That is basically a non-post. And you cut out half my sentence.

any game wherein you have to memorize a list of several dozen hard-to-pull-off combos, those are the ones that don't have very much appeal to me  

Guilty Gear is probably the most technical series out there, but just because it has a high skill ceiling doesn’t mean you have to be doing character specific loops and hitting FRC’s to just play the game, especially if you’re just playing with friends of your skill level as everything is relative. Most combos are actually surprisingly short; you don’t actually have to convert every random hit into a massive combo like you do in, as an example, BlazBlue. This is the latest a-cho (Japanese arcade) ranking battle. You’ll notice the hit-count is usually pretty low unless the opponent lands their “do not get hit by this” starter:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyqvqQ0Ht7s

What actually takes a lot of memorisation is the two-player part of the game. Especially since the characters can do so much, but that’s precisely why Guilty Gear is so good.

Edit: Nevermind all that. Jam puffball and 6HS don't wall stick anymore. Oh my.

Closest fit to Meiling move-list wise would be Slayer or Jam, though obviously these games play nothing like each other. May has a hat?

Why not just make Guilty Gear XXX or Guilty Gear 3?

oh, and I like Faust the most, I'm a giant a-hole.

Well, if they called this Guilty Gear 3 everyone would be complaining it’s a tweaked version of Accent Core. At least they’ve dropped “The Midnight Carnival” as a subtitle.

The changes are interesting as they are almost exclusively buffs even to the top tiers. It'll be very interesting to see what happens: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM-0enspFlE

Shame Jam isn't getting much. I want more ways to stick people against walls.

Anyways, you got to love the oldschool attract modes where it looked like the game was being played by someone severely inebriated.

Without having done any research on this at all I'm going to say that most of those are probably because of inaccurate emulation.

No, I actually remember many arcade games being like that. My friends and I used to joke about it.

Though some of these look glitchy as hell, I’ve certainly seen many arcade games where the player dies to obvious stuff in the gameplay preview. I always thought it was intentional to lull people into giving the machine a shot out of “well I wouldn’t lose to that” bravado. As if the game was being played really well it would intimidate.

really? wow this is almost korean mmo levels of awful. d2 may have had its flaws but at least it never forced to grind for gold.

Right, because the currency for trade in Diablo 2 was duped items.

Unless they plan on overhauling the classes at some point the PvP will be WoW-levels of bad.

Well, and in Diablo 3 you don’t have to fight for all the rares and uniques and shit because everything that drops on your screen is yours. Blizzard stopped whites being salvageable in beta and stated they didn’t want them fulfilling any purpose but adding to the spectacle of loot piñatas.

so far the most times i have died have been in nightmare when getting stuck against a rare that has ridiculous attributes. extra health + shielding? vortex + arcane? say goodbye.

also apparently inferno was more along what is now hell difficulty and they ended up making it like 4x harder. and by harder i mean one-shot everything

I think Diablo 3 is harder than Diablo 2 once you hit hell difficulty (controversial?). Especially if you’re a melee class and you’re navigating through the fireballs, gloop and laser beams like it’s goddamn Gradius to do a couple of swings at an elite. However, Inferno is hard in all the wrong ways; everyone knows the enemies hit like trucks, but the real problem is Elites now have four mods and some of these combinations are borderline impossible.

Badly written post, sorry. I only meant to imply 3DDGH was niche, not experimental, and I think that can be applied to everything I actually named. It was part of a quick list of games Triple-A publishers wouldn't be interested in, so Atlus publishing all the examples doesn't matter, really, though maybe it would have worked better with diversity. I actually wrote "Vib Ribbon" for some reason, then realised it was Sony and would be a can of worms.

The experimental comment was a separate, albeit vague, paragraph about games that are "out there." I guess I was mainly thinking of things like Noby Noby Boy or The Last Guy. All written pre-TeeGee, who seems to have expressed what I meant better.

If you step away from the extremities for a moment, there are plenty of smaller publishers out there that handle niche products. Of course a triple-A publisher is going to be disinterested in distinctly not triple-A fringe titles, but they also wouldn’t be interested in Demon’s Souls, 3D Dot Heroes, Phantom Brave, or what have you.

Just look at what games are actually being published, especially on downloadable services, there is a ton of experimental stuff out there. Please stop pretending a publisher is some evil entity that clamps down on originality, while those free from the shackles bleed creativity from every pore.

Icycalm vs. Jason Rohrer.

Whoever wins. We lose.

This winter... Rancor is The Exporter.

His service is really good, by the way. I brought a few things a while back, including a swanky Cave Matsuri t-shirt where they misspelled the names of their own games. I agree the prices can get pretty steep but that’s how it goes unfortunately. Looking over what I’ve spent on shmups over the last few years I’d probably be better off with a smack habit.

Anyhoo, for the most part I’m with you, but I’m not completely sure if I agree with the opening gambit. I appreciate you want to encourage people to try other shmups, but as you acknowledge most people will be coming from touhou fandom and maybe pissing them off isn’t the best way. Besides we know Touhou's characters come from it starting as a KiKi KaiKai clone and it’s not like ZUN actually tried to build some huge perverted futanari doujinshi scene. Though if I was him I would be rather conscious of it... Hey guys, look, it’s the stage 5 boss: a speaking Toby Jug. Go on. Make porn of that. Do it.

But the rest, the actual review part, is spot-on. Siter Skain know what they're doing and RefleX is top.

Looks pretty solid so far and I’d like to hear more about the fight engine.
I love me some airdashers.

I had a whale of a time.
That’s really great. Though, I also sat on the white end screen for a while.

Process is coming along okay, though most of the changes are under the hood (I am far from being a programmer, even a grid and cubes can cause me trouble it seems!). For now I'm experimenting with using tetris/columns style blocks to play the various aspects of the garden, though with no time pressure. Looking to add bulbs, flowers and thorns next.