Hey Guys,
I needed to vent about the new Independent Dreamcast game that arrived at my house today. NGDEVTEAM is a European indie developer for the NeoGeo & Dreamcast and they blew it again. Two times in a row. First with Fast Striker and now with NeoXYX. Technically speaking both games look great. Great levels, great enemies, great bosses, amazing music but sadly....and I do mean sadly......The last two shooter games they came out with had a huge Achilles heel flaw to them. Hit Detection.
I don't know about you guys but I've played at least 100 shoot'em ups in my time and every single one of them from Galaxian and GORF to Ikaruga and mars matrix all had SPOT ON hit detection. For all you people out there that do not know what hit detection is, its like collision detection in side-scrolling beat'em ups. You can literally fly through countless shots unscathed. You have no idea when and how the hit on your aircraft will take place. You may fly through 10 shots in a row and on the 11th shot your spaceship blows up. WTF.
Since I'm very conspiratorial minded I think I may have the answer. NGDEVTEAM's first project was called Last Hope and even though this game looked, sounded, and played amazingly with its super perfect NeoGeo graphics.......customers were all pissed off about its difficulty. The customers complained so much that NGDEVTEAM capitulated and re-programmed the game to make it have numerous other difficulty settings and re-colored the shots coming at the player bright pink......Last Hope: Pink Bullets.
To make a long story short, I think NGDEVTEAM is still in capitulation shell shock mode from Last Hope's complaints and has made their games so user friendly that they actually made the "HIT POINT" on the players spacecraft so small that you don't know if you're going to blow up one minute or the game is just going to allow invincibility mode for the next 30 some odd enemy bullets.
Blah! Hope Ghost Blades from Hucast is better or else I'm retiring my dreamcast.
-TheCool
I needed to vent about the new Independent Dreamcast game that arrived at my house today. NGDEVTEAM is a European indie developer for the NeoGeo & Dreamcast and they blew it again. Two times in a row. First with Fast Striker and now with NeoXYX. Technically speaking both games look great. Great levels, great enemies, great bosses, amazing music but sadly....and I do mean sadly......The last two shooter games they came out with had a huge Achilles heel flaw to them. Hit Detection.
I don't know about you guys but I've played at least 100 shoot'em ups in my time and every single one of them from Galaxian and GORF to Ikaruga and mars matrix all had SPOT ON hit detection. For all you people out there that do not know what hit detection is, its like collision detection in side-scrolling beat'em ups. You can literally fly through countless shots unscathed. You have no idea when and how the hit on your aircraft will take place. You may fly through 10 shots in a row and on the 11th shot your spaceship blows up. WTF.
Since I'm very conspiratorial minded I think I may have the answer. NGDEVTEAM's first project was called Last Hope and even though this game looked, sounded, and played amazingly with its super perfect NeoGeo graphics.......customers were all pissed off about its difficulty. The customers complained so much that NGDEVTEAM capitulated and re-programmed the game to make it have numerous other difficulty settings and re-colored the shots coming at the player bright pink......Last Hope: Pink Bullets.
To make a long story short, I think NGDEVTEAM is still in capitulation shell shock mode from Last Hope's complaints and has made their games so user friendly that they actually made the "HIT POINT" on the players spacecraft so small that you don't know if you're going to blow up one minute or the game is just going to allow invincibility mode for the next 30 some odd enemy bullets.
Blah! Hope Ghost Blades from Hucast is better or else I'm retiring my dreamcast.
-TheCool