So I discovered this YouTube channel electric underground. At first he seemed like an arcade purity obsessive. He is, and I disagree with many of his views, but the channel has so much more than just opinions.
He's got great ideas on fundamental gameplay and design. It's more like I like to talk about games, but he seems notably smarter than me so I find myself sucked in to the videos. They explain and expand ideas that I've only thought of in the vaguest way, or never thought of at all.
So these videos after the last few days inspired me to play a space shooter. You can call them shmups and go fuck yourself. I call them space shooters.
I had recently bought a nicely made bootleg of Cotton 2.
So last night I got down on that.
Now I'm not very good at these at all. I loved them as a kid because they were scifi. That type of game was such a staple I just took for granted it's existence. All I knew was that it started with space invader and ten years later it was one of Japan's premier exports.
So there are a few periods where I enjoyed one for a few weeks at a time. I loved r-type delta and ikaruga, and more, but that was back when I would always play for survival.
At some point in the 2000's I tried playing for score and it turned out to be way better for me. I sort of unlocked a new level of enjoyment. So since then, I start a new one playing for survival, possibly going on easy at first. Then over 3 or 4 hours I start playing for score.
So, Cotton 2.
Let's get something straight. This 4MB ram cart shits all over add-ons like the Sega CD or 32x. This is a console upgrade done right. The N64 one wasn't as good because the games that supported it -as well as they sold- don't have the shelf life of 2d games.
The Saturn can push a lot of big sprites, but the low base memory cost something important: missing frames. This along with sprite numbers and size, are the main things that would set an arcade game way above it's console version.
So the cart fixes that. The games that supported it do look closer to what you would expect in an arcade.
Cotton is slow paced and I've been finding more mechanics over like 4 hours of play. A mix of system things and commands. I feel like I can have some strategy and mix it up. Which is cool because being a tourist in this genre, my patience has a limit with the frequent restarts. This has tools to play around with and I'm not thinking of restarts at all.
The attract mode has been running for a minute now. I'm going to take one more run. Luckily I have the pretty Saturn stick because this game has no auto fire and you shoot hella fast. This would be unplayable for me on a pad because hammering my right thumb would inflame my old wrist.
