A brief consideration of tells in shoot-em-ups

I was considering the application of "show &" tells to shoot-em-ups the past few days while playing Raiden IV, Mushi-F, and Lightening* Force; the idea that enemies should visually indicate when an attack is about to happen (e.g. Bowser sucking in air before breathing fire). It should be taken into consideration that I have not cleared any of the three games I'm about to discuss, although I'm on the final stages of Raiden IV and Mushi-F. Lightening Force I've played for like 3 hours so take that with a grain of salt.

As I said before, Raiden is so positionally-oriented that precise shot timing doesn't really matter. If there's a group of enemies above me that I know fire single tracking bullets, I also know that I will be safe sweeping left until I clear the bullets. I can start the sweep any time before the first bullet reaches me and end it any time after the last one fires. If there's also an enemy left of me, then I should probably sweep up-right to get away or down-left to get under it and fire. These scenarios are pretty static across runs. Timing doesn't really matter that much - what matters is doing these movements in such a way as to sync up with targets while also setting up the next dodge. Which is quite enough to make it more complicated than "sweep left". I did think it would be helpful on a few enemies who shoot starburst or static patterns - and I also noticed these enemies do have animated tells (e.g. a mine blinking faster before it explodes).

Mushihimesama Futari yeah nah. It's all sight-dodging. I'm looking at the bullets for paths through them, or for enemies under them to shoot and consume them. Also, everything pretty much shoots immediately as it comes on screen and doesn't stop til it's destroyed. Herding is a pretty big deal in situations where aggression fails - essentially, you can treat enemies as though they are firing at all times and this would not significantly change the strategy.

Lightening Force I can definitely see the applicability. Not for bullets so much, but the game is plagued with enemies that blast on screen and smash into you so fast there's barely a second to react. Some of them do have foreshadowing, swooping across the background or burrowing through the desert sand, but not nearly enough. Blazing Star solves this in the simplest way possible, with "incoming" arrows where enemies are about to emerge. Crude, but effective. The bosses desperately need tells for everything they do, because they move around jerkily without pattern and again fire extremely fast bullets without warning. Maybe need is too strong - they'd be altered, for sure. As is, playing it safe and staying completely out of their targeting zone is pretty much the only road to success. The anxious fidgeting makes sure that even that isn't particularly easy.

So yeah, I'm inclined to think something is wrong with Gradius if it would really benefit from visual tells, and I'm starting to question if it actually would. The most troubling factors seem to be malingering enemies like the footbots who hang around for 10 or 20 seconds and can mostly be ignored except for those three random times they shoot, and the crowded spacing that means sustained motions like I described re:Raiden lead to constant collisions (I've said in the past I don't care for walls in shmups). It's like the series carves out a weird space between Thunderforce, where you always have to play it safe, and Mushihimesama, where you always have to wait and see, but without having the elegant level design of Raiden IV which realizes that it's in that space.

*light·en·ing

/ˈlītniNG/

noun

noun: lightening; plural noun: lightenings

1. a drop in the level of the uterus during the last weeks of pregnancy as the head of the fetus engages in the pelvis.

Ouchies; Sine Mora revisited

How the motherfuck is it pronounced. Come on. Someone tell me. It's eating me up inside. It's eating a sandwich inside. It made a sandwich from my insides?! That is FUKK'D.

Certainly the game was the belle of the 2.5D ball

Hang on let me invent this thing called a search 'train' engine and then invent this thing called the Internet and go 'on' the Internet thing and post the answer to my question and then rediscover the search brain and wait how did I discover it without having something with which to search oops plot hole well let's just move on because this is Hollywood. It looks like it's Latin(o?) for "ohne Verspaetung", which is German for "without delay(o?)", which is English for "turkey time". My high school Latin experience tells me that there isn't really an official pronunciation of Latin words, so you generally just say all the syllables as if they were phonetic English. I don't know this for a fact. That was like ten years ago and I was never super-sure that I could take my teacher's word for anything. So let's stick with what I've been saying all along, "SEE-nay MORE-ah". Of course, the game was developed and titled by fucking Hungarians, so they probably say it completely differently. OH MY GOD THIS IS ALL SO FUKK'D TO READ ABOUT!

See how hard it is just to pronounce Sine Mora? That sets the tone for the entire game. Not simply because it's hard as FUKK'D. Because it's hard in a way that you can choose to ignore, or choose to tear out your hair over. Just about any player can putz their way through story mode, the same way a four-year-old could get through the title as "Sinnamer". And just like a four-year-old, they can be proud of their work and pat themselves on the back for a job well done. We can think of this as "critic mode". Sine Mora also offers a far more difficult to perfect Arcade mode, which provides extremely punishing piecemeal challenges that force you to constantly use all of those tools that were previously forgotten.

This isn't so original in the world of the console shmup. Yes, Sine Mora actually justifies the presence of Story Mode, but the notion of being able to cruise through, spamming the Insert Coin button, is present (and oft-criticized) in everything from Mushihimesama to Mushihimesama Futari. What makes the challenge more worthwhile and entertaining in Sine is that it's not simply in pursuit of score. The game offers a mode that actually makes survival a challenge, and weirdly enough, it evokes in me a tension very similar to survival horror games.

You know what, it's just a tension similar to tense games. Because the only survival horror example back-flipping across my brain at the moment is Dead Space. What made that game scary was the constant threat of space coming back to life as a zombie. See, in the beginning, your character gets fed up with killing time. He gets bored. So he reads a book that says "time & space are a continuum, that's why they call me Albert and Ernie Einstein", and says, holy shit, if I kill space instead of time, maybe that will give me something different to do while still accomplishing my main goal (kill time). That all happens in the form of a minigame, and then something about a ship which crashed into space's corpse. It's a tense game because you're left wondering, "is space rly dead tho?" Wait none of this sounds right where's my script?

Since when does Space look like THAT?

Another tense game is Dark Souls, which can be shortened to DS if you're brave enough to risk it being mistake for a video game platform or Dead Space. Dark Souls is scary because sometimes your entire game gets ruined because SOME BULLSHIT FROM THE CEILING.