Post by oldhomehaibane on May 3, 2018 15:19:47 GMT
I think I might be done with my attempts to beat the PCE version of R-Type. I finally managed to get to Bydo with both bits (yes, I redid Stages 1-4 perfectly to get a mission code that starts me from Stage 5 with them) and a fully upgraded force (having accomplished this feat only twice before but without the bits equipped), but then died to one of the Mikuns shortly after reaching Bydo and of course lost all of my remaining credits trying to recover from there. I'm convinced that your probability of beating the final boss without both 'bits' is so incredibly low that any death from Stage 5 to Stage 8 is reason enough for a reset. Certainly if you die at the checkpoint of Stage 7 it is a colossal waste of time to try recovering when you can just reset and hopefully be back at that point by the time you would've lost all of your credits otherwise. The possibility of recovery at Stage 8 is at least tempting, albeit pure folly, but attempting recovery from the middle of Stage 7 has all the idiocy of beating one's head against a brick wall.
I remember reading a blog post about the game with a memorable line to the effect that R-Type would "test my limits of suffering." I think this test has been completed and the conclusive results are now in. My limit is apparently any game which demands that the player go through several consecutive levels perfectly in order to stand a reasonable chance of completing it. I think this is truly disgusting and regressive and I am so glad that the overwhelming majority of games nowadays don't ask anything like this of the player. I'll grant that we've gone too far in the other direction since the arcade days, but what the Dark Souls games do is about as much correction to such excesses as I will gladly suffer.
I love R-Type, I find much to admire in both its level and its art design, but I think my relationship to this game has become psychologically unhealthy in a really extreme way. My voice is still hoarse from screaming obscenities at it. I feel a strange mixture of sadness over not beating it and pride that I was even able to get as far as I did. It's all the more agonizing because I've beaten the final level on an emulator many times over (in fact, three consecutive victories right before I made my most recent attempt on actual hardware) and I know more or less what needs to be done and when (I have every "puzzle" in the game solved, at least on a theoretical level), it's just a matter of doing it and doing it all perfectly in a single run. The game has such an exquisite way (as long as you haven't died and still have your powerups, at least) of making you think that it's well within your power to succeed, that it's not truly impossible. And indeed, I suppose it's not. I even think I could manage it, if I kept at it long enough. But I have dedicated every last ounce of my free time for an entire month to the project of beating what is essentially a 21-minute game, and I'm really beginning to question whether the euphoric rush of victory is worth the degree to which it is consuming my life and frustrating me. I mean, for fuck's sake, the rush of beating the damn thing probably won't even be qualitatively or quantitatively distinct from the emotional high I would get from going outside right now and just jogging for half an hour. I really doubt that, physiologically speaking, it would be any more profound or lasting than that.
At the very least, I need to take a break from the game, read a book or do literally any other fucking thing that is not playing R-Type and thinking obsessively about it.
I remember reading a blog post about the game with a memorable line to the effect that R-Type would "test my limits of suffering." I think this test has been completed and the conclusive results are now in. My limit is apparently any game which demands that the player go through several consecutive levels perfectly in order to stand a reasonable chance of completing it. I think this is truly disgusting and regressive and I am so glad that the overwhelming majority of games nowadays don't ask anything like this of the player. I'll grant that we've gone too far in the other direction since the arcade days, but what the Dark Souls games do is about as much correction to such excesses as I will gladly suffer.
I love R-Type, I find much to admire in both its level and its art design, but I think my relationship to this game has become psychologically unhealthy in a really extreme way. My voice is still hoarse from screaming obscenities at it. I feel a strange mixture of sadness over not beating it and pride that I was even able to get as far as I did. It's all the more agonizing because I've beaten the final level on an emulator many times over (in fact, three consecutive victories right before I made my most recent attempt on actual hardware) and I know more or less what needs to be done and when (I have every "puzzle" in the game solved, at least on a theoretical level), it's just a matter of doing it and doing it all perfectly in a single run. The game has such an exquisite way (as long as you haven't died and still have your powerups, at least) of making you think that it's well within your power to succeed, that it's not truly impossible. And indeed, I suppose it's not. I even think I could manage it, if I kept at it long enough. But I have dedicated every last ounce of my free time for an entire month to the project of beating what is essentially a 21-minute game, and I'm really beginning to question whether the euphoric rush of victory is worth the degree to which it is consuming my life and frustrating me. I mean, for fuck's sake, the rush of beating the damn thing probably won't even be qualitatively or quantitatively distinct from the emotional high I would get from going outside right now and just jogging for half an hour. I really doubt that, physiologically speaking, it would be any more profound or lasting than that.
At the very least, I need to take a break from the game, read a book or do literally any other fucking thing that is not playing R-Type and thinking obsessively about it.