other hardcore shumups from the forum's iggy's post like:

http://click-stick.com/bbs/viewtopic.php?t=190
or
http://forum.shmups.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=96

You'd see that there are people that did like TriService's XII Stag. Sure I like innovation like everyone else, but I can also relate because i still have love for 2D fighting games. Its niche nowdays and the genre see's like 1 or luckily 2 games a year, how could you not support it?

I'm disappointed with Capcom Fighting Jam but i still bought it, Its a (imo) mediocre fighter, but I feel it was better spent then some EA sports game. Yes this isn't about charity, but to expect ikaruga from every shumups and ignoring everything else is (imo) illogical, you can't really call yourself and enthusiast of that genre.

I agree that the more innovative titles get recognition, but at the same time.. and average shooter shouldn't be discarded just because its not innovative. I like 2D games and while i don't like them all, i'm willing to give each one a chance nowadays. Sure maybe i'm getting conned out of $50, but his honesty and love for his craft has touched me.
 
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