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[RagnarokNAJU]

In games like Gradius and many others, you go left to right on a horizontal plane when flying and blasting away..
In the game TGL, you progress from bottom to top when flying..
In Life force you do both..

[arseniy]

In games like Gradius and many others, you go left to right on a horizontal plane when flying and blasting away..
In the game TGL, you progress from bottom to top when flying..
In Life force you do both..

Vertical. But 3D games probably win this as they can do change between both in solid level gameplay! BTW is there such a trick? I not play games that much

[RagnarokNAJU]

gradius 5 switchs between tons of views.. its a 2-d shooter on a 3-d plane, pretty cool

[arseniy]

I meant that it could be a gameplay change from horizontal to vertical. Did I miss something? It seems that gameplay in Gradius V has horisontal only.

gradius 5 switchs between tons of views.. its a 2-d shooter on a 3-d plane, pretty cool

[teremochek]

It cool to change a kind.
But I love vertical games more.

[RagnarokNAJU]

lol... am I the only one who voted horizontal? too much UNsquad and Gradius

[arseniy]

well think about that TGL is vertical scrolling and imagine Gradius forum would have top vote for horizontal

[RagnarokNAJU]

for sure.. I love the flying squences in TGL but in games like UNquad and Gradius you have more room to move around and dogde stuff.. I love pulling off fancy dodges on a horizontal screen

[tummai]

If you're talking strictly NES, then horizontal scrolling has some serious limitations.  The NES has a limit ( 8 ) on how many sprites it can display on one scanline.  After 8 sprites it just stops drawing them.  This limit is reached a lot, and rather than lose sprites and have enemies be invisible, games will cycle the order of their sprites so that different ones disappear every frame.  This is why games flicker when there are many sprites on the screen.

If you have a horizontal shooter, your ship and your bullets will all be on the same line by default.  The ship will have to be small, the bullets small, the enemies small and the special weapons probably need to be designed so they don't shoot on the same line as your ship.  You can still produce an awesome game with these constraints, but it's something to keep in mind when comparing the two styles.

One thing that makes TGL so cool is the large size of it's enemies and weapons. You know that huge level 3 Fireball?  Whoosh.  This scale is possible because it's a vertical shooter.  TGL has its share of flickering of course, but it's typically on the side of your ship where the action is not.  Huge monsters and weapons is not possible in a horizontal shooter.

For example, a Grimgrin or a Fleepa would be a flickering mess.  



Grimgrin is 9 sprites wide, so parts of him flicker automatically even if nothing is going on.  In a horizontal shooter, you'd have Grimgrin (9 sprites), your ship (probably 2 sprites), your bullets (1 sprite each) all on the same line.  It would be too annoying to play!  The only way to have a huge boss in a horizontal shooter is to make them part of the background.

So if you like big crazy weapons and monsters, vertical.  If you like small weapons and monsters (= more room for dodging), horizontal.

Incidentally, this sprite issue is the reason why you can't use the laser weapon in the overhead map part of TGL.  You can stack sprites as much as you want vertically, but drawing a long horizontal line with sprites will fail quickly.  Rather than holding a flicker party everytime the player shoots the laser sideways, the designers decided to disable the weapon in that part of the game.

[arseniy]

I think the talk about shooters overal not just NES but thanks for that info.
I voted for vertical but yeah horizontal is also fun

[RagnarokNAJU]

wow.. thats alot of info to reflect upon
very interesting stuff for sure though

[tummai]

I think the talk about shooters overal not just NES but thanks for that info.
I voted for vertical but yeah horizontal is also fun

Well the voting topic said NES

[arseniy]

I think the talk about shooters overal not just NES but thanks for that info.
I voted for vertical but yeah horizontal is also fun

Well the voting topic said NES

I didn't paid attention it was about NES . Does that makes difference hehe!

[MoonCloud]

Life Force (Salamander) is one of my fav games to the NES and as mentioned earlier, both horizontal and vertical scrolling is used in that game.
But I still went for vertical, since Twin Bee, Xevious and Star Force are awesome  

[arseniy]

1943 is great SHMUP on NES. It's vertical.