Integer Game Gimmicks (Read 360 times)

[Aeon]

eighteen? eighteen games? you must be joking! that's a lot. i've made like, one point two games. most people do not make eighteen games. touhou is pretty mechanically formulaic though so zun can make em fairly consistently but they are still fairly distinct from eachother.
basically everything aside from lls and eosd has some special gimmick mechanic that makes you think about the game in ways other than immediate dodging and pure firepower. pretty neat
but not all engine forks are created equal: some are cooler than others

for convenience here's a list:
soew: mash z for damage
ms: dream bar
pcb: sakura barrier thing
in: human/youkai and time system
mof: faith items/bombs = power
sa: capture spells/bombs = power
ufo: ufo
gfw (im counting it): freeze bullets/choose stage/level up
td: spirits/trance
ddc: the shit wit da items
lolk: graze system/pointdevice
hsifs: flashbombs! awesome! and subweapons
wbawc: ufo 2
um: the binding of isaac

what is your favorite mini-objective/additional mechanic? useful information to know because i am making a few danmaku gimmicks of my own but also we simply make some good video game rankings. my favorites are pointdevice from lolk, the cards from unconnected marketeers, and the bullet freezing from gfw

[spongelevator]

now I have only actually attempted like 10 of these and completed two
but as a person who cannot 1cc any of these on normal and also can barely pass with using every single bomb I will respond to each of these anyway
all of these answers come from very limited experience remember that

I would have to say the only one of all of these I actually care about from a gameplay perspective is the human/youkai split from IN
from what I recall each side did more damage to certain types of enemies and the more you are biased to one side, the more damage that side does
it's simple enough but spices up the game some and also allows for the teams which add more variety and movement/damage options
the wiki says nothing about damage so I could be remembering this wrong entirely though but if it worked like that then that's the good one
special mention to pcb's barrier which allows you to not lose a life when you get hit (or rack up points if you do that) in arguably the easiest games in the series so it's not actually noteworthy and is only helpful to people like me who can barely beat it anyway

I haven't played SoEW but mashing z for damage sounds more like a design flaw that leads to carpal tunnel and the reason why I do not want to play PoDD and I think fairy wars which also did that? (PoFV at least let you remap it to shoot when focused)
also dream bar sounds like a cereal bar that would have been released around the time of mr dream's punch out back when they made video game cereal
that or a really damn good mars bar that would get discontinued at the turn of the century and never be heard of again outside of some obscure european country

the gimmicks of MoF/SA/UFO/WBaWC/LoLK I either don't remember at all or don't really care enough about to think anything of them
freezing bullets is a nice gimmick but then fairy wars plays like absolute ass so I have less than fifteen minutes of experience from it and can't really enjoy the gimmick

from a not gameplay perspective trance mode is very cool and also resulted in a ton more great tracks from already best OST but from what I recall it only happens when you die and it makes you very likely to just die again when the mode ends and you're directly on top of a newly spawned enemy so you can't really use it

for not an option PoFV's versus gimmick is definitely the best because it resulted in a varied playable cast and an online option that actually works not to mention epoch recolors and not actually having to beat the game to enjoy it all (I cannot beat the game)
PoDD being the less good older version where you have to press the button repeatedly to shoot and the larger cast consists of literally whos and though it's still fine I'm guessing I think PoFV is a success because it really went all out on the idea of pvp

for me UM's gimmick is the wrong type of "more things"
PoFV did "more things" by having straight up more characters to use while UM did "more things" by allowing you to change how one of your four characters plays and generally I don't care for that because then all the "meta" and rpg-type minmaxing and guide-dang-it things start happening instead of "I use tewi because it's funny"
simple is good
stuff like a somewhat minor gameplay change in IN that you don't have to always be thinking about is nice or having a decently large cast of characters where you can just use the same four as always or you can try the new options that don't majorly change the game played but offer a slightly different experience is nice
I have realized most of this is not very useful and does not answer the question well so basically "IN is best gimmick because it's minor and can be ignored but is pretty nice if you use it" and the rest just exists


ok I hope you enjoy onion from the least qualified person here to answer the question 

[TSUN]

hello

i have still not played past MOF but here is my thoughts

"mash z for damage" in SOEW is 100% a glitch and if ZUN intended it then it was actually a glitch in his brain that made him think that was a good idea

it's the sort of thing you'd see in an early NES game made by laughin jokin numbnuts

the mashing is okay in PODD because of charge shots, but also it's kinda beans if your character has a bad charge shot.

im pretty sure LLS has the dream bar too, it's just a number instead of a bar. IIRC in both games it increases the value of point items (and also make enemy bullets faster???)

