I will not die until I achieve something...

[STG4WD]

Do you see that? Do you? It's like THREE levels of gamers.

0. Easily accessible, hand holding, all those Mass Effect/Assasin's Creed gamers
1. Gamers of 90s and early 2000s, who played Blood on hard and look at modern gaming with anger YET they see no reason in j-style shmups/1cc thing
2. This very forum, this very thread, OP and others.

#L24LYFE

[ZacharyB]

This topic reminds me, in a way, of the economics of Internet piracy. Are pirate-downloads lost sales? Are modern video-game players polishing their skills?

I believe that playing a video game is just something that suddenly became cool, and that people realized they could use to build friendships and other social connections and statuses. The amount of people playing as a means of sport or self-actualization is small... I'd take a guess and say it's only slightly larger than it was before the Internet plunged video games into the international consciousness.

Social status trumps all, but the social status of mastering a video game is not very large... because video games are such specific skills. The true social status of mastering a game only becomes apparent to other people who have played that game, and even then, they must recognize and accept the skill. (This is part of what makes shmups special: the skill from one shmup usually carries over to the next.)

In order to illuminate the goal of these games, playing for score and completing the game with as few deaths as possible, it needs to be seen as cool. It needs to be shown as a worthwhile pursuit. I don't think the structure to support this status is very strong or visible right now.

[qmish]

The question I'm asking is, what can be done IN-GAME to incentivise players to push further and try to clear them?

Would that be enough? I mean, things must be changed outside games too if you want shmups be respected as they should among wider audience. Children are being upbringed, and they should have been taught and educated in "80s games ruleset" position too.

Look at this forum. How many of users are older than 30 and how many are younger than 20? Those who been raised in 80s and early 90s were born with that blood. Contra and GnG flows through your veins. While modern childreen step in world of videogames and see what? Cutscenes, openworld, saves etc. It's different era, man. And that's hometown for them like R-Type (for example) is hometown for you.

You can say that they will grow up, find out about "retro games", credits, etc. But i dunno. Just compare game circles of past and present.

The true social status of mastering a game only becomes apparent to other people who have played that game, and even then, they must recognize and accept the skill. (This is part of what makes shmups special: the skill from one shmup usually carries over to the next.)

Sadly they ll be looked upon. "Look at these no lifers!"

[Kollision]

In order to illuminate the goal of these games, playing for score and completing the game with as few deaths as possible, it needs to be seen as cool. It needs to be shown as a worthwhile pursuit. I don't think the structure to support this status is very strong or visible right now.

Interesting.

If someone like AVGN made a 10 minute video about the rewards of the 1CC, would it change anything at least within his fanbase?

[MathU]

One thing you should keep in mind about Metal Slug 3 is that not every Metal Slug fan is going to care about some half-assed DRM-crippled DotEmu port. Or even Steam cheevos in general really. Metal Slug 3 on Steam is far from many people's first introduction to series, and those previous enthusiasts are where you're going to find the greatest amount of people who have single-credit cleared it. This might skew those results a little bit outside of the knee-jerk sale purchases that other people have mentioned here.


Also Metal Slug 3 does have a fair bit of randomness, but only on the Mission 4 boss is where it can really make or break a playthrough. By all means it requires a ton of practice and patience, but you can play it pretty consistently outside of that part once you've figured out strategies for everything.

[Illyrian]

Pretty sure almost no-one has 1cc'd MS3 because it is a bullshit unfair money stealer of a game.

Once you accept that you can have a lot of fun with it.

Mike Uyama from GDQ actually 1cc'd it and got his bliss speedrun.

Well holy shit 1 person on stream did it! That completely and utterly proves me wrong and I now completely believe that anyone can do it! While we are at it let's post that video of Seahawk beating Gradius III on very hard and say that means that anyone could do that ad well!!!!!!!11!!

[ProjectAKo]

1CC is just mastering the survival aspect of a game. I see it as almost the same as speedrunning. People master/speedrun all sorts of weird games, like 8 hour RPGs. That's because they're passionate about that individual game, not that there's a reward for it.

