Ha!
Okay. I have no idea what a schmup is.
I wouldn’t mind if the website gave me a dynamic ordering of entries through the competition which would tell me where my votes would be most useful. It would be a combination of a low number of votes so far, and a high deviation of the votes received. (Though keep which of those reasons is being considered hidden!)
I’m not really much of a voter because I normally don’t have enough time. I read reviews and hear about a bunch of great games and some terrible ones. If I could vote on something that’s either been neglected, or is divisive, then I probably would.
What do you think?
I agree with Hannes that there’s not really much evidence of a big all twine = 1 thing happening. If you look at the voting spread the only games with two noticeable voting peaks are Solarium and Final Girl. And maybe Dream Pieces, but it’s Quest!
Re: the idea to rate games in order (EG 1-35) I sort of operated that way myself this year, which was new for me. Rather than decide on a 1-10 score for each game as I went, I added the game to a list in order of preference, ‘preference’ being that huge machine where I put in my taste and assessment and magick up the result. At the end, I gave a 10 to the top of the list game, a 1 to the bottom, finetuned my remaining rankings and then distributed scores over a bellcurvish curve. Since I only had to compare the games to each other, I felt this worked out well for me (it gave me fewer headaches, anyway, and I know I’ve tried to use the full scoring range available to discriminate.) On my IFDB votes I tend to take a more standalone scoring attitude.
This might all be old hat to some of you who vote this way every year, but it was new and exciting for me.
-Wade
Apparently the preferred spelling is ‘shmup’. Doing an image-search will give you the idea. (But the basic idea is that it’s a 2D spaceship thing where lots of things are shooting at you and you are shooting back and there are millions of bullets and shit gets crazy.)
Oh, “shoot em up”? Although what you described sounds like a narrow genre I’ve heard called “bullet hell” where the primary gameplay focuses on maneuvering around hundreds of airborne particles without getting hit.