Raiden IV: When it Really Is the Game’s Fault

Raiden IV never stops ticking me off.

Normally, I give shmups the benefit of the doubt, given that the shmup may well be my preferred genre of game — something about the impossible odds of the things, both in a narrative and in a ludic sense, has an almost unlimited appeal to a gamer like me. I’m willing to make apologies for shmups that I’m simply unwilling to consider for other genres.

And yet, Raiden IV. I bought it because it was a gaping hole in my collection, an entry in a genre that I have few excuses not to be a completist for. Heck, I convinced family to get me a Cave shmup at exorbitant import prices before I ever got around to landing Raiden IV, which even had a soundtrack in it and everything, for around $20? So I’m glad I finally got around to picking the thing up, but wow. It just makes me angry.

Mostly, it makes me angry because I’m terrible at it, and it requires the sort of fast reflexes that, say, Cave shmups eschew for the sake of offering bullet patterns and tiny escape windows. But there are a couple of quantifiable things in here that just feel like poor design decisions, the sorts of faux-pas that can turn a 1cc run (not that I’ve been anywhere near one of those on any sort of respectable difficulty) into a thrown controller. These are the places where getting blowed up real good goes from being a player deficiency to a game deficiency — something any decent shmup developer should desperately try to avoid in the creation of their game.

Problem #1: MEDALS LOOK LIKE BULLETS (ALSO, BULLETS LOOK LIKE MEDALS)

No, they don’t look exactly the same. The medals either have wings on them or they stay still and just sort of glimmer in the sunlight, while the bullets are typically smaller circles that move in a straight line, but really, the problem is the color. Bullets in Raiden IV are the same color as the medals. While this isn’t such a problem in the early stages when there aren’t as many bullets to dodge and you have a few hundredths of a second to look around and figure out whether running into the yellow thing or flying away from it is a good idea, the latter stages afford no such luxuries. It’s too easy to think you’re flying into a medal, when actually you’re flying into something that will explode you into a million pieces.

I mean, the obvious solution here is to avoid the medals, but this is a shmup, and scores matter. When I’m in the zone and running on pure instinct, I should be able to simply think something like “YELLOW CIRCLE BAD!” and move out of the way, or “YELLOW CIRCLE GOOD!” and go pick it up. I shouldn’t have to think “YELLOW CIRCLE OMG WHAT DO I DO NOW DOES IT HAVE WINGS?”, because by the time I get halfway through that thought, I’ve been killed by a stray bullet from somewhere else that I didn’t see coming.

Problem #2: CAMERA MOVEMENT

It’s no secret that there’s a certain amount of precision involved in navigating the treacherous waters of shmuppery, and that gaining a feel for your ship — that is, achieving an instinctual sense of how fast it goes and how powerful its shots are — is paramount. As such, it can be terribly frustrating when some levels allow the playing field to go beyond what the screen displays, allowing the player’s movements to affect the section of the field that is shown on-screen. What this means in a vertically-oriented shmup is that when the player moves to the right, the camera moves to the right as well, which also means that the player moves slower on the screen than he or she is accustomed to. Bullets traveling in the direction that the camera is moving will also slow down, and bullets traveling in a direction opposite of that of the camera will speed up.

What this means for the player is a slight shift in the perception of the game, one that only applies to certain levels. It’s not severe enough a shift to be an obvious change in style, but it is enough to have an affect on the way that a player has to approach the game.

Really, it’s just enough of a change to get you killed.

Raiden IV is not a terrible game, and it’s enough to satiate my need to blow up tiny airplanes with my own tiny airplane. Still, it’s hard to see myself running back to this one too often when I have things like Mushihimesama Futari or Ikaruga, games that never feel cheap even as they’re making me cry, to play.

Breaking the Chains (or, Region Free or Die)

Finally.

Finally, I’ll get my chance to play some of the shmups that have exactly ZERO chance of landing an American release. Finally, a publisher realizes that a good way to gauge overseas interest is to actually open up those games to a worldwide userbase. Finally, the globalization and standardization of media is dragging the antiquated standards of the console era into the 21st century.

Finally, Cave is lifting the region locks on some of its most celebrated shmup series.

Perhaps spurred by the groundswell of interest in the upcoming American release of Deathsmiles (most of which unfortunately centers on the appropriateness of an apparent “loligoth” aesthetic in its character design), Cave has begun to release its celebrated cult-hit shmups without region locks.

Way back in November, Mushihimesama Futara was the first. As far as the current generation of bullet-hell shooters go, Mushi-Futara is actually purported to be one of the more forgiving. Of course, so is Ikaruga, and I still spend 20 or so lives getting through its final level. By starting with one of the more forgiving shooters on the market, however, Cave is making a calculated choice to ease American gamers into the genre if they choose to import it.

February saw the release of Espgaluda II, supposedly a much more difficult entry in the genre, but with enough innovation to perhaps capture the imagination of a gamer looking for something with a little more meat than a mere Gradius-style space shooter. [more]

Finally, in June (or maybe, July, August, October, February 2011 the way some of these shmup releases go), Deathsmiles will arrive. It’s actually older than the other two games that will have been available for months before its American release, and it’s actually the most traditional of the three games. Still, there are hooks built in to the other two that may actually provide a bump to the sales of Deathsmiles, from players who have developed an interest in the genre who will be happy to be able to get such a game at domestic prices (rather than the actually-pretty-reasonable 70 bucks the imports cost).

