Why shmups are such a niche genre

[qmish]

I thought you meant "sine mora = 9/10, raiden iv = 4/10" position

[qmish]

Or you could go to some space combat sims forum and tell people on there that their beloved genre went niche because it became too anal (to the point of utilizing every single key on a keyboard and demanding an expensive, analogue joystick and hours of learning and practice, no less, to be any fun at all) for its own good, and that space combat theme (which has been neglected in recent years indeed) needs more masses friendly fun blasters, because nobody in their right mind wants "realistic" physics and whatnot in this kind of game.
Personally I wouldn't say no to another, more polished and varied Freelancer, and I'd like another Zone of the Enders, and I could use more games like Sky Odyssey, but it doesen't mean shmups or flying sims must become these games, or move on in this direction. I don't think you'll find allies on such forums by disdaining the games these forums are dedicated to.

Damn that shmupsorrow77 debate was crazy.

But, actually, something in his words strikes from another viewpoint.
If you go again to communities, who grew up on old ms-dos/win98 games, you'll discover how 1) yes, they usually prefer euroshmup approach of "trying to make it advanced with hundreds of levels and weapons with power up system and story" 2) if not, then they stick to more classic stgs, hating bullethell/danmaku 3) for question why not shmupping, they gonna reply about how shmups stopped in evolution, be it about weapon systems or stages or "please make advanced AI for enemies" etc. All of that stuff which would sound retarded for fellow shmuppers, but honest and sincere for them. It would be totally different eyes, different school of thinking.

And if we go back to sorrow77 flight/space-sim/rail-shooting obsession...

Is it really a fact, that all attempts of "evolutionize" stgs end up being transforming them into other genres (fps, rail, etc)?

Also, the idea of varying stages has made my still in concept phase shmup even more esoteric. Here is what I have so far:

A six color system, in which your ship and pilot each have a color which can be the same and all enemies have one color. Bullets have the same color as enemies that fired them. Your bullets are a mix of your two colors, depending upon the levels of both gauges. You are not immune to same color bullets.

There are two gauges. One acts is the pilot gauge, and you get a game over if it empties. There is a maximum it cannot increase beyond. It is slowly decreasing at all times, with the exact speed dependent upon the relation between your pilot and ship colors. The other is your ship gauge. When this gauge is at 50% of your pilot gauge, it is considered neutral. As this goes down, your hitbox becomes larger and your shot is more heavily influenced by your pilot. As it becmes larger, your hitbox shrinks and your shot is more influenced by your ship. If it exceeds your current pilot health gauge, you enter requiem mode, in which your hitbox disappears, and your pilot health gauge starts dropping faster, dropping even faster as it exceeds by more. If it empties, you enter free mode, in which you cannot graze and your hitbox is at it's largest. You have only your pilot color in free mode.

Enemies will drop two kinds of item: ship items, which raise the ship gauge, and pilot items, which raise the pilot gauge. Ship items are the same color as the enemy that dropped them, pilot items are of a different color, which is constant for all enemies of one color. In requiem mode, only ship items drop. In free mode, only pilot items drop. Between these two, the balance is affected by how close you are to either mode. The amount of points each item is worth depends upon how close you are to the mode in which it will not drop, with max points being awarded when the item is least common.

When not in free mode, you can destroy your ship for a bomb effect, which causes you to enter free mode. You can also, at any time, exchange your current ship with a nearby ship, exempting certain large enemies. Doing so will set your ship gauge to the value of that ship's health gauge, and your old ship is destroyed. Switching ships will damage your pilot gauge. In free mode, you can take control of a nearby ship as well, but the amount of pilot gauge lost is increased.

Grazing will raise the item multiplier. How much the multiplier increases depends upon the amount of time the bullet is grazed, pilot, ship, and bullet colors, the two gauges, and how close the bullet gets to your hitbox. Each color has a relation with each of the other colors, which each have a multiplier. These are multiplied by the base bullet value to determine how much the item multiplier goes up. They are also used in calculating the value of destroyed enemies and collected items, though those use 1/bullet color multiplier. The normal graze multiplier are also used to determine how quickly your pilot gauge drops. Increases are calculated per frame. The balance between the color multipliers is determined by the value of both gauges. A high ship gauge means your ship's color is more important, and a low ship gauge means the pilot color is more important. As the bullet gets closer to your hitbox, the pilot color becomes more important, and the ship color becomes more important as the bullet is closer to the edge of graze range.

