I remember cheesing the hell out of Raptor's economy by waiting until I got to a stage with the dumbfire missiles, then repeatedly grabbing it, leaving the stage, and selling them. I felt so smart when I figured that out as a kid, haha.
Much appreciated that you proved what I suspected, but couldn't prove, in my early years playing Raptor. A great deal of the weapons really ARE pretty underwhelming. The Pulse Cannon and Twin laser were always favorites by far, and now I know that's perfectly founded. Those hypothetical changes sound neat too. I'm kind of on the fence on if I'd want a "classic" mode with the old weapon numbers/mechanics included, but I'll be happy with the remake either way. Also, there IS a 4th weapon in Demonstar. It's incredibly useful when you can start finding those powerups. All I'll say is that it's orange.
I had no idea that Raptor: Call of the Shadows and Demonstar were linked in any way. I used to play the demo version of the latter so much that I started going for "challenge runs" where I would try to simply avoid taking any damage rather than destroying anything in my way (outside of bosses, of course). I already owned the former, but this video put the latter's Steam re-release on my wishlist. OH YEAH.
As funny as this may sound. I was actually in the process of making a response video to your old Raptor: Call of the Shadows video. You beat me to the punch. lol. I'm glad to see this updated edition. Really enjoy your work. :)
Omg, I miss that game. It's my childhood. whenever I encounter boss, my hands got sweaty. I was too young and couldn't finished it. Always ended up on the plane crash game over. It was really cool as a young child. Also miss my pentium II.
Nice deep dive. Raptor and Tyrian were peak DOS SHMUP. Tyrian being my favorite. Any chance to lure you over to Mastodon? Very strong and welcoming retro community there...
While that's where a lot of viewers want me to go, most of my friends have actually gone over to BlueSky by this point if they've left Twitter and I'm really bad at managing multiple social places at a time, so chances are pretty high that's where I'm going to end up in the long run. Not yet though; I'm waiting for the place to go full-public.
@@Pixelmusement Sure, whatever floats your boat. I personally want to stay away from the proprietary platforms. They all eventually turn sour. And I was positively surprised how good the Mastodon community is. Lovely mood over there.
I absolutely fucking love Raptor and Demonstar, I played the fuck out of their demos on the Egames disks I had, and always wanted to play the full things. I did when I got older and enjoyed the shit out of them. Sadly largely forgotten though, so it's great to see a channel like this is particular take a real in-depth under the hood look at them beyond just saying they're real cool shmups. Also didn't know about the Demonstar re-release, thanks for making me aware as well! Great vid.
You never played DemonStar? Granted it was DirectX Windows-only; the shareware edition was my own introduction to Mountain King Studios and I continue to enjoy it more than Raptor. I still have the Ionos (who also distributed Nebula Fighter, another interesting 2D space shooter which has the distinction of its original shareware release being for DOS but full version for Windows) retail CD and prefer the older version graphics. Now called DemonStar Classic (to distinguish it from subsequent "Secret Missions" add-on packs) it had 4 main versions over the years, the differences of which I may dedicate a post on my blog to someday. You are correct: it has one additional weapon that is rare, generally only shows up in later levels, and has a quirky homing effect similar to Raptor's minigun that makes it not as worthwhile as it seems. There's also a third "bomb" type which I won't spoil for you. However, this applies to the classic editions up to version 4.04: the new Steam release appears to have gotten further upgrades and having not played that one I can't speak on any substantive gameplay changes. For those interested, the older shareware downloads should still be findable online (I also recommend getting a program to read old Windows help files since the manual's in that format) which show that the work he's put into it over the years makes DemonStar to be Scott Host's real magnum opus.
The main reason I missed out on DemonStar was when it came out: I switched primarily from PC gaming to console gaming right around the debut of Windows 95. Not that I didn't play Win9x games in the late 90s but not nearly as many as I could've due to a lack of a good enough system to do so. When I got back into PC gaming in late 1999, I had jumped from a P120 with no hardware accelerator to a P3/600 with a Voodoo3 and thus missed out on many late 90s PC games which simply hadn't stayed on store shelves. :P
Now I'm curious about the weapon levels in Tyrian; is a level 1 lightning doing the same as a level 11 lightning, or does the unit get upgraded along with the fire rate and other stats?
Tyrian 2000 is on my list of games to give a Pro treatment to... but as it stands I'm still trying to think of a good way to properly test it out because the sheer quantity of weapons and weapon levels and everything makes the idea of testing it all out a bit overwhelming. o_o
@@Pixelmusementa combination of god mode and ship editor will be necessary to test that... I presume? Although, I guess there were damage values spread across the internet, including fire rate and energy consumption. It is a very involved deal. Good luck!
It would take way more than that. The energy levels tracked in the game are extremely erratic due to their nature and would be very, very difficult to measure properly, the inability to not have a front weapon equipped would make testing anything for rear weapons and sidekicks difficult at best, plus many weapons fire multiple KINDS of shots at a time, not just multiples of the same kinds of shots, so those would need to somehow be measured individually as well... and EVERY front and rear weapon has 11 different levels of power... The amount of testing necessary to figure that all out without using external sources/tools is STAGGERING. o_o;
I wonder if you could fire up Turbo Debugger or something similar and reverse the code to come to the same conclusion. This could especially be useful for games where this is harder to figure out.
I don't like to go that far with the Pro videos because the average game player would not have access to those kinds of tools, though I will sometimes pull up source code if it's widely available to confirm findings if I can find such code. Apparently there IS source code for Raptor out there now which I didn't know until after making this video! That said, if OTHER people watching these videos want to try doing decompiling or such and posting their conclusions in the comments then that's totally fine! :B
@@PixelmusementTrue, I had the info that Raptor's source was available somewhere in the back of my head while watching the video. However I wasn't sure if I was confusing it with Tyrian or something else. Regarding disassemblers: I would agree if you said the average game player doesn't have the knowledge to interpret the resulting assembly code. Sure, that makes sense. The tools are widely available -- there are even tons of online disassemblers, no need to install something. :) Recording and counting frames is surely much more laborious than dropping an EXE file into a web page. Understanding the resulting code, yeah, that's where it gets a bit more interesting. I wonder if there is a DOSBox fork that adds in situ debugging? The VICE Monitor is a great example what one could do, but for C64 and related machines.