PCB sakura barrier makes it the most forgiving traditional game in the series so far

i would much sooner do a lunatic no bomb run of PCB than a regular Hard MS or EOSD or MOF run. the one thing i hate about most integer touhou games is constantly retrying the first three stages even though they're pretty boring to play, just because you can't afford to make a single mistake. PCB doesn't have that problem, and that's part of why it's my favorite.

also uhh

"so it's not actually noteworthy and is only helpful to people like me who can barely beat it anyway"

im pretty sure playing for score entirely revolves around the sakura barrier, since it gives you like a million billion points

human/youkai is very cool yeah. The main cool thing is the spirits/fairies/lightballs/whatever. they're basically fairies with a lotta health that bosses & other fairies shoot out, and only humans can destroy them. if you're a human they can block your shots at the boss, but when they're destroyed they stop shooting. if you're a youkai then you can always attack the boss, but theres often way more bullets to dodge. it's awesome to switch between human and youkai to destroy them, and also really changes the dynamic of the game if you're playing as a solo character.

also the time system doesnt matter much to me but then again if it did matter then it'd probably just be super annoying

"bombs = power" is awesome and i hate it

it lets you use as many bombs as you want, but punishes you for using too many

sadly i have no self control and tend to bomb a million times until i have no power left and do barely any damage to the boss

"PoDD being the less good older version where you have to press the button repeatedly to shoot and the larger cast consists of literally whos and though it's still fine I'm guessing I think PoFV is a success because it really went all out on the idea of pvp"

I CANNOT BELIEVE YOU SPONGE ELEVATOR

I'LL HAVE YOU KNOW THAT PHANTASMAGORIA OF DIM DOT DREAM IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL GAME ON THE PERSONAL COMPUTER 九十八 AND IT DESERVES 5000 MORE LOVE POINTS THAN IT GETS

ELLEN'S CAT IS BEST 2HU

DABBING SAILOR LAZORS IS THE GREATEST DANMAKU EVER PROGRAMMED

YUMEME IS THE MOST FAIR AND BALANCED FINAL BOSS IN THE HISTORY OF VERSUS GAMES

srsface though

at least right now, PODD versus POFV is kinda like how IAMP vs Soku is for me

the new one is Objectively Better but for some reason i like the aesthetic and music and unique mechanics and general flow of the old one more

or at least on par with each other, depending on the day

speaking of those games

UM did "more things" by allowing you to change how one of your four characters plays and generally I don't care for that because then all the "meta" and rpg-type minmaxing and guide-dang-it things start happening instead of "I use tewi because it's funny"
simple is good

i am not at all qualified to talk about how soku works, but on first impressions that's how i feel about the deck building system

IAMP's card system is really cool, i just wish the spells were better-balanced and the 2nd "tier" wasn't always just an upgraded version of the first one

the soku card system is good i guess, but it's too way random for my tastes

(also the weather system would be awesome if you could turn it off, but you can't so it's stupid and dumb and poopy)

conclusion: PCB sakura barrier thing is best because it's a built-in autobomb. human/youkai comes at a close second because of how it affects the danmaku itself.

[spongelevator]

man I'll have you know mashing for damage is never okay under any circumstances
you know how people who play that nasty, foul "osu" game mash z and x at like 300bpm and then almost all of the best guys retired due to wrist and/or forearm injuries
it's ALMOST close enough to almost be a similar thing therefore it is the exact same thing and playing PoDD will result in having your hands chopped by 25
instead you should play better NES shmup silver surfer (no I did not play it)

