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to weigh in on the arcade game discourse earnestly: i’ve been slowly getting into them more and more lately, playing both shmups and beat em ups, having a great time with both and i think they’re extremely inviting and fun and rewarding even and arguably especially at lower skill levels

i think credit feeding is a net good and not the problem. to me learning to clear a shmup is like learning to play a hard song on drums, and so the first thing i do is listen to the song the whole way through. play along a few times with it in my headphones just feeling it out, getting comfortable

i know having this feature does lead to some being extremely dismissive and rude to a genre they do not understand or care to but i don’t know if you can cross that metal bridge by being stricter on them. you need them to buy in. they have to care first, unfortunately

yeah like someone who doesnt give a shit about like going full hog into arcade games probably will not care to begin with unless you find some way to hook them and removing the one thing that lets them "complete" them even in the nonstandard way isnt the key i dont think

my gut tells me that, with the massive popularity of roguelikes, a compelling enough "you died" screen is a much better hook to get ppl to care. not to say the solution is to literally get rid of credit feeding, but I think them no longer being front facing defaults would have some upsides

i dunno how to design to solve it but for my part as someone who enjoys these games but is absolutely not like that highly skilled at all i will simply advocate that they’re good and worth more people trying, and you don’t need to be intimidated by their reputation

I think is a very funny thing specifically to evolve along the meta of everything being a roguelike now those two things are the same

i wanted to chime in here bc i agree. credit feeding conceptually i find to be harmless. but i think credit feeding enables kinda mindles play that doesn't incentivize properly *learning* the level because of the nature of how a lot of these credit inserts work. i.e screen clears in Final Fight

you did touch on this and i don't have the answer either, but i think infinite 1 button continues in these ports can feel sort of hamfisted, because at no cost you can effectively square peg round hole the level design until you roll credits but in totality its harmless and is mostly nerd stuff

I'm remembering a time a friend asked me to netplay metal slug. we credit fed like mad to reach credits. it was fun! afterwards he prompted me for my opinion, like a fully formed take on how I felt about it as a game. it worried me that he expected me to have a real take having played like that.