tal

I'm kind of curious if anyone has some "slower" PC shmups that they could recommend.

I used to enjoy playing shmups some years back, but kind of fell out of the habit, partly because a lot of shmups seem to have increasingly-focused on the "bullet hell" category, where a lot of the game focuses on keeping intense concentration on dodging through tiny spaces in a heavy barrage of projectiles, which I've never really enjoyed all that much.

Some things I'd be interested in:

• More space to maneuver, less of the screen covered by projectiles.

• Slower.

• I'd like to have more-complicated mechanics and planning than is typically the case for a shmup. I know that maybe sounds odd

I mean, a shmup is an action arcade game

but for example, I really enjoy Nova Drift, a roguelite Asteroids-genre game; there's a lot more going on than in the original Asteroids. Think, oh, maybe something more like Jets 'n Guns (which I've already played, along with its sequel).

• Horizontal or vertical scrolling is fine. I'd slightly prefer horizontal, given present-day monitor aspect ratios.

• It would be preferable to avoid low-resolution pixel art. I don't hate pixel art; I think that it's a good way to keep art costs down. And there's plenty of pretty pixel art out there. But because most pixel art games target devices with a wide range of resolutions, they tend to use a least-common-deminator low resolution. I'd like to take advantage of my monitor's resolution. A lot of indie games use pixel art, and a lot of shmups are indie. Just kind of feels like every shmup I look at is low-resolution pixel art, and I've gotten a little tired of the aesthetic, interested in mixing it up.

• Would like to support running at high Hz rates, stuff like 240 frames per second. I'm not worried about the game balance changing slightly at different frame rates or having comparable high scores to players on different hardware.

• Showing action covering the full screen. A lot of shmups only have action on part of the screen (in some cases, especially with vertically-scrolling shmups, because they were written for older 4:3 displays). I don't care about screen aspect ratio changes unbalancing the game slightly.

• It'd be nice to take advantage of the graphics hardware, do something more than blitting 2d sprites to the screen.

• I'd prefer to avoid chiptune (FM-synth or faux FM-synth) music.

• Having a steep learning curve, requiring a lot of reading, is fine. Most games that I really enjoy take many hours to "get" the mechanics, have a lot of levers to pull.

• Keyboard-and-mouse or gamepad is fine.

Anyone have something that they enjoy that they think might be something along these lines, want to give it a mention?

Thanks!

I suppose that this is probably obvious to some, but I certainly overlooked it.

There are a number of things that I like about Pinball FX, like support for over 60 FPS.

However, the tables also display a number of animations. One has to stop play and wait for them to be performed, sometimes they obstruct one's view, and they just generally kill my enjoyment of the game.

I just learned that it's possible to...actually turn those animations off, at least for Williams tables, thanks to a Steam thread. As users in the thread had suggested, I'd looked in the graphics settings, hadn't seen anything and had given up; the setting is not very obvious.

On Williams tables, there's a dedicated button

on controllers, "B"

which will toggle "Visual Mode". What that actually does isn't very clear, and I'd skipped over it in the controls section. It toggles all of the obnoxious animations.

Suddenly, the Pinball FX implementions of Medieval Madness, Tales of the Arabian Nights, and The Addams Family are fun for me again!

Just a heads-up to anyone in the same boat.

Looks like the Stylish trait

a long-standing ability that allowed one to get a small, constant amount of morale by wearing fancy or very fancy clothing

is gone.

Just noticed this after doing a build out of git.

I kind of regret this. I'm not saying that it's the most-realistic trait, but it made it interesting to collect fancy items.

Related PR on GitHub:

https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/79745

CHANG: Now, the budget bill does not specifically mention Medicaid, but that's because the budget just gives instructions to lawmakers on the committee that oversees Medicaid to find $880 billion in cuts over the next decade. The legislation doesn't explain exactly where lawmakers should make those cuts, so I started by asking Park very simply, can Congress find $880 billion in federal savings without cutting spending for Medicaid?

PARK: It cannot, unless you're cutting Medicare, and both Speaker Johnson, other House Republican leaders and President Trump have said that they do not want to cut Medicare. So if you take Medicare off the table, Medicaid constitutes 93% of all mandatory spending that remains under the jurisdiction of the Energy and Commerce Committee.

CHANG: Speaker Johnson has talked about how there is about $50 billion worth of fraud in Medicaid each year. Is that an accurate estimate? I'm just curious.

PARK: It is not. What he's trying to do is equate a measure that's used in the federal government to assess improper payments. But he's trying to equate these improper payments as fraud, and the vast majority of improper payments are not because the payments shouldn't have been made, but there were some errors in terms of the documentation related to that payment or errors in terms of some of the procedural steps that were taken in making those payments. But there's no finding that that was actually fraud or even payments that should not have been made.

PARK:...So states are essentially left holding the bag. They're going to have to make the painful choices in terms of cutting eligibility, cutting benefits, cutting payments to providers like hospitals and nursing homes that serve Medicaid beneficiaries. And in fact, that's one of the reasons it's politically attractive to some federal policymakers, is because they're not explicitly cutting Medicaid benefits. They're making states, legislatures, governors have to make the politically difficult choices, the politically painful choices that they'll have no choice but to make in light of these massive cost shifts that they could face.