I know rack up points but all of the guys I've seen who play for points have ascended already so I have no idea if it even matters to those people or if pcb just has points inflation
honestly I thought pcb was supposed to be the easiest game because it's the easiest game but now I see the barrier thing actually makes it easier

yeah that might be the thing I was thinking about because I recall one of the sides was able to kill enemies spawned by the boss very quickly

for the pvp gimmick I think PoDD does it worse just because its cast is smaller and mostly new characters (I don't even care about the three returning ones either) not to mention lacking easy access PvP
I get it didn't exactly have uhhh
three games to pull characters from nor online to use but trying to get people to tolerate mashing the z button for thirty minutes and getting the game to work at all with the weird pc98 savefiles to have access to the whopping nine characters and then trying to find some way to make it playable online without horrid lag and all for a game that plays almost the same as PoFV anyway is not at all worth it
aint saying this based off of one experience either I've tried getting people to play it at least three or four times both online and offline and nobody wants that shit because we can either play wii party offline or PoFV online (assuming it's not soku instead or assuming it's not TF2 instead of soku)
I don't even care about "objectively better" because p3p>p5 and pikmin 1>3 and mario kart 7>8 and "every single game released past 2016 is eh because I can't play it" and whatnot but when a game's entire gimmick is that it's versus and you will almost never play it versus it's pretty damn tough to call it the better one as opposed to soku vs IaMP which is more "how do you like the game to play" (also iamp's cast is such ass I'd rather play soku nine out of ten times regardless of how it plays and PoDD is that plus having to work to play it)
I aint saying the game is treash and if all of those issues can be ignored and somehow a second player is found it's fine but the asspain required to get anyone to play it multiplayer doesn't pay off at all and I would never play a mostly versus game singleplayer for more than ten minutes
probably this sounds stupid but it almost results in PoDD not feeling multiplayer at all as opposed to an offline-only multiplayer like mario kart wii without homebrew that everyone is racing to play (ha) and when it loses that gimmick it's just the one touhou game that plays funny
also you can't play as ruukoto 0/10 never again

yeah as far as I know many fightman avoid soku because they don't like the randomness of the cards while others say it makes the game more interesting
in casual pvp none of us know what is going on anyway so I don't gotta worry about centipede phoenix medicine LNN so I just slap on all the buffs and get to +4 in everything then become slightly less easy to kill

weather can straight up be manipulated consistently however and it's said that competitive matches are just as much about fighting as they are gaining control over the weather but for us who can't be assed to waste time figuring out the entire weather cycle and how it works it's just "wait for typhoon then finish the match"
I understand what you mean though it still tends to be pretty not great (but the cast is large and good so it's kinda in the middle for me I will not forgive 15.5 though that cast is ass)

[Aeon]

spongelevator
it would be cool if it affected damage but it does not do so directly. the big difference is that you and your shots ignore familiars as a human and are affected by/can affect them as a youkai. most easy to see in the reimu and eirin fights
still a pretty neat thing though

i was jokin about the mash z for damage being a feature, it is a funny game

to be honest i havent actually played fairy wars in quite a while to see how it holds up i just thought the cirno stuff was cool. oh yeah and the demotivation laser, makes it kinda almost have a full hp system

i did not include pofv and the photo games in my list since i considered them too different to compare but i do like them and the massive set of playables is awesome
gonna stick with tsun here though podd is still pretty cool. big fan of the weirdos

very interesting take on unconnection game (this may not bode well for my own danmakugame if that is general consensus) BUT i will agree that there being just one or two optimal builds can be annoying and instead of being able to take things as they go you gotta worry about finding the specific cards that make it possible for even little aeon to lnn

TSUN
i am going to be honest i dont actually really know how the dream stat works in either game i just know that if i get items a lot and maybe near the top of the screen it goes higher and i get more points and i get more lives

i have reiterated your data about imperishable night! too bad i respond to things as soon as i read them

bombs = power yeah its funky
i think you could just make releases in hsifs full bombs and keep the gradual bomb acquisition through dropped items without having the annoyance of losing much power (but still a bit)
then again power is kinda stupid usually since you max it in stage two and then keep it forever
in unconnected marketeers you can sell your power as a last resort which makes it more interesting at least

spongelevator again
listen right
its not mashing exactly
actual mashing is usually gonna be more faster and erratic than high level rhythm game play
and especially in games like osu's case you can always bind more keys to tap and use three or four fingers instead of just hammering away at z and x
doesnt mean you wont get carpal tunnel! this is why i play everhood and cytus at the moment

true facts on god for real for real! game should have online. cannot believe jynx made a remake but failed to include it all the way in the 2010s. i know its not his area of expertise but cmaaan how hard could it be

