I do like the music bosses, but in the general vain of IWBTG and its fangames/spinoffs I'm not quite as much of a fan. The first game was fun as a joke (which is what it was), but I don't like people acting like it's the epitome of game difficulty and the continued remaking of the same sort of things. My main issue is the heavily trial-and-error focused gameplay. It becomes tedious and sort of boring, perhaps frustrating if losing some progress can irritate you. People act like the games take an incredibly huge amount of skill, when really they just require a little bit of memory so you know which stars are gonna' fall at what point on the screen you are. That's not to say the game is free of actual precision, though, with certain rooms like the Ghosts 'n Goblins room with the pulsing spikes, but those moments are few and far between in the real game and generally even fewer in the fangames. It's just sort of the repetition of a stale joke, IMHO.
Music-based bosses, however have always interested me and I am glad to see the amounts of effort people put into them, but what kind of gets to me is the trial-and-error gameplay begins to translate into the formula I want to see done well so much. Usually a few of the patterns in these bosses are reasonable, but then it starts getting to circles that either disperse, implode, or send things in any number of directions. Maybe they bounce, maybe they don't. There's not really good warning for most of the patterns and the only good way to know what the patterns are going to do is to memorize what happens with each and every one of them. This may be the intention, but I find that distressing because it goes strongly against what's generally considered to be good design. It's not really challenging, it's just unfair, and that's less fun for me. If the games either allowed better warning for what the patterns did (arrows, flashes, unlethal demo shots) or made "mistakes" less punishing (more hits before you die, some way of recovering, or a dodge mechanic) the bosses could be much better done without much altering to the patterns that are already there.
Re: I wanna be the the thread
Posted: Wed Jul 10, 2013 1:07 pm
by Fluffyumpkins
It's the same thing shmups have done for years. Just following that formula. I like the ones that have funny gimmicks like Boshy.