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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

the most rewarding thing is feeling a sense of improvement and the worse you currently are, the quicker you can initially improve. i think a core struggle of the genre in a modern, post-emulator and console context is making it very hard for players to access that initial sense of improvement

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