harrihaffi wrote:Robotron is a twinstick shoter, if I'm not mistaken(Haven't played it only seen gameplay) It belongs to a pretty well known genre! Why should it be called a shmup allso? And Metal slug is a shoter/platformer! Bangai-O seems to be even worse! It seems to be a twin stick shoter with more freedom! (I haven't played this game so if I'm wrong please do correct me) Freedom to move at your own pace! While in a shmup you don't have this choise! shmups may not allways have scrolling backgrounds, but the enemies are scrolling...(they turn up at a point they are programed to vs you going to the area where thay appear or are placed)
I think nobody is saying a shmup needs bombs to be called a shmup, but if somebody did they would be right like 1/4 times. (at least) So one could allmost say that bombs(that make you invinsible for a short time not all bombs) are one of the elements that make a shmup a shmup!
Robotron is a twinstick shooter, I said that in my first post. But twinstick shooters are a subgenre of shmups. Just as old school verts, manics, bullet hell, horis, tube shooters etc... are all sub genres of shmups. Metal slug isn't a platformer, it's a shmup. The gameplay is 99% dodge and shoot. There are very few platforming elements, though it does have them. It is more similar to R-Type than it is to Mario World. It may look more like Mario at first glance, but the core gameplay is 100% shmup.
Again, I ask... why is a twinstick shooter or run-and-gun game not a shmup? What about their gameplay makes them not a shmup? I will say again that, at the core, a shmup is a game with visable, slow-moving bullets which you dodge using your on-screen avatar while shooting enemies. It's simple, and at the heart of every shmup. Why call some of them shmups while others get their own specific genre which only has like 5 games in it?
You make an interesting point about Bangai-O having freedom, but a shmup doesn't have to be linear. A shmup isn't a shmup because you have no freedom, that just happens to be the case most of the time. Bangai-O is pure 100% shmup gameplay. Having a small degree of free-roaming doesn't change that, nor make it another genre. A few shmups do have multiple paths (Blast Wind, Panzer Dragoon 2). Bangai-O represents evolution in the genre, not another genre entirely. If 300 games came out in the wake of Bangai-O that had similar gameplay, then it would become a new genre and need a different name (roaming shmup?... hell, those games would STILL be a subgenre of shmups). In reality, Bangai-O is just a unique shmup.
Edit: The overhead levels in Thunder Force II have as much free-roaming as Bangai-O, and Thunder Force is a classic shmup even with the overhead levels.
The best reason for calling twinstick and run-and-gun games shmups is because shmups have evolved so much over time that only the most inclusive definition makes sense. If Space Invaders is a shmup, and the most modern shmup (with new elements previously unseen in shmups) is still a shmup, then you need to include everything in between. Look at how different R-Type and Ketsui are! I'm pretty sure Robotron can fit in there and not stick out like a sore thumb in a genre so varied. It is a wide, HUGE genre, and that is why we have terms for sub-genres and even have terms for games based on their age/era.
If shmup just means "a vert or hori" then it is a really useless term. Why not just say vert or hori? If you remove many subgenres from the term "shmup", then I can't say I like shmups, I have to say "I like shmups as well as twinstick shooters, rail shooters, tube shooters, run-and-gun games, walk-em-ups with 360 degrees of aiming, etc..." Including all shoot-em-ups under the banner "shmup" makes it less confusing, but only if they share the same core (which my examples do). Picking certain subgenres and removing them from the shmup family at random just makes the term less useful and more confusing.
Many of these subgenres (especially twinstick shooters, rail shooters, run-and-gun) are so small and uncommon that as stand-alone genres they don't make much sense. Adding them to the term "shmup" doesn't glut or convolute the term at all, especially since the games share the same core gameplay, which no other genre has.
Shmup is a wide term, a big family that doesn't care whether a game scrolls or not, has a jump button, has bombs, 360 degree aiming and/or rotation, a dude avatar or a space ship. It is the individual subgenres that get more specific based on what elements are used or not used. Genre=less specific, based on a common core value (metal is metal whether it is Black Sabbath, Slayer, Children of Bodom, or Deicide). Subgenre= more specific, based on inclusion or exclusion of certain elements (classic metal, trash metal, black metal, death metal etc...)
Saying Robotron and Metal Slug aren't shmups is like saying Children of Bodom is techno because it has keyboards and doesn't sound exactly like Slayer.
As time goes on, shmups will keep evolving, so we'd better be prepared for the term to get even wider and wider, and with more and more subgenres. That is *less* confusing than the alternative, which would be to create a new parent genre for every game that brings something new to the shmupping table and saying they can't be shmups.
