Arcade Longplay [110] Ghost Pilots 

That was the very first time i ever heard of this game

What was the Expert's Challenge? Wasn't it to score 5,000 in 30 seconds?

Abtin A That’s not a flaw at all. These games are purposely designed that way. Different ones have varying mechanics, but the principle remains the same. Beating Ninja Gaiden is admirable, but it requires a completely different set of skills, namely rote memorization of enemy placement. I beat it when I was seven and I wasn’t particularly good at it. Shooters are different because they not only test reflexes, but your ability to sculpt an ever-changing battlefield to your own advantage. You have to choose which targets to attack first, redirect enemy fire by faking out enemy shots, and anticipate ahead of time where enemy patterns and fire will be and plan accordingly. It’s a little different for different kinds of shmups, but the core mechanics are the same. The reason powerups float in the upper third of the screen and in frustrating patterns is because they’re another battlefield element that you have to plan for and act accordingly. And either you have the skill and take the risk, or you don’t. Whenever I play Seibu Kaihatsu shmups, I get whatever powerups I need and ignore the rest because I don’t want to take the risk. It’s a strategy that’s allowed me to beat every shmup I’ve played on the highest difficulties-work with weapon sets you have, learn their strengths and weaknesses, and determine whether or not that tempting powerup is worth it.

I totally get what you say mate, and never implied otherwise, sorry if my previous piece suggested it. What I say is that DESPITE whatever purposely calculated difficulty elements that are proper to the schmup, you have to admit that some of them pushed the principles to the limits beyond acceptable thresholds for any average player, bar the very few select gifted elite with higher-than-normal psycho-visual reflexes. What I am saying is that gameplay elements are tailored around the assumption that the player gets a minimum needed amount of powerups for the odds to get even remotely feasible with intensive practice (read "coins dropped day after day in the same machine"). Some schmups, such as this one, do basically everything that is possible to even prevent you from achieving this minimal level of required empowerment whenever you commit a single given mistake anywhere. It is a punishing experience by a margin that borders total absurdity and makes it a frustrating and stressful experience rather than a challenging though enjoyable one. You will note that not every schmup is like that. I call it a flaw by design in the way that you can easily deduce the dev were betting on a kind of experience that forces the player into compulsively sinking many coins several times in a row upon loosing a full-powered life before understanding it is a waste of their time and the odds have suddenly become impossible, and THEN ONLY start to learn the idea of patterns and also powerup formation that you are describing here. Your take does apply to a schmup say like Seibu's such as the Raiden series that indeed offer different powerup paths forward to the player to choose and/or ignore past a certain point, and this is exactly what I do with this franchise, just as you do. But in this one there aren't powerup rewards other that the spread of the weapon, there are no "types" other than wider-ranging shots. Learning patterns of enemies while choosing to ignore a given powerup is a different set of parameters, and your philosophy does not necessarily applies here I'm afraid. Here enemy planes with the ability to kill you merely by crushing on you are the powerup options, not a big, relatively sturdy, slow and predicable single enemy (say like in Raiden or Twin Cobra) that you have to destroy to obtain the floating icon. These are two completely different sets of schmups at their core and you make an emphasis in your argument in that regard on a dimension that does not apply preferentially here. Sometimes the enemy "powerup waves" come from all directions in unpredictable patterns and tend to crash all over you. You cannot possibly handle this by skill alone the first time you have to overcome it. It adds insults to injury, like you get roasted over and over again for a single miss somewhere down the line, and by all accounts, it has more to do with the business model having too much of a presence in the designers' minds rather than wish for the ultimate challenge. Just as Ninja Gaiden, this game, while a completely different type of scroller of course, requires memorization of key swarms of enemy elements, there are many points in the game where a newcomer has a 99% chance of getting fatally surprised by a given behaviours of 360° appearance from every side of the screen and this game plays a LOT on this, by distinction to many other hard but fairer schmups, that is all I am saying.