@@root42 I meant in the context of an 80s or 90s game player... which TECHNICALLY yes, you could use the DOS DEBUG command, but I don't think the average person wants to be caught dead using THAT as their debugger! :P
Good ol' Raptor. A favorite of mine on my venerable shareware CDs. My best friend at the time and I played the hell out of it. The auto-tracking minigun was the game breaker. Played Demonstar too. It's great, though I don't remember it being super tough, nor do I remember the titual demonstar actually appearing. Maybe I only played on easy? Also the last weapon is purple. It's basically Raiden 2's toothpaste laser in all but name.
My guess for the next game covered in a regular ADG episode is the DOS port of Dungeon Master. It (the Atari ST version at least) was seen as a pivotal RTS.
DPS isn't everything against non-bosses, sometimes it's about the *one hit* you get in on an enemy while you pop into its line of fire and then back out again before you take damage. You can synchronize that to the cadence of your missiles, plasma cannon, or whatever.
Which works with most other 2D shooters, but enemies here in Raptor often aren't on screen very long and have a lot of HP. That auto-tracking laser for instance actually has trouble taking out ANYTHING once you get beyond Bravo Sector, which is unfortunately how far you have to get before you can even really afford it. :|
I love Demonstar that game was amazing back in the Windows XP days. There IS a fourth weapon and it's extremely rare, orange. Orange is the best weapon in game by far hence it's rarity, it is a homing orb launcher and allows you to sit in the corners of the screen on bosses so you can kill them without getting hit. Extremely OP but very fun. Demonstar also has many hidden warp portals you can use to progress farther in the game kind of like SMB2/Doki Doki Panic. Great game, highly recommended.
I always liked the dumbfire missiles, if I remember right I think you got some on like the 5th or 6th mission in Bravo? Or maybe that's the mission that gave you another set of missiles you picked up early and could quit to sell them which let me buy the dumbfire's early. I just liked the simplicity of getting a weapon that hits all targets early so I could save up for the micro missiles asap.
if he goes back and remakes this game id love it if the graphics and everything was kept the same...just add more levels, new enemies/gear/etc and have more challenging enemies and bosses. the game is amazing the way it is the crystal caves remake came out a couple years ago and i loved that but i do kind of wish some of these dos games could retain that dos feel either way ill still pay and play and love it no matter what
If you're in contact with this creator and he's thinking of doing a remake you may want to let him know that even the lowest level of difficulty was insane, and myself and the rest of the computer lab kids that played games over lunch at my school that played this in the 90s when it first came out pretty much all gave up on it pretty quickly because none of us could get past the first few levels. Meanwhile, I liked Apogee's Major Stryker, a very similar game from the period which is very graphically inferior, enough to not just play and complete the shareware version but to purchase and complete the two paid sequels too as well. A fix wouldn't necessarily be very hard either, it would just be a matter of having more difficulty levels. That's of benefit to the creator as well as you open up interest in the game to a broader amount of players of different skill levels, some of which might like the game enough to come back and play the game at a higher skill level once they get the hang of it on lower difficulty levels.
I doubt that's going to happen. Some of the people who are good at 2D shooters are REALLY FREAKING GOOD at 2D shooters, and thus if they also decide they're going to make one, they make it accordingly difficult. Thus if you think Raptor is overtly difficult, Demonstar would pretty much annihilate you before you even finish the first level. I would agree though that a high difficulty limits the target audience and when possible it's good to develop for a wide range of skill levels.
@@Pixelmusement High difficulty is not the opposite of low difficulty. You can do both at the same time with different and customizable difficulty levels and appeal to a broader base of interested players in the process. It unfortunately sounds though from what you're saying the game is going to be developed exclusively for elitist snobs and that's unfortunate. Welp, that's his call I guess.
@@someguy3186 Trying to do that from what I recall just resulted in not making much money from any given mission, so while you didn't die for quite awhile as the missions were getting harder you were just slowly getting further and further behind. To be fair it's been well over two decades, we were kids with lots of other choices, not knowing that you weren't supposed to try to beat all enemies hurt, and then for that matter some of the weapons you paid lots of money for not being great values all contributed to us giving up the game too.
@@stormthrush37Raptor was challenging, but the mastering process was very rewarding once you got how it works in general. The rookie difficulty worked perfectly as a tutorial to master the first patterns. I guess this game is far from being "a game for elitist snobs" when compared to most bullet hells around. If you are looking for something a bit more forgiving with rechargable shields and full refund on credits after changing equipment, I do suggest trying Tyrian 2000. It's one of my favorites. It comes with a wide variety of difficult levels and you can even go crazy hard on the difficult if you feel like you mastered the game.
21:30 You might want to differentiate here. There are weapons which would definetly be realistic to be deployed in combat since they are super useful/powerful, but they are unrealistic to exist yet. -In the first sense, the Deathray is definetly realistic. And then there are weapons which could realistically definetly be built nowadays already, but are unrealistic to ever being used in battle since they would be pretty useless. In that sense, spreading weapons are unrealistic. Given these assumptions, all the weapons in Raptor are realistic as long as there are no spreading weapons.
That's getting WAY too deep into the weeds for a passing comment that was simply meant to point out that this is a game and doesn't have to be super-realistic to be fun. :P
There is one little detail about the Megabomb that you may have missed - the time between its drop and the explosion is affected by the player's position on the screen. The bomb always travels from the plane to the center of the screen, and if the plane happens to be there, in the center, the bomb explodes almost immediately, without any movement ;)
Good catch, fortunately it doesn't really change the testing results given that the rate of fire is not dependent on how quickly a Megabomb explodes. Heck, testing this just now you can technically have TWO Megabombs in the air at a time if you launch them both from the far corners of the screen! :o
On the topic of spreading shots in Raptor, I do wonder if that was a design choice for gameplay reasons or technical limitations. All weapons fire except for the turrets and enemy bullets travel in a single direction (up from the player, down from enemies). That both makes the Twin Laser a far more useful weapon than the deathray due to the greater horizontal coverage, but is also my defining experience of the late-game in Raptor: Playing laser chicken with the many laser-equipped enemies in the later stages of Tango Sector and the Outer Regions
There's a lot of intentional design here. That's one of the weird things when it comes to assessing a game as a player is: Which design elements are INTENTIONAL and are those elements good or bad? You can have unintentional genius and intentional lousiness which all stems from a lack of experience. Even when you look back at many of the great designers, their first projects, even if well received, are gonna have at least one or two little quirks which were intentional but, in retrospect, also kinda dumb. :P
I love Raptor because of the lack of spreading weapons - I hate them! The Pulse Cannon were never my favorite, it blocks to much of the view for my taste. The Scatterpack missiles seems to fly slower than the Mauler missiles, so I never enjoyed them much. The Mauler and Air-to-Ground missiles are given to you in the first and third (or fourth?) level, these are great. I would keep them and sell every other weapon I pick up, and buy weapons in the following order: Micro-missiles, Plasma, Autotrack minigun, Autotrack laser, Twin laser. No other weapons are worth it in my opinion. I might rethink the Bombs, though - didn't know they were so effective against ground targets. Tips for remake: Make it possible to select which weapons you switch amongst (or make shortcut keys for different weapons) so you don't have to cycle between all when you have multiple selectable weapons.
