From Comments of DGR: 02.27.2009
Your comments on Flower are pretty interesting, John, in light of the podcast I heard right before this week’s episode. I was listening to a recent episode of The Geekbox in which Ryan Scott was discussing R-Type Dimensions. His take on the game was essentially this:
“It’s good, it’s really hard… Thank God they put in Infinite Mode because it’s too hard for me to get through otherwise. But the game’s really short– I mean, you can blow through it in 45 minutes.”
While this is technically true, as shmup fans, we get a [i]lot[/i] more out of the R-Type experience than this guy did. Perhaps the same is true for Flower. Obviously, you can’t directly compare Flower with a shmup– DJ Incompetent is likely to vomit upon reading this, in fact– but for many folks, the experience that they get from playing through Flower is good enough that the length isn’t a concern.
- M.C.
I hear what you’re saying. Flower is a “flight-ish” game for certain, reminding me almost of Nights.
I have no problem with short games. Hell, I wish a lot of games were much shorter than they are. I just don’t have time for it anymore. But it wasn’t just the length of Flower that gave me pause. It was just the feeling of, “They could have done so much more with this” that I had when it was done. But like I said, I sort of go back and forth with it. The experience I had playing it was mostly great and often unlike any other game I’ve played. That itself is worth the price. But when I finished it I just had this sort of unfulfilled feeling.
- John
As far as I’m concerned, short games are fine, but I put a lot of value in games that offer options and alternate ways to play through the content. That is what earns the timeless replayable triple-A award for me. Did you know one of the bigger complaints expert players have on Gradius V is that it’s too long? This game clocks in at about an hour, but the ideal time STG players (myself included) want to spend on a one-credit session is roughly 30-something minutes. This is a large complaint for many Compile games as well (Aleste series, Zanac series, etc.), being long stages are a fault and not a feature, especially when they have dead zones of no on-screen enemies for several seconds. An ideal way to maximize content of a single shmup title is to have several different ‘courses’ of 5 stages instead of one massive 8-stage trek. Developers have not thought to include this option besides the compilation multi-game packages. Raycrisis explored this by allowing users to plot a course of five stages out of a selectable eight.
But what’s the issue here with the semi-controversial Flower and FlOw?
They’re great stand-alone games, but players complain not enough is done with it.
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