Abtin A Oh no doubt. I’ve played my share of shmups that absolutely required a no-death run. A lot of that difficulty can be remedied by adjusting settings, but some of them are just poorly designed, or cheap with their powerups. The very best shmups are balanced and forgiving-again I cite Seibu Kaihatsu, namely GunDogs and Raiden-where the more powerups you collect the higher rate of fire the enemy has. And when you die, their fire rate drops down to its default on that difficulty setting. It’s a carefully crafted mechanic that, like the best games, pushes your limits while forgiving some slip ups. My problem with the genre has been that there are many of them that are designed to simply be quarter-eaters: take the player’s money and it’ll only buy them a little more time no matter how good they are. Capcom shmups were some of the worst offenders there. My other major complaint has been the rise of “bullet hell” shooters, where the enemies just throw clouds of fire and memorization, not necessarily skill, is what’s required.

@@theusher2893 Oh man, you speak my mind entirely, it's refreshing and I feel less of a lonely rager all of a sudden lol. Quarter-eaters are what they are. Worst offenders I can name are a couple Konami schmups, at the time they still bothered to make these, they were Lightning Fighers and Ajax. And one was a typical bullet-hell abuser that was a neatly-realized technically as it was unfeasible for even the average++ player starting at boss ONE, like the diff curve was a joke to the devs and they really pushed it to the point where 90% of players are thrown out of the possible experience after 5 minutes and just push them to drop in more coins right from the start. Air Gallet I'm looking at you right there. Checkpoint-based schmups are the worst offenders for me, as it only drastically adds to the level of an already ludicrous level of punishment for every live lost. Checkpoint hell is absolutely common with those. For the sake of argument I tried to start level 5 (last of a given loop) in Flying Shark. No matter how good you are, there is simply no way to get to the final runway after the giant flying fortress, you firing span just cannot cope with the final barrage of tanks + enemy air squadrons. And this particular SNK is directly inherited by FS, by all accounts, and the designer barely try to even hide it, looks like a tribute in an even harder way, minues the checkpoint joke. I totally agree with your favorites, and for identical reasons. If Raiden became a sub-genre by itself with SO many derivatives, it was for a good reason. Balance was the key word, and averga to good players could contemplate a decent, viable chance at beating the game even though not superhuman flawless runners that have hundreds of hours of their lives to spent on endless arcade runs to master every stage. The ONE schmup that I almost mastered this way was FS itself, and I never made it past stage 4 without making a given mistake. Fatigue is an absolutely critical element that we often forget to factor in skill considerations. That is why we can relatively easily get by a flawless run of every separate stage of a given schmup one by one rather than through a full run that exponentially heightens the chances of a random fail past say 70% of that run.

Most NEO GEO games are.

As if Ghosts N Goblins wasn't hard enough, nobody seems to know how do you earn extra lives on Ghost Pilots

Except you respawn where you died instead of being pushed back at a checkpoint like Raiden.

@@Theshark15z In Raiden, you only respawn at a checkpoint in the Japanese and Taiwanese versions. You respawn where you died in all other versions.

@@jayden6538 in the first game you respawn at a check point. All the other ones you respawn where you died upon continue.

DO THEY?

Many of the runs on this channel use save and load states on an emulator, reloading when a hit is taken. Some may be legit. They dont really clarify most of the time.

Not if you're unlucky or out of position and those shots hit. No way to dodge on reaction alone.

@@wazzobazzo totally agree here. And that's basically the same with yellow-blue waves : you get one wave wrong and it gets cut into two sub-waves spread over too wide a screen, and you're toast.

Wow, you are a Level 99 dumbass, LaVey Charkus Veros! First of all, this game came out in 1991, so, if anything, it would have to have ripped off 1941: Counter-Strike. Second, 19XX: The War Against Destiny did not get released until 1996, so it would be impossible for this game to have ripped off that game. Third, 1944: The Loop Master did not get released until 2000, and, again, it would be impossible for this game to have ripped off that game as well. Fourth, where are your arguments against Seiba Kaihatsu and Psikyo on this matter, both of which made excellent rip-offs of the 19XX Series in their Raiden Fighters Trilogy and Strikers 1945 Trilogy, respectively? Fifth, and lastly, this is a much better game than 1941: Counter-Strike. Now go home and cry, emo kid.