Serious question: why is Jamestown so vilified by hardcore shmup fans? Is this like how they treat euroshmups?
Well, as a general thing, I dislike Euroshmups because they're poorly designed and have ghastly aesthetics... which, incidentally, is exactly the problem with Jamestown. The levels seem to just throw bullets at you completely at random, without regard to how dodgeable the patterns actually are. On higher difficulty levels, it's just frustrating -- even rote memorization doesn't get you all that far. The problem this all leads to is that when you do survive a nasty stretch of a level, it feels more like luck than the result of skillful play.
And aesthetically, the thing is just a disaster. The visuals are pretty garish, looking like the unwanted offspring of Tyrian and Dodonpachi... but much uglier than both. It reminds me a lot of those games that you could play on Cartoon Network's website -- you'd see the commercials and think to yourself, "this would probably be great if I had no money and was a stupid child." I can't comment on the music because I don't remember any of it, but it probably sucked, too. And the whole progression of the game was stupid. The shop system was a good idea, but including a terrible story that you can't skip through fast enough and locking later levels until you play through on a higher difficulty were bad design choices.
And the whole "we're colonizing Mars and it's kind of like the 1800s" theme is just unpleasant. Frankly, the 1800s just aren't a good setting for a game... hell, it's not even an interesting time period to
think about. The only good use of this time period would be a Guwange clone where you play as a runaway slave and try to make it to the North. Stage 3 is the underground railroad, which is a lot like the train level from Ibara. Your summon is Jesse Jackson, who threatens the racist Southerners with discrimination suits and whose bomb attack is called "The Rainbow Push." There: I've just improved on Jamestown's concept in every way.
But yeah, the biggest problem I have with the game is probably that it's tricked people into thinking that that's what the genre is. It's a disposable game capable of providing about 30 minutes of fun at best, and that doesn't provide any incentive to get good at the game... which is kind of missing the point of a shmup.
Any really cool levels in particular in this game?
Stage 4's pretty awesome, just because of how it starts out underwater with you taking out torpedoes and such, and then you eventually surface. Music's really fitting for that stage, too.
