Remembrance
Member
Charge shots seem very underused in general. In fact, I think the trade-off you talk about is exactly why games have almost completely replaced charge shots with special gauges. You still need time to "charge" but you don't need to hold a button (and button-holding definitely taxes the dexterity of players who are trying to dodge at the same time).
Designing games based around dodging also happens to make it sometimes humanly impossible to juggle a force pod like in R-Type.
When you bring up autoscrolling, that reminds me that a handful of games have tried speed-based mechanics - Cloudphobia, After Burner Climax, and probably others I've forgotten. These games effectively let you control how quickly you scroll past enemies, and give you incentives for going as fast as possible. But they kind of went too far in opposite directions - in Cloudphobia most beginners will just time out on the first stage unless they go so fast that they start taking massive damage, and in After Burner Climax going fast doesn't actually matter unless you're chasing absolutely perfect ranking.
I could see a more elaborate version of this where you just face one wave of enemies at a time unless you press the speed-up button to get multiple waves on screen at once, which tests your ability to destroy them efficiently. You could get rewarded by unlocking alternate paths if you get through the stage fast enough by taking out multiple waves at once.
DBCS has one serious barrier to entry: you can't really read about how all the ships work except outside the game! And then in the game, all the ships look so similar (and you almost never get to see all the ships on one screen) that you lose track of which one you're choosing. The mechanics are rich, but they are opaque.
I do know that Super Hydorah is going to have a large number of levels and branching paths. Once this gets on Steam, let's see how far that gets it in terms of acceptance.