Grazing and getting hit reduce the gauges as well. The same color multipliers as are used for graze value are used to determine how much. Grazing is only affected by the relationship between bullet color and ship color. Getting hit is affected by the relationships between bullet, ship, and pilot colors.

Enemy appearance are dependent upon player actions.

On top of all this, there is a story that makes David Lynch films seem comprehensible.

wow

I was just thinking, a lot of people complain shmups are too short because you can credit feed through them and "beat" it in less than an hour, but as we all know with some of our favorites we've played them to death and keep coming back for more, easily logging 50, 75, or 100+ hours into them. I wonder if its too late in this day and age to get this fact of true replayability into anyones heads these days unless some achievement has explicitly told them so...

But these games, if played properly, can easily compare to the time one puts into a typical RPG or other game.

There is difference between playing one game's content 10 times or playing 10 times more content at that time. So, basically, modern gamers would ask for 30 unique levels in shmup instead of playing 6 levels 5 times.

Dariusburst CS tried things... instead of doing procedural random generation, they handcrafted hundreds of missions. But this fails in eyes of non-fans because "content" (enemies, levels, bosses) is the same, just different patterns/mixes of sets. Still, CS mode is cool in how it basically gives you chapters, where each chapter is several levels at once.

http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?t=22905

That thread reminded me of:
My friend wants a game where bullets will be rotating circles, and player should be able to fly through them.

If I play a game like Graidus V with the aiming laser vs playing Ikaruga, I'll take gradius V every time. Ikaruga for me had major problems with what I call "constrained options", that is, the game doesn't have much to do beyond move, shoot, absorb... the environment was sterile and lacking in interactivity, you couldn't say grab enemies, chuck them around, etc... now I know this was Ikaruga (arcade port) but my point is Ikaruga is the symbol of why the shmup genre died out.

Dunno if somebody told him about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boogie_Wings

why can't your plane grow arms (mecha) and toss enemies into other enemies, and have them bounce off one another? Imagine doing chains by chucking enemies into enemies by predicting the bouncing path!

Also interesting. Reminds me Every Extend Extra where your suicide lead to chain of nearby enemies one by one.

[Magma Dragoon]

There is difference between playing one game's content 10 times or playing 10 times more content at that time. So, basically, modern gamers would ask for 30 unique levels in shmup instead of playing 6 levels 5 times.

Dariusburst CS tried things... instead of doing procedural random generation, they handcrafted hundreds of missions. But this fails in eyes of non-fans because "content" (enemies, levels, bosses) is the same, just different patterns/mixes of sets. Still, CS mode is cool in how it basically gives you chapters, where each chapter is several levels at once.

Think it like this, disregarding 1CC/credit feeding: once you played through a shmup's five or so stages for about one hour and a half, you've practically seen everything the game has to offer, and most shmups give practically zero real incentive to replay it, like unlockables, new ships, different endings, etc.

[qmish]

That's why comparison to fighting games or tabletop war games come, though they are multiplayer unlike stg.

And how in stg it's player who progresses, not the game

[Doctor Butler]

I posted it before, but it suits this thread better...

So, there was a relatively big forum where i'm a frequenter and of course there was a thread about shmups. And after some discussions there i gathered data of what "usual gamers" want from shmups:

- 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 loose 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 then 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 instead of power ups
- constantly whine about lack of A.I. of enemies in shmups
- say that game should have both "mode for normal people" and "for those crazy 1cc guys"

The thing is that it wasn't a forum of you average Uncharted 5: Call of Infamous fans. No, that was damn freaking forum of old-gamers. Though, mainly PC oldgamers. They play Jagged Alliance 2, X-Com: Ufo Defense, Planescape Torment, Doom 1-2 on Ultraviolence (or sometimes at Nightmare), Blood, Warcraft II, Fallout, Carmageddon, Hexen etc. So you can't just go out and call them a bunch of "modern casuals". Yet they criticize shmups for many things and consider them having "simplistic and foolish game design" (if i m not imaginating things) and , yes, that "lack of content" problem.