lmao
i still like it but yes a bit cumbersome to play
someone should straight up port all the pc98 games already it would take like no time at all and you could fix a ton of the stank parts
assets are already there, just takes like a weekend in danmakufu or gamemaker

i dont care how bad weather is it always beats having fighting game timer in the same spot on the screen
whadda ya talkin about with the cast though its pretty good
lemme mark up who coulda been cooler with someone else


hm alright well maybe we could have taken a couple of pages from this guy
and gotten:
meiling again (good thing)
muse from seihou
yumemi
yeah he has pretty good ideas
the touhou playable cast redemption arc was 17.5 though that shits rockin dawg!!!!!

[spongelevator]

wait if it doesn't affect damage in general what does the meter even do
too lazy to try and find out myself considering I already got it wrong

fairy wars playing like ass was a shame considering fairies is good manga and fairy wars is a direct continuation of a gag from that
maybe one day I shall just see someone else play it on the utoob

podd's cast would be alright if there was any actual way to see the cast outside of gnarly single-player playervscomputer sad times
tis an unfortunate result of needing to install a 300 foot tall lightning pole upon your house and never touching the telephone or toaster to access the world wide webs back in the 90s
imagine you're a kid on christmas and you get super mario galaxy and then an xbox 720 so you can't play it (no this isn't supposed to make sense)
that is podd in 2014!!!!

yeah if the cards end up crusty in a way it starts to be like the pokeymans where you spend 3 hours hatching eggs and massacring one specific type of wild animal so your guy gets the buffest possible arms and then punch 10 fish in the face to steal their scales so an old lady can teach your giant chicken how to kick stuff

I literally forgot the timer existed 
that is definitely one reason why no 15.5
also rollback so we don't get 99 second matches that last 297 seconds
weather turns out funny at least though when you are training to get carpal tunnel a decade early by obliterating the down key and then the weather changes and you start sliding all over the place

I remember seeing that guy's eirin and thinking "man and instead we got mamizou"

instead of rating by "who should not be here" I rate by whoever either plays like ass and I wouldn't use or whoever could disappear from the game and I would not care

I'm fine with alice and sanny but they play like trying to use a ps4 controller on an nes
raymoo and yakumo yukarin! both play like ass and I don't care about em get em out of here don't want em shoo git

now uhhh
well 2/3 of the cast plays like trying to scoop up eels covered in butter with a broken arm
and I can't tell if this is a result of the way the game plays and is balanced or if they seriously just all play like that
in soku I thought marisa was wacky to use but here just nah man
nitorin/koish/mamizou/kokoro/sumireko/doremy I just do not care about and you could literally replace them with like

man the fact that I genuinely would be fine with this exchange
you got the giant catfish himself and robot meido-san and the one and only UFO tokens which you can exchange for three tries at the UFO machine or one bag of UFO candy
the weird PoDD princess lady who can finally see some online action after so long and the DiPP shrine maiden who literally does not exist but has my favorite design of ZUN's weird shrine maidens 
and then the tank lady who has you recreate the one boss fight on shadow moses that didn't become iconic and was forgotten (I do not know her well but she has a tank so we're mugen now)
ok anyway that aside reisen doesn't need to be here and yakumo yukarin! can go away 

oh fiddlesticks I just saw there is another thread to respond to and I have already said more than enough about my distaste for 15.5
17.5 kiiinda makes things better because it has a wacky ass cast but it also is singleplayer only and plays ehhhhh
step in the right direction that's what it is but not there yet

[Aeon]

if you are more on human side you start to get time orbs when dealing damage, and when you're on the youkai side you start to get time orbs while grazing. not the biggest difference especially in like extra but its something to pay attention to

podd-themed fighting game when!!!!!!!! then i can look at my favorite toho, kotohime nolastname, in full real time blast-processed action as she ravages gensokyo with her weird explosive things

your rating system is a cruel! if i had used such a rating system i woulda taken out marisa in soku. very surprised you are not a fan of soku reimu though, even aside from second-maining her i thought she moved in a like normal way compared to weirdos like okuu or tenshi
soku yukari i like all of her moves i just wish she was a biiiiit faster at all of them
even though nitori was one i marked off on my list i think she plays pretty well. funny speakers
omg kotohime again yeah we can do that trade as long as i can keep at least sumireko
the giant catfish is in aocf though. you're tellin me ya didn't find the secret true final boss?