It’s a great time to be a shmup fan if you own an Xbox 360. Small as the audience for these games might be — especially the portion of that audience willing to import a game that won’t be released domestically — it’s hard not to think that the PS3, a future-friendly region-free machine, might have benefitted from a few of these types of games that would bolster its worldwide clout as much as its local clout.

The Beauty in Construction

The more I hear Bitte Orca, the more I enjoy it, and yet I can’t bring myself to love it.

Dirty Projectors’ latest collection of songs established itself as a mid-year contender for Album of the Year last year (though it would never catch up to Grizzly Bear and Animal Collective in the eyes of most publications, including PopMatters). It’s an album that could be described as aggressively indie, what with song structures that prog bands could identify with, melodies that take the long way to singsongy, and at least three vocalists taking the lead microphone, with the other two often singing along in harmony. It’s a strange album — not completely inaccessible, but it’ll never befriend any fans of top 40 radio. It’s obscure enough that I had a rather adverse reaction to it on first listen.

Since that first listen, though, I’ve come to admire it for both its chutzpah (it knows what it is, and it never tries to be anything else) and its construction. It’s the type of thing that benefits from its listener knowing what’s coming; the jarring transitions make sense when you know they’re coming, and their association with one another eventually sounds as though it was crafted by a master composer, rather than an irritable kid in a rocking chair who bores easily.

Even as my appreciation for it grows, however, I never find myself absorbed by it; never able to pierce the glass pane that separates it from my consciousness, I take it in on a technical level while it stays in a plane completely separate from my emotions. Its nine songs are simply nine songs without a narrative or a flow uniting them, and its sound strives for little more than individuality.

While I was putting this criticism of the album together, it felt familiar, and it didn’t take long to figure out how — these are the same sorts of criticisms I see levied at a genre of games that I hold dear: space shooters. Shmups. I’ve lobbied in support of seeing space shooters as “art” before, and the belief that they are is one I continue to hold. Anyone, after all, can make a game in which a little blip on the screen has to shoot projectiles at a bunch of bad blips in order to win; to make such a game compelling takes an artist.

Why, then, can I love the experience of playing a space shooter while the experience of listening to Dirty Projectors falls short? The interactive experience. Being able to insert myself into the complex equations being played out in front of me is thrilling; to be able to master those equations in the ways obviously intended by the developers can be just this side of mind-blowing. I don’t get to insert myself into Bitte Orca‘s tapestry. I’m forced to admire it from afar.

Even so, this is enough to force me to take pause for a second and re-evaluate my own criticism of the album. Perhaps it doesn’t engage me on an emotional level, but who am I to say it won’t do so for others? Who would I be to try and lambaste an indie scene that’s chosen to embrace an expertly-constructed album just because I won’t be singing along to it in my car any time soon? I’d be a hypocrite, for I have personal experience in how the technical construction of a piece of art can be enough to inspire love for that art, even without, say, a cohesive narrative or a specific appeal to visceral reaction.

So Bitte Orca is on your list of the best albums of 2009? Bully for you. Perhaps one day I’ll find a way to love it enough to put it on mine.

…of the Decade: The Shmup (Ikaruga)

I’ve loved space shooters / shoot ‘em ups / shmups / whatever you want to call them for a long time now — probably since it was discovered that the Contra code worked in Life Force, the latter perhaps the best of a good bunch of NES shooters. The 16-bit era cemented that love with games like U.N. Squadron and Gaiares, and I’ve followed and defended the genre ever since.

What I’ve never done in all the time I’ve been playing these games, however, is call a shmup “beautiful”, with one notable exception: Ikaruga. Ikaruga is a beautiful game, from its simple-yet-innovative light-vs.-dark gameplay mechanic that allows you, at all times, to absorb a subset of the bullets in the game, to its unobtrusive-yet-epic soundtrack, to the smooth-as-silk graphic style. It’s a shooter that takes its cues from the modern “bullet-hell” style of shmup that delights in throwing millions of things at you at once and daring you to find the on-screen pixel in which you won’t die, but it twists the concept by encouraging you to run into half of those bullets at once.

I owned Ikaruga on the GameCube and I now own it on Xbox Live Arcade, on which I have the privilege of playing it in all its HD glory; I’ve beaten the game (thanks mostly to the ever-expanding arsenal of continues you get as you keep dying), but I’ve never scored an A or better on a level. Despite my long history with the genre, I’m still an amateur, though I can’t remember ever playing a shmup (save perhaps the Sega CD’s Silpheed) that I wanted to come back to over and over again like Ikaruga.

Why would I come back? For the punishment? For the achievements? Well, sure, those two things are fine, but it’s mostly because the true beauty in Ikaruga is in watching a master play. When you find someone who has unraveled the intricacies of Ikaruga‘s gameplay, you realize just how complex and well-designed the game truly is.

The fourth level, really, is the game’s shining moment, a stage in which you hardly travel at all; instead of moving forward, as in most games of this type, you spend your time chipping away at a circular structure as bullets literally rain around you. It looks impossible when you see it; it feels impossible the first time you play it, but somewhere around the 15th time you play it…the pattern clicks. It’s still difficult, but you realize just how navigable it is, if only you take constant advantage of the ability to shift from light to dark and back again.

And then you lose two more lives as you stare at the game in quiet awe. It’s that good.