I can't call them "Modern Casuals", but I can certainly call them "Old Casuals", lol

[BIL]

Sounds like a bunch of save-scumming fannies tbh.

[WelshMegalodon]

It's kind of what PC gamers have traditionally wanted, though, isn't it? Diversity and options and things, as opposed to quality "action" or mastery or whatever. It's a difference in philosophy between arcade and PC gamers that isn't brought up enough in spite of its ubiquity, or something like that.

[qmish]

Sure, some of them good enough they never save in any game or save for level at maximum. And that's one side, another is their need for "advanced" "complicated" "possibilities". Like they treat Front Mission as primitive and inferior because "you should have impact on game how physics from bullet destroys cabin and pilot with explosion of fuel tank that was on a way; instead of simple tabletop like ruleset". Or, again, like guy from that thread who was asking for development of "ubershmup" that "evolves everything into wonderful possibilities" like "its not just move and shoot but also kamikaze in enemies, grab them with hands, chain them by bouncing them back arkanoid-style, use environment as weapon"





"innovation" seems more interesting than fun?

I've been to both sides, but this radical contrast between perception of things still puzzle me. Reminded me how recently i had an argue about map/level design in FPS titles, where some people were nearly suprematists about "how levels were simplified from non-linear labyrinths to one long reskinned corridor".

[Shepardus]

Or, again, like guy from that thread who was asking for development of "ubershmup" that "evolves everything into wonderful possibilities" like "its not just move and shoot but also kamikaze in enemies, grab them with hands, chain them by bouncing them back arkanoid-style, use environment as weapon"

But that does sound like fun

[qmish]

On a 2nd thought - yeah, too bad this idea was buried into debate whether author was a troll or not

edit:

Some occasional finds.

You could go one further than those traditional composites, and have a creative SHMUP by having an organism that shoots a specially chosen projectile at biomatter to alter it into another form, or have the player character be immobile in a traditional sense, but be able to move by shooting a spore, which becomes a new incarnation of the player character.

This is where they take what appears to be `the genre formula` and basically do exactly the same thing without going outside of the box. That means, boring enemies which fly in a sequence following a preset animation path and shooting hot little bullets in the direction of the player, then flying off-screen. I mean.... almost every one of them does that the same way, with no other significant AI, and it's just really boring. That's the part of it that I find to have been done to the death, and if that's all people are bringing to the table then that does make it seem like the genre is totally used-up. But that's only because people are not innovating enough.

I really wish someone would do something original with a shootemup, but unfortunately what I mostly see are really boring movement patterns, predictable waves, end of level boss, various weapons bla bla bla... a bit kind of formulaic. And often the `spaceship` is just not as engaging as, say, a `character` in a platform game. So maybe they tend to be a bit cold and dull and harder to relate to? Plus they're really a super-solo experience most of the time and things have become a lot more social in gaming in general so they maybe represent a genre frozen in time that hasn't moved on very well. Anyone agree?

just making some alien sprites move along a pre-designated path is not engaging. It's way too much `on rails`. I think maybe that's why platform games have survived better, because they offer puzzle elements and interactions with enemies that have some kind of AI behavior, and stuff happens much more dynamically and unexpectedly which keeps it interesting.

I think it would be neat to have annual arcade-challenge development competitions for [game development] students. Thinking about what makes a good arcade game is a fun mental exercise. It's also a segment of the industry that saw a lot more stability and refinement over the years. (being one of the first large-scale applications of game design)

Gaming has become a lot more social and most shmups are still single-player reflex games. You'd be hard pressed to find many 2-play or multi-player shmups at all. I can barely think of any. So they've sort of stayed in a box of isolation, and this is partly also why almost every shmup people make still stays heavily confined in a box that copies everything that was done already

Enemies are basically brainless moving in simple patterns rarely reacting to the players presence. The same can be said of most platform games (and heck many games from other genres for that matter) but the difference is the player has more choices available. You can jump, perhaps climb, you may do a close combat attack (even if just jumping on an enemy's head) or a range attack, you can often jump and/or duck to avoid being hit and so forth. Compared to shmups platformers offer a huge amount of choices. A greater number of ways to interact with the game world.