Oooh, your next review is gonna be a pivotal DOS real-time strategy that you have not already covered? All I can say is... Skooboo! Zug zug! They're destroying our city!
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I would also like to ask a question if anyone wants to give their opinion. Many times i though on making my own shooter, (which i actually did for mobile couple of times but abandoned them) but my main issues in deciding on investing time on it are mostly because either the screen ratio or the input because for me breaks my love for the game experience itself. Screens now a days are wide and yea i could still make a top down shooter horizontally but looks weird right? and people do not seem engaged to space shooters in pc.. and about mobile which has a acceptable vertical screen... my problem is the input. i hate touch screens. I tried to create the game with gyroscope once, not sure if i was going in the right direction, but once again feels like a downer because people dont seem invested into shooters and I think there hasnt been many inovations through the years. So any ideas or suggestions or opinions would be welcome. Maybe I get hyped to restart doing a "space" shooter.
Well, there's a few things to keep in mind here. The first is that people who are VERY into 2D shooters typically invest in solutions to run their games in "Tate Mode", or rather, with the screen turned 90-degrees into a vertical orientation, so the trick there is if you're going to make a vertical shooter, make sure it supports doing that. Touch screens are terrible for gaming in general so unless you're explicitly trying to target mobile first you're better off forgetting it's a thing or adding touch screen support after the fact. 3D is also something to consider, whereby the gameplay remains 2D but done with a 3D perspective. This can work well for a vertical shooter on a wide-screen by allowing the perspective to shrink into the distance which helps to fill out the screen better. Generally speaking though, make a game BECAUSE you want to make a game, not for any other reason. Sure, monetization and such are important, but at the end of the day if you don't enjoy the game development process then it's GOING to show in the final product. :P
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@@Pixelmusement thank you for the feedback. Its appreciated. it helps me to unblock some ideas. The thing of making a game because i want thats the reason why i stop, i was not satisfied with the outcome i was having or the feeling. I notice many games nowadays have a huge amount of resources and many times they are not even fun. My latest example was Diablo 4, it looks great but it was really boring for me (although i just tried the demo) I was anxious for it and was disappointed. I keep going back to diablo 1 for some reason
@ The best thing to remember there is that every game is someone's favourite, whether it's an $80 AAA title, or a $3 solo-dev indie project with several game-breaking bugs, or something between those two extremes. The quality of a game versus the amount of effort put into creating it does not always match up, even between different titles from the same developer, which is another part of the reason why it's important to only do gamedev when you actually want to do gamedev stuff! :B
It's not a big one, but there is still an audience for non-japanese shmups like Tyrian or Raptor. If you want to make a game like this, make sure to clearly distance yourself from all that anime style bullet hell stuff we've seen so much of. You already figured out why mobile is not a great platform. As for screen space, you don't have to use the full screen. Black out the unused space in full screen and provide a window mode. A neat bonus would be the option to rotate the game and HUD individually in steps of 90. This way players can choose to play sideways and/or physically rotate their monitor (rare, but I got a rotating screen set up vertical permanently). I don't think innovations are particularly necessary, if you can capture the spirit of Raptor and alike. A cohesive grounded art style, quality 3d models/sprites (no cheap cobbled together primitives like in Hornado), no visual effects overkill during gameplay, no bullet hell, shop/upgrade system, fun weapons, memorable soundtrack, bosses that actually do something compared to Raptor ... people are already freaking out about a new Raptor, so you really don't have to reinvent the wheel. One thing worth trying might be manually aimed secondary weapons, akin to twin-stick shooters. Think of turrets or laser guided munitions (see Highfleet). Just food for thought.
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@@fonesrphunny7242 thank you so much for your feedback My initial thingy with being a mobile game was due to a few points: - First me being a mobile developer. - Second due the trend of mobile gaming... although there are too many games on the market I think i still have new ideas never made. - Third i don't imagine people playing "2d" space shooter on computer anymore. Not with the thing of multiplayer and all the free FPS games and so on. I think yea we could use a little bit of innovation in these 2d space shooters that could attract players. I haven't though much on a 3d because... 1º of my lack of experience in 3d, 2º but also because I love 2d graphics sprites complex pixelized art 3º I hate the 3d graphics of mobile games haha, its like the lack textures and proper light, everything is cartoonish, reminds me old cgi tv cartoons, I did use to play Skyforce and enjoy it but it was my limit for my taste on its graphics. I guess its to spare some free space in the smartphone and work. I think i did try a couple of times to make few games on 3d mostly unity tough
Oh boy! This is going to be a fun video... I cheesed this game so much collecting extra cash and quitting missions middle way when I was young just to get the turrets. lol Let's see what you got there.
A pivotal MS-DOS RTS that isn't C&C or Dune 2? Others have guessed Warcraft, and Starcraft was 1998 so a Windows game, so I'm going to guess... Sim Ant!
Another cheat was hitting the backspace key while in a stage. Yes, just hitting one key. It would give you a deathray laser (second best weapon in the game) and iirc, you could do that multiple times and then sell those lasers until you can afford the twin laser.
