Is it normal to find a generally hard difficulty easy?

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Holy crap, and I thought Ikaruga was crazy!

I'll stick to less intense shmups like Tyrian 2000 and Raiden II.

No, THIS is crazy:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uON3zty3-Q[/youtube]


I dont even wanna think about how long it took to get to the point of being able to do that. It's harder than it looks. Though I did crash into something damn stupid at the end there.

Worse though is just how crazy that mode in that game really gets. I can do THAT in the first stage there. But stage TWO, just the very next one, I've yet to beat that one. Or really get close to beating it. And it just gets worse from there. It's all technically entirely dodgeable, too. The final boss is a total nightmare. Probably less than 20 people have ever beaten it. Cant use continues or anything like that, nope... the real endboss wont even show if you do that. Which is pretty typical for the genre, alot of them do that nowadays.

Of course, that's only that one mode. The other modes are... well, they're still shmups made by Cave, so they're still plenty difficult, but they're nowhere near THAT.

Though, one thing about bullet-hell shmups is that they tend to ALWAYS look very difficult, even when they arent. Giga Wing is a good example, that's the one I started with years ago. It tends to LOOK like there's just all sorts of crap flying around and that you cant possibly survive, particularly in the later stages, but it's actually one of the easiest in the genre and is a great starting point. Deathsmiles is another one that's like that.

I'm usually too arrogant to set the difficulty to anything but the maximum available. It doesn't always serve me well, but I have to admit it contributes a great deal to the longevity of single player games.

These shmup videos give me flashbacks of "Legendary Wings" on the NES. I was never able to take that campaign to the end, even at my most hard-core.