So you're asking how to make people get passionate about shmups. Well, first you'd need to target the actual hardcore players, which right now is speedrunners. You could also say the fighting game community, but I see those as more social games. They're multiplayer for one. They're about conquering another person. I just can't see one of these FGC guys sitting down to quietly study a shmup for months and reset a thousand runs. Shmups and speedrunning go hand in hand for me because they're that really low down, nitty gritty, obsessive nerdy shit, which just doesn't match the bravado of the FGC. Speedrunning is endless grinding, obsession, studying, resetting a thousand times, and mastering yourself, just like shmups.

Some very very good runners I know have expressed mild interest in shmups. Some of them have dumped several years into running their game and are very competitive. If they dumped that much time into a mid-tier shmup they could take some world record for sure. But there's a lot of misconceptions floating around. Most of them even in speedrun circles just don't understand shmups. Most people think they're

1. Nothing but completely random bullets everywhere
2. Random enemy waves constantly flying in with no logic or way to control anything
3. All about reflexes and twitch dodging
4. Because of 1 2 & 3, completely impossible

Shmup fans reinforce these notions because of how they worship untouchable foreign master players and superplay videos. Just go and watch God Hand's second loop of Gunbird 2, and pretend you're one of these people who thinks bullets are all random and it's all about reflex dodging. What you'll think is "I could never do that. He has godlike reflexes. Better stick to RPGs".

And that's what most think about shmups right now. First of all, they lack any passion for them because they didn't grow up with one they really liked, and second, they think they're impossible unless you have freaky genes, so it's not worth trying to get better at them. Stuff like Special Demonstration and commented runs are a great step in helping people understand they're not impossible, but there's not really any way to make people get passionate.

[Nick420]

Yeah, there is a good few shmups that do this, and every time I see it I think..more shmup developers should do stuff like this.

I say that because as a child I absolutely loved scrolling shooters. I played a decent amount of them(very rare to find one, I lived in a small town in Northern Ireland) but I had no concept of 1cc. I used to think to myself, imagine beating this game on 1 life and fantasise about being able to do so lol. It wasn't until I met someone who actually knew quite a bit about shmups that I was introduced on how it all actually works.

Immediately hooked for life...

Yeah we need to see more encouragement to 1cc, or more explanation on the real goals of the game and how to play it properly from future shmup releases. Shmups are niche but I bet if people understood them, then a lot more people would be into them.

[pegboy]

Why not just give the player a bad ending if they don't beat the game with a 1cc? The game could even explain it with a little text saying you haven't really beaten the game yet unless you do it 1cc. Ghost N Goblins kind of did this by telling the player they need to beat the second loop for the true ending (even though it doesn't enforce 1cc for that condition). I'm surprised I've never seen this before in a shmup (maybe it exists, not sure).

If I was designing a game I would have a short cutscene at the end where the final boss regenerates/respawns and kills the player if the run wasn't a 1cc. This would be followed by "your efforts to stop the enemy have failed" and explain that the player cannot use a continue to get the true ending.

[Blackbird]

My two cents: I don't think it's really productive to try to force people to go for a 1CC (or to force players to player a game a particular way in general). For my part, I think 1CC is the most fun way to play, so I encourage other players to try it out, but ultimately it is up to the player to decide what the most fun way to play the game is for them.

[ZacharyB]

Why not just give the player a bad ending if they don't beat the game with a 1cc? ... I'm surprised I've never seen this before in a shmup (maybe it exists, not sure).

There was an old doujin game called Extend which always gave me a bad ending. I could never figure out what I was doing wrong, because all of the text was garbled when displayed on my computer. But I think it was performance based, because I don't remember managing a 1cc on the hardest difficulty level, which was called "Extend". Additionally, each level had a Score Gate that the player had to meet, but I don't know what that affected. I can't remember if I managed to reach every Score Gate, either. But it was fun trying.

