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High Score Competition (March: The Mine)


arcadeshopper

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Yeah, one issue I have with it is that enemy movement seems like it's mostly just randomised.  Which means there isn't really any strategy or pattern-learning.  And without that, there's not much opportunity to improve at the game over time. Timing shots well to collide with enemies is one big part.  But a bigger part is just firing and hoping an enemy moves into the path of your fire, which they will or will not, randomly. In a crowded market of Galaxian clones, that's not quite enough.

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On 12/11/2020 at 7:12 AM, pixelpedant said:

Yeah, one issue I have with it is that enemy movement seems like it's mostly just randomised.  Which means there isn't really any strategy or pattern-learning.  And without that, there's not much opportunity to improve at the game over time. Timing shots well to collide with enemies is one big part.  But a bigger part is just firing and hoping an enemy moves into the path of your fire, which they will or will not, randomly. In a crowded market of Galaxian clones, that's not quite enough.

I disagree. As I repeatedly played this game, I noticed that there is definitely a pattern for the movements of the various aliens which I have been able to exploit, hence the significant improvement in my score. There is of course an added layer of randomness which increases with the levels, which is where concentration and reflexes come into play mostly.

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There are certainly some basic patterns, but the degree of randomness infused into them is just far, far too great, particularly later on.  It's still playable.  But as I say, today, I can't help looking at it in the context of dozens of other Galaxian/Galaga clones of the time, and seeing it as a pretty lousy example within a very crowded cohort, for reasons that have nothing to do with hardware limitations - that really just have to do with bad design.  The game evidently understands that ideally, you want to increase challenge by way of increasing pattern complexity or structural difficulty, because within each individual cycle, the levels try to do that.  But increasingly difficulty via simple randomness over the larger level cycle structure is just straightforwardly a formula for designing a bad shooter.  Everything else about it is fine.  But a difficulty curve which increasingly punishes rather than rewards learning and exploitation of enemy patterns as difficulty increases is just a dumb idea. 

 

I guess the game bugs me all the more so because it's so close to being genuinely good.  But that aspect of its approach to the difficulty curve kind of tanks it for me. It's the fly in the ointment that just can't be ignored.

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How about a nice game of chess?

For TIPI users. CALL TIPI("PI.HTTP://MYTI99.COM/CHESS") by Electriclab. V003. (Only the setup of queens are wrong. Queens chooses color. White queen on a white square at d1 and black on black square d8) and I believe certain moves don’t work like castling 0-0 and 0-0-0 and en-passant moves) but the setup is a great idea! (For non-TI. Chess I am using recently Lichess (userid Globeron) on Android, iOS or browser.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
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