I can't lose the urge to compare this game to tyrian cause i use to play them both at same time and enjoyed both in the some way. Raptor more like a simulator than shooter maybe because of the graphics. also when you come back from a mission seeing the battle damage, the feedback you get from shooting enemys with the normal guns like they are getting bullets to ricochet
I loved both too! From memory, Tyrian was more difficult and the weapon attachments that came up for sale were random between stages. Raptor had more precise controls and had a more grounded art style. Tyrian graphics were more 'chunky' and vibrant, but the framerate was also lower/slower (on my 133mhz 586 with 16mb of RAM, lol)
I imagine many people come here looking for information to make weapon-switch macros. Do you know how many frames it takes to switch from one weapon to another? Is there a theoretical optimum?
Doom 2, an RTS game? c_c EDIT: Wait, no. You probably mean DUNE 2. I misheard it the same way my friends misheard "Doom" when I talked about "Dune". Can't believe I fell on the pitfall I hated with all my heart when I was younger. XD Anyways... It's definitely Warcraft. It's going to be Warcraft, right? It's clearly going to be Warcraft.
I feel the weapons are very unbalanced. At the time, it was only my second shooter and I was like, "Oh cool, let's put whatever in." I spent more time on balancing in DemonStar. When we thought it was done, we had someone play it while we watched and realized we had a lot more balancing and work to do, which took another 3 months. About the FPS, it couldn't run at 30fps on my 386 16sx, so I chose 24fps, thinking it was good enough for movies. And yes, there is a bug in the timing. BTW I have been locked out of twitter for a month
That's bizarre about the Twitter thing as your account there still shows up fine, just with no recent activity. Twitter is not long for this world; I'm just waiting on Bluesky to get private messages going later in the year before I make the switch as most of my friends ended up there. But yeah, balancing is one of those weird things with gaming where too little balancing results in many aspects of a game going unused or avoided, while too much balancing can strip a game's components of all personality. Always hard to find just the right balance and often can't be done right without feedback from other people! :B
@@Pixelmusement weird i replied to this and now its gone. anyways i said to join my discord as I have no idea when I will get twitter back. I wanna talk to you about the Raptor stuff when I get back on it Info is on my youtube page
@ScottHost I don't actually use Discord, one of the reasons being I'm terrible at multi-person socializing, but Steam chat is an option for one-on-one, as is just firing eMails back and forth. My eMail address is at the end of my videos, my channel About section here on TH-cam, and on my website, and as for Steam just give me the OK and I can send you a friend request over there! :B
You're not supposed to destroy all enemies, but you ARE supposed to destroy as many ground targets as possible, since they are worth much more money than the enemy ships. And later episodes have more ground targets so you can afford the big weapons.
Of course you have to intentionally leave some enemies undestroyed - that's one of the cornerstones to mastering Raptor (and Tyrian too, by the way). And it only took you 20 years to figure it out :D
Amazing! ... Damn, there is one thing I have to point out. "Spreading weapons", which is a fitting name regardless, do "Area of Effect" damage, making them "Area of Effect weapons". Sorry. :)
...I could go into a dissertation about why I don't agree with that logic, but I'm not going to and will just say that no one calls the "S" weapon in Contra the "Area of Effect Gun". :P
I dont think we need a remake of this game...the game will not become better - if you remake a game that has such massively gameplay and balancing issues. If you change this it will not be a remake by any means. The game was a blender back then but lets face the fact as a shmup it did NEVER GOOD AT NO POINT. I played this game enough and it always looses its fun after 1 or 2 levels... because its so boring game design. It will never match the j shmups cuz raptor always followed another game design and experience. But as time proved the game is too boring. Its all too generic and the bosses were always lame. No we played this tur d of a game because like you said sjmuos were ( and still are) quite rare on pcs
The whole definition of a "remake" versus a "port" is to make changes to the game to enhance it or make it better, so if Scott Host does go back to it to alter things and add new features for a modern re-release I would absolutely call that a "remake". :P
Also, the DM1R Psycho's "random" firing is an advantage, because you can hit from off to the side. With the air to airs, you have to be in front of the thing you're shooting.
Remember that part of the fun of the Pro videos is trying to figure this stuff out WITHOUT resorting to source code, decompiling, external tools, etc., as though we're just everyday game players with the game in hand and maybe also the cheat codes! ;)
I remember cheesing the hell out of Raptor's economy by waiting until I got to a stage with the dumbfire missiles, then repeatedly grabbing it, leaving the stage, and selling them. I felt so smart when I figured that out as a kid, haha.
That's a very smart play!! Wish my friends and I had figured that out.
I did the same on the very first mission just selling the air to air rockets over and over
i did the same thing as a kid. ^^
But ultimately, it's not necessary. The economy is fine in this game.
Much appreciated that you proved what I suspected, but couldn't prove, in my early years playing Raptor. A great deal of the weapons really ARE pretty underwhelming. The Pulse Cannon and Twin laser were always favorites by far, and now I know that's perfectly founded. Those hypothetical changes sound neat too. I'm kind of on the fence on if I'd want a "classic" mode with the old weapon numbers/mechanics included, but I'll be happy with the remake either way.
Also, there IS a 4th weapon in Demonstar. It's incredibly useful when you can start finding those powerups. All I'll say is that it's orange.
Back then it my thinking was more tossing in cool ideas vs making them balanced
Raptor: Call of the Shadows and Demonstar are both awesome games.
I played the hell out of the Demonstar demos back in the day. I absolutely loved the style and destruction.
holy shit gemini... this game was SO COOL when I was a teen back in the day. A remake would be the bomb! and the gun. and the explosion!
I had no idea that Raptor: Call of the Shadows and Demonstar were linked in any way. I used to play the demo version of the latter so much that I started going for "challenge runs" where I would try to simply avoid taking any damage rather than destroying anything in my way (outside of bosses, of course).
I already owned the former, but this video put the latter's Steam re-release on my wishlist. OH YEAH.
As funny as this may sound. I was actually in the process of making a response video to your old Raptor: Call of the Shadows video. You beat me to the punch. lol. I'm glad to see this updated edition. Really enjoy your work. :)
omg this game... memories...... the music takes me way back. thank you man :)
Omg, I miss that game. It's my childhood. whenever I encounter boss, my hands got sweaty. I was too young and couldn't finished it. Always ended up on the plane crash game over. It was really cool as a young child. Also miss my pentium II.
Nice deep dive. Raptor and Tyrian were peak DOS SHMUP. Tyrian being my favorite. Any chance to lure you over to Mastodon? Very strong and welcoming retro community there...