[Shepardus]

Why not just give the player a bad ending if they don't beat the game with a 1cc? The game could even explain it with a little text saying you haven't really beaten the game yet unless you do it 1cc. Ghost N Goblins kind of did this by telling the player they need to beat the second loop for the true ending (even though it doesn't enforce 1cc for that condition). I'm surprised I've never seen this before in a shmup (maybe it exists, not sure).

All the Touhou games do that (though none of the endings are all that terrible in Touhou). You also need to 1cc to unlock the Extra Stage.

<snip>

Wholeheartedly agree with this. I'd also like to mention that there's also the exact opposite attitude about shmups, that they're just rote memorization and recital of safespots and the like. This understandably sounds unfun to most people, but it's untrue and understates the challenge and fun of execution as well as the importance of learning general techniques and pattern recognition rather than individual games and sections. Shmups are interesting because they're a combination of both good planning and on-the-fly execution, not one or the other. The same goes for many speedruns.

I think livestreams of shmups are great for showing people that even great players mess up a lot and that their best superplay isn't representative of how they play all the time, but obviously people who aren't interested in shmups to begin with aren't going to be looking for this.

[CWM]

I had a discussion on another forum which is dedicated to old games (mainly MS-DOS/Windows, though console players are there too) and it was like:

Average players (outisde of arcade culture):

- prefer health bar instead of life count
- hate being pushed back to checkpoint or level start when you die
- hate starting game from beginning when loos all lives
- would love to have something that will make game more diverse for multiple walkthrough (different routes like OutRun/Darius, or even randomised patterns/levels every time) because it's boring and shitty for them playing the same game over and over trying to learn patterns over and over (and NOPE, they dont give a thing about your complex scoring)
- disagree that game over is game over unless it's permadeath roguelike (double standards?)
- would like to save at every level/start playing from any level
- they honestly think that you, guys, who spend 10,20,50,100+ hours in shmup and than can sit and virtuosly 1CC game are insane/out of mind/have too much time to kill
- wanna have long single player campaign with different levels and everything (and big NOPE to loops, of course)
- demand weapon system like in fps/tps
- constantly whine about lack of A.I. of enemies in shmups
- says that game should have both "mode for normal people" and "for those crazy 1cc guys"

Maybe something more was said that i didn't notice. So, i guess portrait is clear. It's that exactly mindset of gaming that started associating with games since PS1 era.

P.S.
And before you think that those guys i'm speaking about are "miserable casuals". Sit down and think. Those users from that forum are fans of good old Doom (and Brutal Doom. Even on Black Metal difficulty), strategic games like X-Com. They love Fallout and System Shock 2. They love metroidvanias. And they're upset with current game industry thinking that all those Call of Duty MW6 and Uncharted are very primitive games for casuals.

Do you see that? Do you? It's like THREE levels of gamers.

0. Easily accessible, hand holding, all those Mass Effect/Assasin's Creed gamers
1. Gamers of 90s and early 2000s, who played Blood on hard and look at modern gaming with anger YET they see no reason in j-style shmups/1cc thing
2. This very forum, this very thread, OP and others.

Which forum is that, exactly, if you don't mind me asking? I'm curious because this doesn't match my experience. I post on the RPGCodex, which is one of the most uncompromising bastions of 90s PC game design worship, and the sentiment towards arcade game I observe there is rather positive (if sparse). Logically, it makes some sense to me as well - if you can beat Wizardry 4, ToME or even something like Terror from the Deep ironman, then you have no business complaining about arcade games being bullshit and unfair and crazy.

[qmish]

Which forum is that, exactly, if you don't mind me asking?