17.5 if moving in the air was easier for people who weren't reimu and maybe there was a command list it would be pretty complete in terms of maneuverability. singleplayer i do not mind at all since i generally dont even like fighting games and generally other games have movesets that are much more fluid

[spongelevator]

ok that is not as good as I thought it was considering nobody cares about the time mechanic anyway
I suppose it's still a fine gimmick though because the other things are accurate

we may not have PoDD fighting game but we have mimi chan in fair and balanced mugen remember always
mimi chan is a believer of peace but if you attack and make him angry
ohhhh boy 

I thought soku marisa plays fine and is basically like a less powerful but faster okuu but 15.5 marisa plays like not fun
soku raymoo is sliiiiiightly off so she can't go into "moves weird" category like okuu or frog but she also isn't normal enough for me to just pick and play as her without issue
she's like a 79%
to me that is ass because she's not weird enough for me to expect weird but not normal enough to just play it normally
maybe an honorary "yeah she is fine" should have been given here I dunno
nitorin plays alright but she is probably the most "why is she here" character in the cast
I know ULiL and all but why was she there why wasn't it someone else
I can't even really think of a proper reason as to why it's weird she is here but it just feels like she shouldn't be part of this cast
I don't even dislike her or anything kappa pretty fun but why

ok I forgot giant catfish was in the game so we'd only have to replace five
I vote for the treash raccoon, the rabbit, the kappa, the not santa, and yakumo yukarin! to gtfo so we can have our cool, very cool, cast of fine characters enjoyed by enjoyers of impeccable taste such as UFO tokens and unnamed dolls in pseudo paradise CD illustration shrine maiden

I don't like fighting games either but the twenty minutes I played of 17.5 felt like a single player almost fighting game (or it just straight up is one but a weird one)
though if it's "singleplayer is fine because movement doesn't work for multiplayer" then I understand that
one day kanakp will be playable multiplayer outside of strange mugen games...

[Aeon]

time is kinda cool
just a bit of an optimization you can do during the easy stages. better than just waiting for em to be over

TRUE there is always all stars. it is very funny

i prefer aocf marisa since her moves move ya around pretty cool and convenient ways
i do not know why nitori is there i think she just. is. there are a couple of people like that (sukuna and kokoro)
hangin out. ballfest.

[spongelevator]

toho all stars would be peak gaming if only it could be playable online
you got all the classics
raymoo, marisa, kogasa, akyuu, yukkuri aya, giant catfish
what more can ya ask for?
aint nobody left to add!
(actually is meimu in it the game is too large to put on this craptop so I dunno)

I would try playing AoCF marisa again buutttttttt
oops
actually damn I have it on a flash drive sad day :(
in my like ten minutes of attempting to see the moves that move marisa around in both games though all I saw was one that moves her to the direction of the enemy and one that moves her slightly down then up in AoCF
I tried just doing everything I could think of and then checked the wiki's moveset though it's possible I could have missed a move
and in soku she has the same stuff except there's a floor
AoCF was harder to move marisa around in general because everything is slow and there's no floor and in soku I never really relied on using her movement attacks because I didn't need to though so it stands out more in AoCF
since soku is way faster marisa in soku is way faster and that's probably why I'm fine with her in there but not in AoCF where the game is slow and she's slower
I also tried raymoo soku because why not and I think I see the issue I had now
her projectiles are mediocre compared to many other characters but her melee seems like I would always be sliiiightly out of range of hitting the opponent when using them
this is obviously a result of me not being good at game but now I know why I never used her
I would assume kinda like using mario in a mario kart game where if you know what you're doing he gets the job done but otherwise he's harmed by a lack of specialization

shimmy definitely don't belong either but I give her a pass because she is actually playable and moderately fast in this game of slow-moving weird characters
there's only like three or four characters in the game I can actually play without desperately wishing I was doing something else so she makes up 25% of the playable cast for me
also she is like a little hamster friend so I have no objections
kokoro just tryin not to be entirely forgotten because she was relevant one single time and then nobody ever cared about her again though I would replace her and nitori with like

oho