Another great episode!
As much as I love playing shooters, I find most if them pretty frustrating, at least at the beginning. Whenever I get a new shmup and have played it for awhile, my wife invariably comes into the room and asks "Why do you keep playing these games that make you so angry?" (She usually hears a few choice words and possibly the sound of a controller being dropped in esasperation or the console being hastily reset. At least I don't throw controllers or punch holes in walls anymore.
) My response; "If it's evoking that kind of response from me, it's usually a pretty good game".
I usually don't get pissed off at games that suck. They just suck and I move on. It's the games where I *know* I can do better, I saw a way around the thing that killed me at the last second, and I'm more frustrated at
myself for either not remembering a pattern or by zagging when I should have zigged, or did some other dingbat mistake. But the frustrations coming out of a good game root from me, so I'm constantly going back to them and getting slightly better.
When I first got Kyukyoku Tiger for the PCE it took a lot of patience to make it past the first level. But now I can usually breeze through it and the next few levels without hardly any effort. The game is amazing. The Genesis version of Twin Cobra, on the other hand, is a mess, imo.