I guess you must use GoogleTranslate here
http://www.old-games.ru/forum/threads/z ... 61/page-20

[Despatche]

"most people" will not like that because they are told not to like it. mmos and even single player rpgs are much much bigger timesinks than any shmup, yet they aren't nearly as "hardcore".

the idea that you need to sit there for hours on end grinding shmups is a complete myth. spending maybe an hour or two a day, if you even want to play every day, will get you much better results and with a lower chance of burnout. what matters more than anything else is paying attention and being able to learn.

the 1cc is the most basic way to actually play the game. continues are not a playstyle, they're a cheat. comparing the 1cc to speedruns is a dead end, and even comparing scorerunning to speedrunning is extremely difficult because how speedrunning works is fundamentally different (play games in a generally unintended way). finally, the 1cc only implies a basic mastery of survival that may be further improved by 1-life clears and whatnot.

people will scream elitism, and i will say that is a most ancient meme based around fear of those who possess knowledge. back then, it actually meant something because everyone tried to keep secrets about day-to-day life. it doesn't really mean as much with video games, especially since a very small minority are the ones keeping any secrets.

people think the way they do because they are told to. you have to find a way to tell them otherwise. maybe you have to rethink how you approach this genre (and arcade games as a whole) in the process.

[gray117]

Bollocks - let people enjoy it how they want and where they can. Sure by al means reward and recognise an elite. But while you can let people know they're not elite there's no need to force them down that path. I have little spare time and I like variety. I love to be able to enjoy a game within an hour, 2 at the most more often if 2 hours they'll be another game I'll play for a bit. It's not attention deficit disorder it's what arcade games are generally there for: Instant appeal, and a thrilling couple of credits.

I love tough, but fair - getting a decent run feels great without the risk of it becoming frustrating/cheap
- I think doj is great for this very reason. The added fact that there's depth and nuance to the scoring and play mechanics is also amazing - giving it as substantial feel and score attack vibe that might otherwise be something of a gimic, or shallow affair.

The fact that I personally will never really take full advantage of thiis, but that I can surface it and experience a taste of it with every play? ... I'm perfectly happy with that - the incentives are all there in a fantastic game and I see at least hints to them during regular play.

Curtain off any more content than a tlb or extra ending screen however and I'd feel yoou were being a dick. If you could perhaps record personal best style achievements as well as the traditional leader boards that would be nice but its just an extra little something.

Could a cute em up ever hang with angry birds? Sure but that's not mecha/doj or any of the lolitastic cave/doujin skins that we've seen in the past decade which have struggled to appease their niche contingents let alone entice a mass market.

So guess what I'm just pretty stoked awesome games like metal slug get bought/played at all. Is it a shame that only 1% 1cc it? Hell no - it's just nice that someone can. If anything it's nice to know that it's a kind of hard (also a bit cheap) kind of game and if anything most people are supposed to kind of want to credit feed, at least a couple of times.

[Despatche]

the problem is that people don't really enjoy the works they consume. sometimes you can even get them to tell you this. they just kinda mindlessly consume everything, and don't really care about all the experiences they're getting hit with. this is why we have the whole thing about people not appreciating classical <x> (music is a good example), and most (or perhaps the most vocal) of the few that do are hipsters who somehow manage to anti-care hard enough to make it seem like people care.

not liking something is all well and good, but most people aren't even capable of liking or not liking things to begin with. it's a huge dilemma, and while the internet has fixed it here and there (mostly due to reaching out to the very few that can), we still have a long way to go.

for the record, i dislike the tlb concept as it's another example of rewarding you multiple times for the same action. that's my biggest pet peeve about any and all scoring systems.

[Sakurei]

You heard it here first, ladies and gentlemen. I spent 400-500 hours on my favorite game and I hated every second of it. But because I'm stupid, a masochist or both, I continued to play anyway. And who would have guessed, I'm still playing the very same thing. Man I must be stupid. I also don't like my favorite anime which I have re-watched 6 times or so. I'm incapable of liking the things I spend many hours doing because I don't know how to enjoy my life.

Look, I have neither the time nor the crayons necessary to explain why your argument is dumber than snake mittens, but what you're talking about is a load of bollocks. People play games because they enjoy playing them, and they listen to music because they enjoy listening to it. They don't do it because they're told to by some invisible overlord whispering into their ears when they sleep. There have been cases where people kept playing after feeling burned out, yes, but ultimately that doesn't mean they hate the game or what they're doing. It just means they need a break.

This is ridiculous.