Nearly all of them [enemies] float across the screen in fixed patterns often completely unaware of the player. One may come out, move 1/4 of the way across the screen stop and fire twice then continue on. Another may do the stop and fire pattern every 1/3 of the screen it moves. Another may move across in a straight line firing every 2 seconds. Another comes out in a wave pattern and so forth.

Send out some mindless pattern based enemies. That is fine. But then send out some intelligent enemies. Give enemies roles. Maybe you catch up to an enemy that is flying back and forth collecting power cells. It has a purpose. Then give it some guards. 4 to 5 heavily shielded enemies that fly around behind it engaging you while also trying to take everything you are throwing out. If that gatherer enemy collects 10 cells it flies off screen. It got away. At another point maybe you find a couple friendly ships that are attacking an enemy base and taking heavy damage. You need to defend them and help destroy that base. Stuff like that. Then focus on the interaction. Give the player a shield button in addition to the fire button. Give them a certain amount of energy that takes a bit of time to replenish. It is a choice. Attack or shield. Add more interaction to the game. If shield is on and you collide with an enemy you send it flying back across the screen if it collides with an enemy (or two or three) they all explode. Maybe the player can send out some kind of mines that attach to enemy ships and explode also taking out any enemies that are very close to that one.

It's from here
https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/where ... ps.239566/
game dev forum, basically. 80% of thread is "stgs are all the same complaint" + 10% "nah its arcade and deal with it" + 10% of some actual ideas formulated (i bolded what i found more interesting).

[Major Stryker]

Hi new guy here. I love that there is a forum dedicated.to shmups! Rock on!...
I can see this has been discussed in depth already, but I'll add my two cents.
I think most people are already engrossed in the new era of games and these shooters, shmups, etc are kind of a nod to the old days in the arcade. (At least for me.) I know they release new titles for these, but they never seem to gain any popularity beyond a small group of gamers...Maybe its really just to difficult for your average hold my hand through the tutorial type gamer..
I personally love to play these games co op with a buddy. My former room mate and I used to play Gun Bird 2 for months on end just trying to master that game. Its not the greatest shmup or game for that matter, but the thrill of not dying and memorizing patterns is really what makes it fun to me. These games weren't meant for everyone and I think that is a compliment to everyone who enjoys these games and are good at them. Thats all for now.

[WelshMegalodon]

I think most people are already engrossed in the new era of games and these shooters, shmups, etc are kind of a nod to the old days in the arcade.

You are aware that nonlinear open-world gaming has been around since the early 80s and that the "save anywhere, do anything" mentality has coexisted with the arcade approach for the past 40 or so years? Handholding does appear to be a more recent trend (I've often seen people point to the PlayStation era as the generation that birthed that approach), but it's not like we haven't had easy games, and there always has to be some kind of guidance so that we actually know how to play.

The North American release of Final Fantasy (a very casual game by Bard's Tale standards) came with dungeon maps, a bestiary, and a walkthrough for half the game. This was in 1990...

[qmish]

Bestiary is cool! Especially unlockable in game

[Shepardus]

Regarding this quote:

Send out some mindless pattern based enemies. That is fine. But then send out some intelligent enemies.Give enemies roles. Maybe you catch up to an enemy that is flying back and forth collecting power cells. It has a purpose.

I do think there is potential here. The option hunter in the Gradius series did this to some degree nearly 30 years ago - it poses a nonstandard obstacle (stealing the otherwise invulnerable options rather than killing the Vic Viper like everything else does) and may appear at different times depending on factors like how many options you have. The way it tracks your position and the dynamic nature of the option hunter's appearances (and the fact that you can't simply shoot it down) really makes it feel like a sort of rival/assassin after you, injecting some extra life into the game. I can't think of much like that within the genre, but there's no reason why everything has to be confined to scripted patterns as opposed to more "systemic" rules/behaviors. Non-fixed, "dynamic" behavior doesn't necessarily lead to a chaotic mess, you just need to communicate behaviors clearly so players can form a mental model of the underlying systems (this is not unique to shmups or even games).

