after spending months playing gun.smoke, i decided to try one of the director's earlier games, sonson. it's a horizontal autoscrolling shooter where you have free horizontal movement, but the only way you can move vertically is by hopping up and down between six lanes.
i love real-time action games about hopping around on a grid, such as the mega man battle network series and my own game chessplosion. they make it easy to line yourself up with enemies and easy to tell whether or not you have enough space to squeeze through a gap between enemy attacks, among other things. they do, however, have some downsides.
some things that would be easy to implement in a regular 2D action game with free movement, such as a zelda-style sword that swings in the direction you're facing, become really annoying in a game where the smallest movement you can make is to hop an entire grid square. if a player is facing right and they want to quickly turn left to hit an enemy, they'll either need to hop a full grid square to the left or you'll need to completely overhaul your control scheme to decouple facing direction from movement direction, such as twin stick controls or a button you can hold to turn on the spot.
sonson's lane-based system gets around these issues by essentially being grid-based in the vertical axis and free in the horizontal axis. you can quickly tap left or right to turn around and shoot enemies on either side of you, but enemies tend to attack horizontally along the fixed lanes so it's easy to see whether or not you're going to get hit by them. it works surprisingly well! maybe i'll try making a game like that in the future.
sonson is on the easier side by arcade game standards. once you've gotten a good feel for every basic enemy type's movement pattern, there's not a whole lot that can kill you other than random silly mistakes. they could have made things harder by giving enemies projectiles that you can't shoot out of the air, by further constricting your horizontal space outside of boss fights, or by punishing you if you let enemies run off the screen instead of shooting them. but they didn't do any of those things, so it's a bit too easy to kite enemies horizontally and bait them into running into your line of fire. that said, even though i don't think it's a game i'll end up playing for dozens of hours, i still had had a great time reaching this point. i recommend it!
if you want to try the game yourself, it comes free with capcom arcade 2nd stadium on pc and modern consoles.