[Despatche]

no, people really do like a lot of what they like because they're told to. it's not some mysterious overlord, it's just random individuals creating trend after trend after trend. what you're telling me is that trends affect everything about a person except their personal taste. that's the real bollocks, because seeing how personal taste changes over the years is the most obvious sign of a trend in action.

it's such a horribly basic part of human nature that all of humanity might as well be taking it for granted. it may not necessarily apply to you with the examples you're thinking of, but then again it may. big trends might be horribly obvious, but as such a fundamental part of your brain, it could affect you in a series of tiny ways. you may say that you like something, but how do you know for sure?

my biggest fear is that people are going to turn this into a nature vs nurture topic and demand a split. please don't; it is a very basic thing that applies to shmups as much as anything else, and needs to be examined in that context. if you guys really want people to play these games, this is the problem you must solve.

...thing is, in recent years, quite a few people have said they don't really want others to play these games anymore...

[eebrozgi]

Am I a rare exception for heavily disliking being told what to enjoy, and consuming my games/media in very occasional bites when I might feel like it?

I think I understand trends, yeah. But I also get the feeling that you should have a bit more faith in people overall.

[Skykid]

I think you absolutely should encourage people to play shmups for a 1CC - by doing so you're helping them to get the most out of their experience with a game, regardless of whether they achieve the clear or not.

Scoring is fundamentally the same in terms of rewarding feedback, so you should encourage that too.

[qmish]

the idea that you need to sit there for hours on end grinding shmups is a complete myth. spending maybe an hour or two a day, if you even want to play every day, will get you much better results and with a lower chance of burnout. what matters more than anything else is paying attention and being able to learn.

It's not about "grinding", i think. Compare difference of "advancing" between "arcade style game" and "home single player game":

- playing shmup every day, you play "the same thing". Level 1, Boss, Level 2, Boss etc. (until you run out of lives etc). What is really changing, it's your skill, your experience, your scoring, your understanding of tricks etc.

- playing typical game of most wide genres is different: yesterday you played first five levels and saved, today you started playing level 11 and ended on level 18, tomorrow you'll get ending of game. In case with RPGs, it could be measured in quests/sidequest as progression. So, every new time it's videogame that's different, while your own skill progression has much less role.

comparing the 1cc to speedruns is a dead end

I think the point was not in "1cc ~ speedrun", no! I think it was compared only in the following way: players, who like speedrunning, could become pretty potentional auditory of shmups.

it is a very basic thing that applies to shmups as much as anything else

Anyway, what do you want more? Make shmups a trend so more people begin play it OR make people sincere love things?

p.s.

And i must remind you. "Videogame", today. It's more "interactive media" today than "ruleset". Ask gamers, and 70% of them will say that they love videogames for plot and atmosphere in first place. Also those "cinematic experience". Also those "walking simulators" which doesnt have any real gameplay, they are canvas for "painters" to express some audiovisual image with some interactivity applied.

So i don't think there are any chances trying to popularize competitive playing of games to increase it from today's state.

[mastermx]

Pretty sure almost no-one has 1cc'd MS3 because it is a bullshit unfair money stealer of a game.

Once you accept that you can have a lot of fun with it.

Mike Uyama from GDQ actually 1cc'd it and got his bliss speedrun.

He continues at around 11mins...

[Kollision]

Pretty sure almost no-one has 1cc'd MS3 because it is a bullshit unfair money stealer of a game.

Once you accept that you can have a lot of fun with it.

Mike Uyama from GDQ actually 1cc'd it and got his bliss speedrun.

He continues at around 11mins...

[waiwainl]

Goldfish have an attention span of 9 seconds, people 8 seconds.

I am not surprised with all the information overload, people are not capable (or willing) to go for a 1CC.

In the old days I was eager to spend 100rds of hours on any game (R-Type, Xenogears, Etc) doing sessions of 3-6 hours, now I hardly can do 2 hours in a row of DP, DDP or any shmup (and shmups is roughly the only genre I play these days) and reaching total similar 100+ hours, but over a longer period of months.

But if you look realistically, also in 1980 the majority of people did not finished their games, the percentage has only become worse in 2015...