I know they release new titles for these, but they never seem to gain any popularity beyond a small group of gamers...Maybe its really just to difficult for your average hold my hand through the tutorial type gamer..

Shmups are some of the simplest games to pick up and play, though, and many newcomers aren't aware of how difficult and complicated they can become, unless their only exposure to the genre is through some YouTube video priding a shmup on its difficulty (though I bet that's where a lot of people come from). Many popular games these days, including some of the most popular, require a ton of investment to learn and even more to master, so I really don't think it's that gamers have gotten too soft to handle shmups. In my experience, the few times I've shown shmups to other people their reaction wasn't "it's interesting but looks too hard for me," they just weren't interested to begin with. Asking players to entertain themselves by taking a simple surface and optimizing it to hell and back is a tough sell these days when there's so many other choices.

[Magma Dragoon]

You remember Xevious? The game that basically codified the Shmup genre? It had those flying enemies which moved the fuck away the second you got close to them. I don't remember any other shmup doing something similar to this.

[Kollision]

gyrodine, twin cobra?

[Jeneki]

Raiden II stage 6.

[WelshMegalodon]

Don't forget the original TwinBee.

[Lemnear]

I believe that one of the big faults about it was the absence of big names on modern platforms, with modern graphics (for example a new gradius).
R-Type tried and with fairly successful success, but an isolated case is not enough.
Why does Jamestown appear in every damned article on Shmups? What does it have so special?
I mean ... Super Mario continues to go great, but in the end it is not that it is so different as a conception of play, it is arcade, it is "simple to play but much deeper than it seems".
So why do Mario or Street Fighter sell great while other arcade games disappear?
That is, they have only updated graphics, for the rest it is more or less what they have always been for over 30 years! Why don't this also be translated on the rest?
What went wrong in addition to having missed the minds of a generation with "pumped graphics" and zero interactions?

And why an indie game with pixel art is fine, but another type of game with pixel art isn't fine?

[Steven]

What went wrong in addition to having missed the minds of a generation with "pumped graphics" and zero interactions?

It's because of a combination of

• The majority of consumers don't want difficult games anymore

• STGs are "too short" because people demand that games be filled with at minimum 50-80 hours of boring meaningless fluff, which in turn leads to

• Nobody gives a fuck about replaying games anymore unless it has that stupid trophy/achievement bullshit

• Playing for score is seen as "outdated, archaic, worthless" gameplay

• Arcade game design in general is now seen as "outdated, archaic, bad" game design, largely due to the perception that arcade games exist solely to waste your money

• Focus on graphics rather than compelling gameplay

• Phone games... or is it phone "games"? I've never played one and have no desire to, so I don't know

• Big companies are no longer willing to take risks

I'm honestly pretty sure the only reason non-STG players know Einhander exists is because Square made it, but it has an excellent reputation among everybody who has played it. If Nintendo or whoever was to start making good STGs, people might start to care again, but it won't happen for the above reasons.

[ryu]

The majority of consumers don't want difficult games anymore

Pretty sure they never wanted them in the first place. There's a bigger market for easier "games" now that millions of people that weren't interested in the hobby before are the average consumer of videogames.

[Steven]

True enough.

I actually just now realized the irony of these two

• STGs are "too short" because people demand that games be filled with at minimum 50-80 hours of boring meaningless fluff, which in turn leads to

• Nobody gives a fuck about replaying games anymore unless it has that stupid trophy/achievement bullshit

The best part is that trophy/achievement acquisition statistics, easily viewable on Steam/PSN/probably Xbox, show that most people that buy those empty 50-80 hour games play them for like 10~20 hours and never finish them. How ironic that people complain about games being too short and demanding more but never actually see the empty, meaningless, time-wasting filler they demanded the devs put in there.

[Skyknight]

I wonder how many of those 10-20 hrs. cases were gifted games?

But I wonder if another part of that is flat consumerism. In this case, feeling like you have to get any given “hot” game lest you miss out on its putatively unique joy, only to be unable to do much with it because family, community/work, and/or other games are swallowing up your available time.

