The term 'euroshmup'

[TransatlanticFoe]

Iridion II it seems the lifebar is just a way to make the game easier and thus more accessible. The hardest difficulty almost does away with it and it's a shame it doesn't get rid entirely (you can take a hit before you lose a life, but health refills are plentiful so it's still very easy). Even on this setting it's possible to clear it without taking a hit - so none of the usual trappings of lifebar to cover awful design.

[xxx1993]

What about the Nano series, as well as Sky Force, and Soldner-X?

[Sumez]

I think it's very easy to conclude that a life bar itself isn't bad design. Though I'm personally a big fan of 1 hit KOs, tons of great games, mostly in other action'y genres have life bars and do it well - Mega Man is a good example of course.
It's really just a way to give the player a bit of leeway for failure, and make each mistake less punishing, while leaving in the ability to reward good players with a bonus for remaining health. It's pretty much the same as screen clearing bombs. In fact, it's exactly the same as Cave's later auto-bombs.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Yes, a lifebar can be done right without being an awful harbinger of a bad game. The Iridion games are quite easy, but that's the market they were aimed for, and they're very enjoyable with harder modes aimed more towards arcade shmupper tastes.

I'm really enjoying Monolith which, if you play your cards right, can allow you a fairly massive lifebar in the endgame. However, it's due in part to the health items contributing to max health bonuses if collected when you're full, so good players are rewarded for not being hurt with extra money and HP. Health items can actually be difficult to obtain so you won't be able to keep your health up if you take hits every couple of rooms. There's also an end of game rank based on how many hits you took, so there's yet more motivation not to simply tank attacks. And there's a couple modes you can toggle that drastically reduce your max hp if that's still too easy for you.

[d0s]

euroshmups back in the day were made to be quick cash-ins to approximate the feeling of playing an arcade game on truly lousy home computer hardware, to part glue huffing british teens from some of their money. These games didn't have good gameplay because the people making them didn't care and pretty much thought "well this arcade game feels hard so we will make our game hard" without understanding the method behind the madness of japanese arcade shooting games. some people got stockholm-syndromed into liking that crap so the genre continues, in order to part the kind of people who post on amiga forums from some of their money

[Turrican]

truly lousy home computer hardware

Preposterous, the whole industry in Japan too was faced with the hard task to downgrade popular game concepts born on powerful cabinets into mass produced inferior home hardware. So the hardware itself was not lousy by any means. If Konami can get Gradius to work on Gameboy and MSX, and Namco can get Galaxian and Xevious on the Famicom, there's no reason why BBC Micro, Spectrum, C64 or Amiga cannot produce good rendition of arcade-like qualities, and in fact they did in their best representatives (Dropzone, Uridium, Datastorm...).

So it's a lot more non-cabinet experience from the developer, an certainly not much an hardware bottleneck.

[d0s]

truly lousy home computer hardware

Preposterous, the whole industry in Japan too was faced with the hard task to downgrade popular game concepts born on powerful cabinets into mass produced inferior home hardware. So the hardware itself was not lousy by any means. If Konami can get Gradius to work on Gameboy and MSX, and Namco can get Galaxian and Xevious on the Famicom, there's no reason why BBC Micro, Spectrum, C64 or Amiga cannot produce good rendition of arcade-like qualities, and in fact they did in their best representatives (Dropzone, Uridium, Datastorm...).

So it's a lot more non-cabinet experience from the developer, an certainly not much an hardware bottleneck.

apart from the c64 most of the western hardware you listed was really really bad for fast action games, the amiga included.

e: compare amiga or ST with x68000 or MD, spectrum with master system or MSX, c64 or BBC with NES, etc (note that these comparisons share CPUs). the japanese consoles/computers were designed with custom hardware to be specifically good at reproducing arcade style action games. apart from the C64, action games on most of those western computers were painfully slow and choppy without serious coding skill, because there was no hardware to support it. this is probably one of the contributing factors to the euroshmup gameplay, these games mostly ran at godawful framerates so they needed something else to make them "interesting".

even when there was a decent system like the c64 you ended up with mostly bad developers who really didn't give a shit so most of those games were bad too

[Turrican]

You realize of course that Amiga launch is 1985 (hardware began to be conceived as early ad 1982), Megadrive is end 1988; so there's a wider gap than Megadrive - Snes, and Sega of course was pursuing the arcade approach since the beginning.

Same for the other comparisons you make, they don't take into account chronology of release, so it's pretty pointless.

But yeah, I concur that Euro developers had to make the best of what they were given.

[qmish]

Didnt Amiga have more powerful revisions later? (Well, it was graphics and sound powerhouse for a reason)

[Turrican]

Didnt Amiga have more powerful revisions later? (Well, it was graphics and sound powerhouse for a reason)

Not really, nothing truly significant until AGA chipset in October 1992, which means that the main bulk of what made the amiga software library was theoretically possible in OCS/ECS 1985 hardware. The single most important hardware upgrade was the 1meg memory expansion, which was basically a requirement to play most games.

[LordHypnos]

Not an expert, but isn't MSX actually way worse than most of those? original system doesn't support scrolling and MSX2 still only supports vertical scrolling. That's why Pleasure Hearts has the super jank looking screen recentering trick to allow for horizontal scrolling. Probably has sprite support at least, I suppose. It's really weak though, especially the original.

MSX has a pretty sick sound chip, though

[M.Knight]

MSX has a pretty sick sound chip, though

Damn, that's really cool! "Inspiration on Demand" in particular is fun to listen to. I can't believe it comes out of an MSX.

