I can think of a handful of games that, despite being games that I’ve enjoyed, never really became part of a “genre”. Do you have any like this, and if so, which?
Are they games that you’d like to see another entrant to the genre to? Would you recommend the original game as one to keep playing?
I love Space Harrier. There are a handful of other third-person, on-rails shooters (Sin and Punishment), but nothing recent that I’m aware of.
Also, Bangai O on Nintendo DS is insanely fun. I can’t think of any other games where slowdown is a necessary mechanic.
The original Rez isn’t recent, (though that’s a game that got a lot of acclaim for the aesthetics, mechanics aside). According to WP there’s apparently a new VR release; I think I remember seeing a video of it.
looks
Rez Infinite.
Looks like it’s just a high-resolution VR remake, not a new game.
If Nintendo’s done a new Star Fox release, I imagine that that’d qualify.
kagis
Apparently yes, though the most-recent was Star Fox 2, which was eight years ago…a lot newer than Space Harrier, but no spring chicken.
Starfox never did it for me like Space Harrier. I’m not sure why. The primitive 3D maybe. Space Harrier creature design is just plain bizarre and intriguing.
Ah, gotcha. It also looks like it was considered to be very difficult (though any game from that era is gonna generally be a lot harder than present-day games).
I also remember a one-bit, not even polygon, but wireframe Star Wars third person rail shooter. It was on the early Mac, but I think it was a port from DOS or something.
kagis
Oh, wow. Apparently, it was actually a color arcade game, Star Wars, from 1983, and I’d just only seen the black-and-white Mac port until today. I wonder if those are true vector-display graphics, like Tempest.
kagis
Apparently yes. For the younger crowd, there was a point in time with CRTs where some video games actually plotted graphics on specialized CRTs by controlling the electron beam and plotting out the graphics with the point of the beam, kind of the way an old analog oscilloscope works. I bet that there have been antialiased remakes or clones of probably most of those vector-display games by now.
EDIT: Oh, I lied. It was first-person, not third person. You did have to dodge obstacles, but you weren’t looking at your ship from behind.
I actually played a bunch of that Star Wars vector arcade game at my local bowling alley. Yes, I am old…
It’s quite common in retro shmups, particularly bullet hells putting way too many sprites onscreen. Designers were always aware of it and intentionally balanced the difficulty around it, and some later games even include artificial slowdown just to preserve that feel.