While that's where a lot of viewers want me to go, most of my friends have actually gone over to BlueSky by this point if they've left Twitter and I'm really bad at managing multiple social places at a time, so chances are pretty high that's where I'm going to end up in the long run. Not yet though; I'm waiting for the place to go full-public.
@@Pixelmusement Sure, whatever floats your boat. I personally want to stay away from the proprietary platforms. They all eventually turn sour. And I was positively surprised how good the Mastodon community is. Lovely mood over there.
I absolutely fucking love Raptor and Demonstar, I played the fuck out of their demos on the Egames disks I had, and always wanted to play the full things. I did when I got older and enjoyed the shit out of them. Sadly largely forgotten though, so it's great to see a channel like this is particular take a real in-depth under the hood look at them beyond just saying they're real cool shmups. Also didn't know about the Demonstar re-release, thanks for making me aware as well! Great vid.
Was always one of the best games to find on a shareware disc 👍
THIS IS AWESOME!
I tried and failed to get the info of the weapons.
Now do Highway Hunter next! Its weapons feel just as crazy
You never played DemonStar? Granted it was DirectX Windows-only; the shareware edition was my own introduction to Mountain King Studios and I continue to enjoy it more than Raptor. I still have the Ionos (who also distributed Nebula Fighter, another interesting 2D space shooter which has the distinction of its original shareware release being for DOS but full version for Windows) retail CD and prefer the older version graphics. Now called DemonStar Classic (to distinguish it from subsequent "Secret Missions" add-on packs) it had 4 main versions over the years, the differences of which I may dedicate a post on my blog to someday.
You are correct: it has one additional weapon that is rare, generally only shows up in later levels, and has a quirky homing effect similar to Raptor's minigun that makes it not as worthwhile as it seems. There's also a third "bomb" type which I won't spoil for you. However, this applies to the classic editions up to version 4.04: the new Steam release appears to have gotten further upgrades and having not played that one I can't speak on any substantive gameplay changes. For those interested, the older shareware downloads should still be findable online (I also recommend getting a program to read old Windows help files since the manual's in that format) which show that the work he's put into it over the years makes DemonStar to be Scott Host's real magnum opus.
The main reason I missed out on DemonStar was when it came out: I switched primarily from PC gaming to console gaming right around the debut of Windows 95. Not that I didn't play Win9x games in the late 90s but not nearly as many as I could've due to a lack of a good enough system to do so. When I got back into PC gaming in late 1999, I had jumped from a P120 with no hardware accelerator to a P3/600 with a Voodoo3 and thus missed out on many late 90s PC games which simply hadn't stayed on store shelves. :P
Now I'm curious about the weapon levels in Tyrian; is a level 1 lightning doing the same as a level 11 lightning, or does the unit get upgraded along with the fire rate and other stats?
Tyrian 2000 is on my list of games to give a Pro treatment to... but as it stands I'm still trying to think of a good way to properly test it out because the sheer quantity of weapons and weapon levels and everything makes the idea of testing it all out a bit overwhelming. o_o
@@Pixelmusementa combination of god mode and ship editor will be necessary to test that... I presume?
Although, I guess there were damage values spread across the internet, including fire rate and energy consumption. It is a very involved deal. Good luck!
It would take way more than that. The energy levels tracked in the game are extremely erratic due to their nature and would be very, very difficult to measure properly, the inability to not have a front weapon equipped would make testing anything for rear weapons and sidekicks difficult at best, plus many weapons fire multiple KINDS of shots at a time, not just multiples of the same kinds of shots, so those would need to somehow be measured individually as well... and EVERY front and rear weapon has 11 different levels of power... The amount of testing necessary to figure that all out without using external sources/tools is STAGGERING. o_o;
Well now I know what to reference on my next Raptor playthrough.
I wonder if you could fire up Turbo Debugger or something similar and reverse the code to come to the same conclusion. This could especially be useful for games where this is harder to figure out.
I don't like to go that far with the Pro videos because the average game player would not have access to those kinds of tools, though I will sometimes pull up source code if it's widely available to confirm findings if I can find such code. Apparently there IS source code for Raptor out there now which I didn't know until after making this video! That said, if OTHER people watching these videos want to try doing decompiling or such and posting their conclusions in the comments then that's totally fine! :B
@@PixelmusementTrue, I had the info that Raptor's source was available somewhere in the back of my head while watching the video. However I wasn't sure if I was confusing it with Tyrian or something else.
Regarding disassemblers: I would agree if you said the average game player doesn't have the knowledge to interpret the resulting assembly code. Sure, that makes sense. The tools are widely available -- there are even tons of online disassemblers, no need to install something. :)
Recording and counting frames is surely much more laborious than dropping an EXE file into a web page. Understanding the resulting code, yeah, that's where it gets a bit more interesting. I wonder if there is a DOSBox fork that adds in situ debugging? The VICE Monitor is a great example what one could do, but for C64 and related machines.
@@root42 I meant in the context of an 80s or 90s game player... which TECHNICALLY yes, you could use the DOS DEBUG command, but I don't think the average person wants to be caught dead using THAT as their debugger! :P
Good ol' Raptor. A favorite of mine on my venerable shareware CDs. My best friend at the time and I played the hell out of it. The auto-tracking minigun was the game breaker.
Played Demonstar too. It's great, though I don't remember it being super tough, nor do I remember the titual demonstar actually appearing. Maybe I only played on easy? Also the last weapon is purple. It's basically Raiden 2's toothpaste laser in all but name.
I know the work on the Steam release is not just a straight-up port so it's possible certain things have been added, changed, etc. :B
Funny thing about the Power Disruptor is that it can prevent a handful of air bosses from firing. The Bravo Sector Wave 2 boss is one of them.
My guess for the next game covered in a regular ADG episode is the DOS port of Dungeon Master. It (the Atari ST version at least) was seen as a pivotal RTS.
DPS isn't everything against non-bosses, sometimes it's about the *one hit* you get in on an enemy while you pop into its line of fire and then back out again before you take damage. You can synchronize that to the cadence of your missiles, plasma cannon, or whatever.
Which works with most other 2D shooters, but enemies here in Raptor often aren't on screen very long and have a lot of HP. That auto-tracking laser for instance actually has trouble taking out ANYTHING once you get beyond Bravo Sector, which is unfortunately how far you have to get before you can even really afford it. :|
@@Pixelmusement Thanks to the shadows you can predict perfectly where an enemy will appear.