[Marc]

Just thinking the same thing - the Spectrum version of R-Type and the C64 version of Salamander, while still a long way from their arcade counterparts, were still way better than anything I've seen on MSX. There was a little known Uridium-clone on the Speccy called Zanthrax, which also proved that the Spectrum could do high-speed scrolling when needed. If fact, the Uridium port wasn't bad at all if I remember right.

[qmish]

some people got stockholm-syndromed into liking that crap so the genre continues

Still not sure if you are right or wrong.

As said before, it's "arcade approach VS. home console/computer approach" in game design when we speak those "many many long levels, story, many weapons, upgrades, healthbar, saves" so implying "this is shit" may come of "racistic" to non-arcade sphear.

That being said, i also wonder, is there an influence on developers that... How to say... I never seen translations of japanese books and articles on game design (if they exist, of course). Would really like to read stuff like that on arcades and shmups, buf if it exists, never gets translated.

Go figure what you have in typical western books on gamedev, on the other hand..

[d0s]

You realize of course that Amiga launch is 1985

be honest, nobody was seriously gaming on amigas until the late 80's when the A500 became a budget alternative to real computers in the UK and elsewhere in europe and were sold in supermarkets etc, thats around the time most of the even halfway decent games started coming out. before that amiga was an expensive toy for rich art people in the US, and the games were mostly american ports of Apple II and C64 games with nicer graphics. these were not very fun or action-packed games.

Not really, nothing truly significant until AGA chipset in October 1992,

and that was a complete joke

Not an expert, but isn't MSX actually way worse than most of those? original system doesn't support scrolling and MSX2 still only supports vertical scrolling. That's why Pleasure Hearts has the super jank looking screen recentering trick to allow for horizontal scrolling. Probably has sprite support at least, I suppose. It's really weak though, especially the original.

scrolling isn't everything and the sprites and better colors make the MSX a much more pleasant experience than the spectrum

edit: also the famicom came out in 1983 and is a better action game system than any of these machines, the amiga included (unless you think lots of colors save the fact that most amiga action games run at like 10fps and control like crap)

Damn, that's really cool! "Inspiration on Demand" in particular is fun to listen to. I can't believe it comes out of an MSX.

it's not, it's coming out of an aftermarket FM sound card for the MSX that like nobody had. the actual MSX sound hardware actually kinda blows

[Marc]

Generalising a bit there man. While I didn't think much of the Amiga's shooters, Apidya aside, it had some damn fine action games. Nit up to the quality of the best SNES or MD stuff certainly, but as mentioned the hardware was much older.

[Sumez]

The issue with the Amiga was that it doesn't have the same tile/character based backgrounds as those consoles, working more like a PC with pixel-by-pixel updates to the graphics, which ends up taking a ton of CPU.

I'm not personally familiar with the hardware, but that's definitely a challenge when you want to make fast arcade-like action games. However, it's not like the Amiga didn't have a ton of games with super smooth scrolling. Here are some examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfBFxvelfVM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vA2PPEXbA8

[M.Knight]

it's not, it's coming out of an aftermarket FM sound card for the MSX that like nobody had. the actual MSX sound hardware actually kinda blows

Ohhhh so that's why it sounded so damn good for an MSX!

[Turrican]

You realize of course that Amiga launch is 1985

be honest, nobody was seriously gaming on amigas until the late 80's when the A500 became a budget alternative to real computers in the UK and elsewhere in europe and were sold in supermarkets etc, thats around the time most of the even halfway decent games started coming out. before that amiga was an expensive toy for rich art people in the US, and the games were mostly american ports of Apple II and C64 games with nicer graphics. these were not very fun or action-packed games.

This has little to do with the system's architecture, though. If anything, it makes more impressive the fact that european developers were able, from 1988 and on, to squeeze something meaningful on gameplay terms, using a budget revision of a 1985 machine that the US market was already discarding as a lost battle. Let's not enter the rich people argument, since you brought in the X68k, with its 400 library of hyperpriced software (roughly 1/10 of the ECS software).

Not really, nothing truly significant until AGA chipset in October 1992,

and that was a complete joke

No disagreement here.

[Turrican]

The issue with the Amiga was that it doesn't have the same tile/character based backgrounds as those consoles, working more like a PC with pixel-by-pixel updates to the graphics, which ends up taking a ton of CPU.

If you're interested, I can't recommend enough Jimmy Maher's book "The Future was here" probably the best book to grasp what Amiga was (and also what wasn't). It should be of double interest around here, since one of the software used extensively to explain the hardware's features is Dave Jones' Menace.

[Metalsludge]

I generally agree with those questioning the design of the Amiga era euroshmups, and I'm a huge Amiga games fan! Unfortunately, some games of the era replaced length with difficulty and/or didn't take into account speed and fluidity of gameplay very well such that they feel like they were just going through the motions when it came to how the games actually played.

But I think it was possible to do good shmups on the hardware, they just didn't bother. Take The Killing Gameshow for instance. It was speedy, had precise control, and was just generally a playable platform/puzzle/shmup hybrid game, hence how it translated to the megadrive so well. Yes, it was yet another hard game, but it didn't feel unfairly so, or hard due to cheap simplicity or iffy hit detection.

But sadly, it's one of only a few examples that were truly slick in terms of fluid playability that I can think of from that era. A lot of other games had pretty graphics, but didn't actually play all that well, or had some slow moments while the game chugged along. The Amiga translation of R-Type 2 likewise looked surprisingly close to the arcade game in its details, but was far from fluid on many non-accelerated machines.

I think the game makers of the time could have done a little better for shmups, and perhaps action games in general on the hardware of the time. Like many, I have a sentimental affection for some of their games, but I can't pretend the end products of their efforts were all they could have been, even if there were some real gems mixed in with the common herd.

[Turrican]

Here's an useful schematics regardings specs:

http://amiga.lychesis.net/knowledge/Comparison.html