[Rastan78]

So why do Mario or Street Fighter sell great while other arcade games disappear?

In the case of SF a lot of stars had to align. In fact it did die out with a long drought between new titles in the 2000s. One producer believed in a new SF and devoted his life to making SFIV when everyone at Capcom thought he was an idiot.

Since Capcom no longer had the expertise to make a good fighting game they were able to outsource much of SFIV development to Dimps, a company headed by a SF/Fatal Fury vet which was active in fighting game development at the time.

Also they were able to target the aging audience of SF2 which had been an absolute global phenomenon beyond anything ever existing in shmups unless you want to count Space Invaders all the way back in 1978. For people who weren't born or were too young to remember it's impossible to overstate the impact of SF2. We might think of early 90s as a peak time for shmups, but they were already very niche compared to SF by then.

Add to that the increasing viability of online play, and the existence of a grass roots FGC that was adjacent to competetive esports you had the makings of a genre renaissance.

[BIL]

Also they were able to target the aging audience of SF2 which had been an absolute global phenomenon beyond anything ever existing in shmups unless you want to count Space Invaders all the way back in 1978. For people who weren't born or were too young to remember it's impossible to overstate the impact of SF2.

Great post. Yeah, even as a casual fan at best over the decades, that "I've been a failure, I've been a success..." hit me square in muh feels.

[Bassa-Bassa]

As a friend of mine says, the versus genres are a very specific case anyway - you potentially have endless hours of play depending only on the availaibilty of other players, which online has made possible in modern time. You aren't getting that with most solo arcade genres. Quoting myself from that other thread:

What about the notion of journey, though? Once the proto years passed and stuff like Swimmer and Xevious born, players welcomed the idea of getting better at the game to see more stages and enemies, and that become the basis of game design for some decades. The option of credit-feeding likely killed it in the arcade habitat in the end, as playing for score just didn't provide a strong enough motivation for most people.

Youtube would ruin any attempt at that today, though.

[Sima Tuna]

So why do Mario or Street Fighter sell great while other arcade games disappear?

In the case of SF a lot of stars had to align. In fact it did die out with a long drought between new titles in the 2000s. One producer believed in a new SF and devoted his life to making SFIV when everyone at Capcom thought he was an idiot.

Since Capcom no longer had the expertise to make a good fighting game they were able to outsource much of SFIV development to Dimps, a company headed by a SF/Fatal Fury vet which was active in fighting game development at the time.

Also they were able to target the aging audience of SF2 which had been an absolute global phenomenon beyond anything ever existing in shmups unless you want to count Space Invaders all the way back in 1978. For people who weren't born or were too young to remember it's impossible to overstate the impact of SF2. We might think of early 90s as a peak time for shmups, but they were already very niche compared to SF by then.

Add to that the increasing viability of online play, and the existence of a grass roots FGC that was adjacent to competetive esports you had the makings of a genre renaissance.

Yeah, what people don't realize about the FGC is that shit was low-key for a very, very long time. It took big money embracing them plus some very major AAA developers (Capcom, Bamco) making big-name games that would draw spectators. As much as Nintendo hates sweaty tryhards, Smash had its part in growing the FGC too, and Nintendo is nothing if not a AAA company. The number of times a truly indie fighting game broke into the FGC has been relatively small. I'm thinking of Skullgirls in particular. Most of the anime fighters that get any play in Evo are ArcSys games, which are AA if not AAA developers.

When we transition over to shmups, what would be the Street Fighter IV equivalent? It has to be 1: a new game, 2: from a famous AAA studio, 3: which has a lot of money thrown its competitive scene in the form of prizes and tourneys, 4: and which releases with online play so the barrier to human vs human play is lower.

With shmups, hell... We can't even get over the first hurdle! How often do we get a new shmup that isn't posted to itch.io? The first step is a new shmup has to release. It has to be at least somewhat good and it has to be on every major platform of the time, or at least most of them. Examples of those do exist. There was that R-Type Final 2 and Sol Cresta thing, but... Just look at those games, bro. You can't put a competitive community on their backs. That shit is the definition of "mid," the devs are too small to throw money at a competitive scene and there's little support for such a thing in the games themselves.