For DOS, after Dune 2 & CoC, I can only think of one *big* RTS. Are we gonna have a Waagh!?
Great job
And thank you for introducing me demonstar i will try it for sure
I love Demonstar that game was amazing back in the Windows XP days. There IS a fourth weapon and it's extremely rare, orange. Orange is the best weapon in game by far hence it's rarity, it is a homing orb launcher and allows you to sit in the corners of the screen on bosses so you can kill them without getting hit. Extremely OP but very fun. Demonstar also has many hidden warp portals you can use to progress farther in the game kind of like SMB2/Doki Doki Panic. Great game, highly recommended.
I always liked the dumbfire missiles, if I remember right I think you got some on like the 5th or 6th mission in Bravo? Or maybe that's the mission that gave you another set of missiles you picked up early and could quit to sell them which let me buy the dumbfire's early. I just liked the simplicity of getting a weapon that hits all targets early so I could save up for the micro missiles asap.
I only other one I can think of would be Warcraft?
Warcraft next?! Hmmmm...
why this game so damn fun. scott did the right choice making it different from rest of other scrolling shooters that you can buy stuff.
if he goes back and remakes this game id love it if the graphics and everything was kept the same...just add more levels, new enemies/gear/etc and have more challenging enemies and bosses. the game is amazing the way it is
the crystal caves remake came out a couple years ago and i loved that but i do kind of wish some of these dos games could retain that dos feel
either way ill still pay and play and love it no matter what
If you're in contact with this creator and he's thinking of doing a remake you may want to let him know that even the lowest level of difficulty was insane, and myself and the rest of the computer lab kids that played games over lunch at my school that played this in the 90s when it first came out pretty much all gave up on it pretty quickly because none of us could get past the first few levels. Meanwhile, I liked Apogee's Major Stryker, a very similar game from the period which is very graphically inferior, enough to not just play and complete the shareware version but to purchase and complete the two paid sequels too as well.
A fix wouldn't necessarily be very hard either, it would just be a matter of having more difficulty levels. That's of benefit to the creator as well as you open up interest in the game to a broader amount of players of different skill levels, some of which might like the game enough to come back and play the game at a higher skill level once they get the hang of it on lower difficulty levels.
I doubt that's going to happen. Some of the people who are good at 2D shooters are REALLY FREAKING GOOD at 2D shooters, and thus if they also decide they're going to make one, they make it accordingly difficult. Thus if you think Raptor is overtly difficult, Demonstar would pretty much annihilate you before you even finish the first level. I would agree though that a high difficulty limits the target audience and when possible it's good to develop for a wide range of skill levels.
@@Pixelmusement High difficulty is not the opposite of low difficulty. You can do both at the same time with different and customizable difficulty levels and appeal to a broader base of interested players in the process. It unfortunately sounds though from what you're saying the game is going to be developed exclusively for elitist snobs and that's unfortunate. Welp, that's his call I guess.
Eh, I sucked at shmups as a kid, but I never found the game that hard since you can just stock up on shields.
@@someguy3186 Trying to do that from what I recall just resulted in not making much money from any given mission, so while you didn't die for quite awhile as the missions were getting harder you were just slowly getting further and further behind. To be fair it's been well over two decades, we were kids with lots of other choices, not knowing that you weren't supposed to try to beat all enemies hurt, and then for that matter some of the weapons you paid lots of money for not being great values all contributed to us giving up the game too.
@@stormthrush37Raptor was challenging, but the mastering process was very rewarding once you got how it works in general. The rookie difficulty worked perfectly as a tutorial to master the first patterns.
I guess this game is far from being "a game for elitist snobs" when compared to most bullet hells around.
If you are looking for something a bit more forgiving with rechargable shields and full refund on credits after changing equipment, I do suggest trying Tyrian 2000. It's one of my favorites. It comes with a wide variety of difficult levels and you can even go crazy hard on the difficult if you feel like you mastered the game.
21:30 You might want to differentiate here.
There are weapons which would definetly be realistic to be deployed in combat since they are super useful/powerful, but they are unrealistic to exist yet. -In the first sense, the Deathray is definetly realistic.
And then there are weapons which could realistically definetly be built nowadays already, but are unrealistic to ever being used in battle since they would be pretty useless. In that sense, spreading weapons are unrealistic.
Given these assumptions, all the weapons in Raptor are realistic as long as there are no spreading weapons.
That's getting WAY too deep into the weeds for a passing comment that was simply meant to point out that this is a game and doesn't have to be super-realistic to be fun. :P
Is it gonna be WarCraft 1? Or 2? I don't remember you reviewing these.
Yeah, I'm sure it's gonna be Warcraft.
I used to play this one a lot, I remember it was quite difficult at the beginning then became easy peasy once I bought all those fancy arms ;d
There is one little detail about the Megabomb that you may have missed - the time between its drop and the explosion is affected by the player's position on the screen. The bomb always travels from the plane to the center of the screen, and if the plane happens to be there, in the center, the bomb explodes almost immediately, without any movement ;)
Good catch, fortunately it doesn't really change the testing results given that the rate of fire is not dependent on how quickly a Megabomb explodes. Heck, testing this just now you can technically have TWO Megabombs in the air at a time if you launch them both from the far corners of the screen! :o
@@Pixelmusement Ha, never thought to try that. But I surely will.
On the topic of spreading shots in Raptor, I do wonder if that was a design choice for gameplay reasons or technical limitations. All weapons fire except for the turrets and enemy bullets travel in a single direction (up from the player, down from enemies). That both makes the Twin Laser a far more useful weapon than the deathray due to the greater horizontal coverage, but is also my defining experience of the late-game in Raptor: Playing laser chicken with the many laser-equipped enemies in the later stages of Tango Sector and the Outer Regions
There's a lot of intentional design here. That's one of the weird things when it comes to assessing a game as a player is: Which design elements are INTENTIONAL and are those elements good or bad? You can have unintentional genius and intentional lousiness which all stems from a lack of experience. Even when you look back at many of the great designers, their first projects, even if well received, are gonna have at least one or two little quirks which were intentional but, in retrospect, also kinda dumb. :P
Ooh nice video! I hope Scott returns to work on Raptor soon as well!