[To Far Away Times]

I guess I always knew a 1CC was the goal before I started playing these games. Ikaruga taught me most of the basics. (It blanks your score when you continue, in a game that makes it's scoring system one of the main focuses of the game. That was enough to get the point across for me.) It just seemed like something superhuman at the time, so I tried to go as far as possible in one credit for the high score and then "beat the game" in x amount of credits instead.

What you don't want to do is piss off the player because they continued. If they credit feed to the end, they are expecting an ending. The actual ending cutscene will be more important to them than someone who plays for 1CCs.

I think the vast majority of gamers could 1CC a shmup if A) they knew it was actually possible and B) they where motivated to do it.

[city41]

I am not surprised with all the information overload, people are not capable (or willing) to go for a 1CC.

When it comes to 1cc pursuit, the game itself is a huge factor. I've 1cc'd Metal Slug 1 and am working on MS2. But I'd never even consider MS3. For me, if I'm going to pursue a 1cc, the game has to be enjoyably when played over and over and for a long duration. Even better when the pursuit teaches you more cool things about the game.

But MS3? It's such a tedious game. The last level alone is utter tedium. I can't even imagine playing it over and over, it wouldn't be fun at all IMO.

[Ed Oscuro]

Shout out to truth talkers banana, NTSC_J, and Icarus...I mostly agree with Despatche, except that yeah, that just forces you to give up an effective practice method, especially in games without certain dynamic elements. Granted, I tend to play everything the exact same way - new credit, new game, every time - but if somebody did the Super Meat Boy treatment without trivializing the game through attrition and perseverance, that could be interesting. One thing that I think has been quite successful about even mobile / web games is that many of them constantly run through new events or challenges to dynamically remix the core game. Something like the multiple modes in Raiden DX and the later Cave remixes sort of prefigure this, but probably shortening the term of challenges could help. I know people here like game mechanics too much for me to seriously advocate fooling around with core game mechanics, or even worse add upgrade systems, where you're stuck in a Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness-style vicious cycle of not knowing your limits exactly.

That Crimson Clover image is interesting (I still don't have that one ) and I think actually, from a game theory perspective, you probably want to creep up the requirements like that.

Naturally the developers wanted to encourage people to keep playing, but in terms of giving encouragement and feedback, it's probably better to have some simple stats counting and write out a message like "you survived longer that time! Next challenge boss 5!" and when that's done, it's boss 6, all the way to the 1CC.

As far as practice goes...well, the problem with savestates as such is that it's easy for an undisciplined player to use them improperly and then blame the game. Checkpoints remove the player's freedom to break their game by saving just as they're about to get funneled into an unsurvivable corner or eat a boss laser they can't dodge from. If you did implement it, though, blanking the score and other stat tracking (aside from current score + survival time) seems like it would be good enough to serve the purpose. Perhaps you could still get both purposes if you offered up a hard checkpoint if the player fails at their saved state.

But going back to the original topic, I think everybody was right to point out that we really don't have good enough evidence that the current method of shmups is broken, because what matters is that it is successful at meeting the design goals, even if those don't ensure they're the most popular thing. If the issue is attracting more players, well, I'm not sure the genre as it stands is fundamentally competitive with the like of Fantasy Big Axe & Wasteland Sleep Survivor 2015 or Call of Throw The Dogs Off Me 4. Most people always played games just to relax and blow something up / kill a virtual somebody, not to actually get better at anything. I'm all for serious games (i.e., games that teach you something) and shmups, but many people don't seem to like this. So, I dunno man.

[Doctor Butler]

Really good ideas in this thread.

Start the game with an unskippable primer video.

Show the "Game Complete" and "1CC" achievements on the main menu, at all times - it will drive people to at least attempt to play correctly, in an effort to fill that empty grey box on the menu.

Infinite continues, wipe the score upon continuing, restart at the beginning of the stage with each credit.
Add a highly configurable training mode, and an in-depth explaination of the game's unique scoring-mechanics (something even vets would need) and we got ourselves a gateway game

[mastermx]

Practice mode should have a rewind button. Think of it like a more approachable form of save state.