[Lemnear]

What went wrong in addition to having missed the minds of a generation with "pumped graphics" and zero interactions?

It's because of a combination of

• 1) The majority of consumers don't want difficult games anymore

• 2) STGs are "too short" because people demand that games be filled with at minimum 50-80 hours of boring meaningless fluff, which in turn leads to

• 3) Nobody gives a fuck about replaying games anymore unless it has that stupid trophy/achievement bullshit

• 4) Playing for score is seen as "outdated, archaic, worthless" gameplay

• 5) Arcade game design in general is now seen as "outdated, archaic, bad" game design, largely due to the perception that arcade games exist solely to waste your money

• 6) Focus on graphics rather than compelling gameplay

• 7) Phone games... or is it phone "games"? I've never played one and have no desire to, so I don't know

• Big companies are no longer willing to take risks

I'm honestly pretty sure the only reason non-STG players know Einhander exists is because Square made it, but it has an excellent reputation among everybody who has played it. If Nintendo or whoever was to start making good STGs, people might start to care again, but it won't happen for the above reasons.

1 ) Half-True, but Arcade/STG/Platform aren't always based around difficulty.
2 ) People want long games that they DON'T COMPLETE! Furthermore, it is not entirely true, the video game market is in sharp decline with the exception of Nintendo (and look what games they make?), so the question of infinite games is a blunder, the industry is collapsing on itself due to costs exorbitant prices, poor sales and so-so reviews (for example the horrible Starfield...)
3 ) Half-True, many modern games stretch the broth with repetition (i always cite Stafield as an example).
4 ) I can't say about this, i don't play for the score (but for Time Lap yes XD) i think this is subjective, and is much more relegated to the more hardcore community perhaps.
5 ) Is another Half-False statement,"modern" games ultimately do the same things that games from 10, or 20 years ago did (Stafield, Stellar Blade, and every other modern game) in the end, once you take away the graphics and nice animations, it's still a game from 2000....in fact sometimes it's even worse...
6 ) This was the great fault of the industry, which, no longer knowing how to sell you a new console, pushed for graphics...then the game is THE SAME SAME as before...
7 ) It depends, card games are perfect for mobile for example! Of course I don't understand how you can play all those SEGA or SNK games on a smartphone, but at least this way even kids can learn about them, which is only a good thing
8 ) Big companies no longer take risks, but they also no longer make money precisely because they no longer dare, and this also applies to Hollywood for example.
Look FROM SOFTWARE, Namco Bandai believed in it and look where they are now!

I think Einhander was also present in some PS1 demos, that's how i discovered it °^°

They banned me from many sites ... because i said that The Last of Us, if deprived of graphics and animation, is a poor game, a poorer version of Metal Gear Solid ... with the difference that TLOU is from 2013 and MGS It's from 1998.
Obviously many didn't like this hahaha
Perhaps it is also the mentality of the masses who frequent the web that is self-destructing the medium.

[Lemnear]

So why do Mario or Street Fighter sell great while other arcade games disappear?

Since Capcom no longer had the expertise to make a good fighting game they were able to outsource much of SFIV development to Dimps, a company headed by a SF/Fatal Fury vet which was active in fighting game development at the time.

I didn't know this :O

[Sima Tuna]

They banned me from many sites ... because i said that The Last of Us, if deprived of graphics and animation, is a poor game, a poorer version of Metal Gear Solid ... with the difference that TLOU is from 2013 and MGS It's from 1998.

Worse than that. TLOU has less to recommend it in terms of high-level play. There's only so good you can get when the game is on rails to such a ridiculous degree and you're riding from set piece to set piece with little "core gameplay" beyond holding a board for Ellie.

TLOU can't even be called a mediocre mgs clone until it dramatically increases the amount of time spent in core gameplay and reduces or eliminates "walk and talk" scenes. Note that the old MGS games had cutscenes and they had gameplay. Codec shit was largely opt-in. If you were playing then you were really playing. TLOU has a lot of loading screen sequences where you are forced to walk slowly while the game blabs at you. Like a cutscene except completely unskippable and you have to hold "up" on the control stick to progress it.