I love Raptor because of the lack of spreading weapons - I hate them! The Pulse Cannon were never my favorite, it blocks to much of the view for my taste. The Scatterpack missiles seems to fly slower than the Mauler missiles, so I never enjoyed them much. The Mauler and Air-to-Ground missiles are given to you in the first and third (or fourth?) level, these are great. I would keep them and sell every other weapon I pick up, and buy weapons in the following order: Micro-missiles, Plasma, Autotrack minigun, Autotrack laser, Twin laser. No other weapons are worth it in my opinion. I might rethink the Bombs, though - didn't know they were so effective against ground targets.
Tips for remake: Make it possible to select which weapons you switch amongst (or make shortcut keys for different weapons) so you don't have to cycle between all when you have multiple selectable weapons.
Oooh, your next review is gonna be a pivotal DOS real-time strategy that you have not already covered?
All I can say is... Skooboo! Zug zug! They're destroying our city!
I would also like to ask a question if anyone wants to give their opinion. Many times i though on making my own shooter, (which i actually did for mobile couple of times but abandoned them) but my main issues in deciding on investing time on it are mostly because either the screen ratio or the input because for me breaks my love for the game experience itself.
Screens now a days are wide and yea i could still make a top down shooter horizontally but looks weird right? and people do not seem engaged to space shooters in pc..
and about mobile which has a acceptable vertical screen... my problem is the input. i hate touch screens.
I tried to create the game with gyroscope once, not sure if i was going in the right direction, but once again feels like a downer because people dont seem invested into shooters and I think there hasnt been many inovations through the years.
So any ideas or suggestions or opinions would be welcome. Maybe I get hyped to restart doing a "space" shooter.
Well, there's a few things to keep in mind here. The first is that people who are VERY into 2D shooters typically invest in solutions to run their games in "Tate Mode", or rather, with the screen turned 90-degrees into a vertical orientation, so the trick there is if you're going to make a vertical shooter, make sure it supports doing that. Touch screens are terrible for gaming in general so unless you're explicitly trying to target mobile first you're better off forgetting it's a thing or adding touch screen support after the fact. 3D is also something to consider, whereby the gameplay remains 2D but done with a 3D perspective. This can work well for a vertical shooter on a wide-screen by allowing the perspective to shrink into the distance which helps to fill out the screen better. Generally speaking though, make a game BECAUSE you want to make a game, not for any other reason. Sure, monetization and such are important, but at the end of the day if you don't enjoy the game development process then it's GOING to show in the final product. :P
@@Pixelmusement thank you for the feedback. Its appreciated. it helps me to unblock some ideas. The thing of making a game because i want thats the reason why i stop, i was not satisfied with the outcome i was having or the feeling. I notice many games nowadays have a huge amount of resources and many times they are not even fun. My latest example was Diablo 4, it looks great but it was really boring for me (although i just tried the demo) I was anxious for it and was disappointed. I keep going back to diablo 1 for some reason
@ The best thing to remember there is that every game is someone's favourite, whether it's an $80 AAA title, or a $3 solo-dev indie project with several game-breaking bugs, or something between those two extremes. The quality of a game versus the amount of effort put into creating it does not always match up, even between different titles from the same developer, which is another part of the reason why it's important to only do gamedev when you actually want to do gamedev stuff! :B
It's not a big one, but there is still an audience for non-japanese shmups like Tyrian or Raptor. If you want to make a game like this, make sure to clearly distance yourself from all that anime style bullet hell stuff we've seen so much of.
You already figured out why mobile is not a great platform.
As for screen space, you don't have to use the full screen. Black out the unused space in full screen and provide a window mode.
A neat bonus would be the option to rotate the game and HUD individually in steps of 90. This way players can choose to play sideways and/or physically rotate their monitor (rare, but I got a rotating screen set up vertical permanently).
I don't think innovations are particularly necessary, if you can capture the spirit of Raptor and alike. A cohesive grounded art style, quality 3d models/sprites (no cheap cobbled together primitives like in Hornado), no visual effects overkill during gameplay, no bullet hell, shop/upgrade system, fun weapons, memorable soundtrack, bosses that actually do something compared to Raptor ... people are already freaking out about a new Raptor, so you really don't have to reinvent the wheel.
One thing worth trying might be manually aimed secondary weapons, akin to twin-stick shooters. Think of turrets or laser guided munitions (see Highfleet). Just food for thought.
@@fonesrphunny7242 thank you so much for your feedback
My initial thingy with being a mobile game was due to a few points:
- First me being a mobile developer.
- Second due the trend of mobile gaming... although there are too many games on the market I think i still have new ideas never made.
- Third i don't imagine people playing "2d" space shooter on computer anymore.
Not with the thing of multiplayer and all the free FPS games and so on.
I think yea we could use a little bit of innovation in these 2d space shooters that could attract players.
I haven't though much on a 3d because...
1º of my lack of experience in 3d,
2º but also because I love 2d graphics sprites complex pixelized art
3º I hate the 3d graphics of mobile games haha, its like the lack textures and proper light, everything is cartoonish, reminds me old cgi tv cartoons, I did use to play Skyforce and enjoy it but it was my limit for my taste on its graphics. I guess its to spare some free space in the smartphone and work.
I think i did try a couple of times to make few games on 3d mostly unity tough
Oh boy! This is going to be a fun video... I cheesed this game so much collecting extra cash and quitting missions middle way when I was young just to get the turrets. lol
Let's see what you got there.
A pivotal MS-DOS RTS that isn't C&C or Dune 2? Others have guessed Warcraft, and Starcraft was 1998 so a Windows game, so I'm going to guess... Sim Ant!
My guesses:
1) Warcraft II: Tides Of Darkness
2) Z
3) Powermonger
Another cheat was hitting the backspace key while in a stage. Yes, just hitting one key. It would give you a deathray laser (second best weapon in the game) and iirc, you could do that multiple times and then sell those lasers until you can afford the twin laser.
I played this game! Always thought it had loads of potential. Just too hard for me.
I remember this game!
I always loved this game.
I can't lose the urge to compare this game to tyrian cause i use to play them both at same time and enjoyed both in the some way. Raptor more like a simulator than shooter maybe because of the graphics. also when you come back from a mission seeing the battle damage, the feedback you get from shooting enemys with the normal guns like they are getting bullets to ricochet
I loved both too! From memory, Tyrian was more difficult and the weapon attachments that came up for sale were random between stages. Raptor had more precise controls and had a more grounded art style. Tyrian graphics were more 'chunky' and vibrant, but the framerate was also lower/slower (on my 133mhz 586 with 16mb of RAM, lol)
I imagine many people come here looking for information to make weapon-switch macros. Do you know how many frames it takes to switch from one weapon to another? Is there a theoretical optimum?
