Quote:
Originally Posted by
squarezero
I played this a lot in the arcades too, but you're right that it doesn't quite work as a tap-to-shoot. It's not terrible, but not great fun either.
Yeah, that's pretty much exactly my take on it.
As I've had a chance to play it a bit more, there are some more things that I've stumbled across that are a bit annoying.
For some reason the "Jungle" scene has music now? It never did in the arcade and none of the other scenes in the iPhone port do. It's pretty jarring.
In the "Castle" scene (the one where you have to shoot out the chains of the drawbridge and deal with the archers), arrows seemingly come from nowhere? In the original arcade version, to deal with this scene, you'd normally just concentrate fire on the archers because the arrows they shot were really hard to hit. In this version, that doesn't matter, because even if there aren't any living archers on top of the castle, arrows will still fire out like crazy. I guess that's kind of OK to make it a little bit more difficult on the iPhone, but it seems off.
And my main complaint so far with this port... the map screen and "choose your path" mechanic. I'd really like one of the devs to explain how exactly that's supposed to work. There seem to always be 2 choices, the "red" path and the "green" path. In the arcade, there were sometimes 2 choices (red and green), and sometimes 3 (red, green and blue), and there may even have been 4 occasionally. What was consistent about the arcade is that if you were at one location, whatever color you chose would take you to another specific location (ie, if you were at the beginning, red would always take you to the alley). In this version, it seems like there's some element of "randomness" to where the paths decide to take you. IIRC, the "correct" path in the arcade (the quickest path to the last screen) was red green green red (and maybe one last red?). In this one it seems like 1/2 the time you choose red from a location you go one way, and the other 1/2 the time you go a different way. Which becomes really frustrating when you keep backtracking through scenes instead of moving on. I'd have to spend some more time with this to figure out exactly what they did here. I have a feeling, since there are always two choices, in some of the locations where there would have been three choices in the arcade, they threw in some random element on one of the two choices. If that makes any sense at all. Which can make it quite frustrating if you're trying to follow a set path. I think this is something that could really use a fix. It's possible I'm just understanding the mechanic wrong though. If I ever figure it out, I'll report back.
I do agree that the Exidy gun games don't really fit the whole "tap to shoot" mechanic, and were a lot more fun with the gun in the arcade. However, I honestly think that if they put some more effort into making this game closer to the arcade (removing the "features"/"concessions" they made for the iDevice port), it would actually be a better game and could become a bit more popular.
But yeah, devs, if you're out there... please give us Cheyenne. And don't change anything.