Doom 2, an RTS game? c_c
EDIT: Wait, no. You probably mean DUNE 2. I misheard it the same way my friends misheard "Doom" when I talked about "Dune". Can't believe I fell on the pitfall I hated with all my heart when I was younger. XD
Anyways... It's definitely Warcraft. It's going to be Warcraft, right? It's clearly going to be Warcraft.
inb4 it's Age of Empires...but I do expect it will be WarCraft
@@dominiccasts Age of Empires is a Windows 95 game, so it doesn't fit the section.
@@MechagirlSachiko OH? I did not know that. I wasn't that into AoE, and around that period has no access to a Windows PC anyway, just Macs.
I feel the weapons are very unbalanced. At the time, it was only my second shooter and I was like, "Oh cool, let's put whatever in." I spent more time on balancing in DemonStar. When we thought it was done, we had someone play it while we watched and realized we had a lot more balancing and work to do, which took another 3 months.
About the FPS, it couldn't run at 30fps on my 386 16sx, so I chose 24fps, thinking it was good enough for movies. And yes, there is a bug in the timing.
BTW I have been locked out of twitter for a month
That's bizarre about the Twitter thing as your account there still shows up fine, just with no recent activity. Twitter is not long for this world; I'm just waiting on Bluesky to get private messages going later in the year before I make the switch as most of my friends ended up there. But yeah, balancing is one of those weird things with gaming where too little balancing results in many aspects of a game going unused or avoided, while too much balancing can strip a game's components of all personality. Always hard to find just the right balance and often can't be done right without feedback from other people! :B
@@Pixelmusement weird i replied to this and now its gone.
anyways i said to join my discord as I have no idea when I will get twitter back.
I wanna talk to you about the Raptor stuff when I get back on it
Info is on my youtube page
@ScottHost I don't actually use Discord, one of the reasons being I'm terrible at multi-person socializing, but Steam chat is an option for one-on-one, as is just firing eMails back and forth. My eMail address is at the end of my videos, my channel About section here on TH-cam, and on my website, and as for Steam just give me the OK and I can send you a friend request over there! :B
@@Pixelmusement how do I send you my steam code w/o posting it publicly?
@@ScottHost You don't have to; Just look for a friend request from "Gemini". ;)
Dude Demonstar... U unlocked me a Childmemory, best game ever!!
Scott's been doing a lot of updating of the code in the new Steam version; May wanna get in on that then! ;)
@@Pixelmusement just bought it :D
You're not supposed to destroy all enemies, but you ARE supposed to destroy as many ground targets as possible, since they are worth much more money than the enemy ships. And later episodes have more ground targets so you can afford the big weapons.
This game was my favorite shoot em up as a kid.
BACKSPACE!
Ya know I hated that cheat but put it in because all apogee games did it
I am not a fan of cheats
@@ScottHost The first boss I ever defeated was in Galactix and I played Blake Stone over Wolfenstein. Thank You!
@@labowskidude Ya know Blake Stone used the Raptor cut scene animation routines in there somewhere.
Of course you have to intentionally leave some enemies undestroyed - that's one of the cornerstones to mastering Raptor (and Tyrian too, by the way). And it only took you 20 years to figure it out :D
Gemini: What's the one type of weapon that's missing?
Me: Side cars and drones!
Gemini: That's right, spreading weapons!
Me: Ohhh. 😥
The next game must be Z, then. :D
Amazing! ... Damn, there is one thing I have to point out. "Spreading weapons", which is a fitting name regardless, do "Area of Effect" damage, making them "Area of Effect weapons". Sorry. :)
...I could go into a dissertation about why I don't agree with that logic, but I'm not going to and will just say that no one calls the "S" weapon in Contra the "Area of Effect Gun". :P
@@Pixelmusement I would LOVE to read or hear all of that, but regardless ... damn, you're right! My bad! :D
I dont think we need a remake of this game...the game will not become better - if you remake a game that has such massively gameplay and balancing issues. If you change this it will not be a remake by any means.
The game was a blender back then but lets face the fact as a shmup it did NEVER GOOD AT NO POINT. I played this game enough and it always looses its fun after 1 or 2 levels... because its so boring game design. It will never match the j shmups cuz raptor always followed another game design and experience. But as time proved the game is too boring. Its all too generic and the bosses were always lame. No we played this tur d of a game because like you said sjmuos were ( and still are) quite rare on pcs
The whole definition of a "remake" versus a "port" is to make changes to the game to enhance it or make it better, so if Scott Host does go back to it to alter things and add new features for a modern re-release I would absolutely call that a "remake". :P
The source code is out there; I believe the creator released it officially a few months ago, but it's been reverse engineered for ages. Use the Source, Luke!
// == PLASMA_GUNS =====================================
slib = &shot_lib[S_PLASMA_GUNS];
slib->lumpnum = FILE1cf_PLASMA_BLK;
slib->shadow = 0;
slib->type = S_PLASMA_GUNS;
slib->hits = 2;
slib->speed = 4;
slib->maxspeed = 8;
slib->startframe = 0;
slib->numframes = 2;
slib->delayflag = 0;
slib->shoot_rate = 10;
slib->cur_shoot = 0;
slib->move_flag = 1;
slib->fplrx = 0;
slib->fplry = 0;
slib->meffect = 0;
slib->beam = S_SHOOT;
for (i = 0; i < slib->numframes; i++)
{
item = slib->lumpnum + i;
slib->pic[i] = (texture_t*)GLB_LockItem(item);
}
slib->h = slib->pic[0];
slib->hlx = slib->h->width >> 1;
slib->hly = slib->h->height >> 1;
slib->ht = S_AIR;
Also, the DM1R Psycho's "random" firing is an advantage, because you can hit from off to the side. With the air to airs, you have to be in front of the thing you're shooting.
Remember that part of the fun of the Pro videos is trying to figure this stuff out WITHOUT resorting to source code, decompiling, external tools, etc., as though we're just everyday game players with the game in hand and maybe also the cheat codes! ;)