The term 'euroshmup'

[Specineff]

Fantasy Zone has a shop and scrolls back and forth, like Defender (An Ameri-shmup). What does that make it?

[Twiddle]

Ah, but that's an Amerishmup...

Huh? The developers are from the Czech Republic.

Still, it's an Amerishmup, or at least a borderline case. Sometimes a Euroshmup will come out of Japan too.

an amerishmup would be aegis wing (terrible, terrible game with no redeeming quality except a completely stupid reason)

tyrian is in between an amerishmup and a euroshmup with the euroshmup part being the soundtrack and the amerishmup part being everything else

fps may count as amerishmup if it's made by id or epic

"euroshmups" aren't bad in regards to presentation, soundtrack but they generally lack the fluidity, challenge and absent cheapness present in better examples of the genre and some people seem to be miffed that these developers tend to miss the point of shmup when the developers' definition of a decent shmup is actually more akin to an action rpg than an arcade game

what isn't good is that when some developers DO get it (like shin'en), they still whine about it because it's not good enough even though it's a step in the right direction

[cools]

Fantasy Zone has a shop and scrolls back and forth, like Defender (An Ameri-shmup). What does that make it?

No inertia whatsoever.

Brilliant STG.

[sfried]

So what about Raptor: Call of the Shadows? That was a quality title.

I think some people are getting weeaboo notions that just because a shmup isn't made in Japan it automatically sucks.

[Twiddle]

missing out on decent titles such as nanostray 2, geometry wars

nope wait not made in japan, game is shit, sorry *wanks off over radiant silvergun*

[Gungriffon Geona]

shit I guess this means I can't like Stargunner anymore. :[

[bcass]

There's a lot of tat that came out of Europe shmups-wise (then again, there's a lot of tat that came out of Japan too, and continues to do so), but there are a handfull of classic European shmups. The two Uridium games are fairly unique (left/right scrolling from a top-down perspective). They aren't incredibly deep games, but they are visceral and can be as manic and challenging (in a fair way) as anything else that came out of Japan at the time.

For me, the only good European shmups are the ones that tried to do things differently (like the Uridium games), rather than the ones that tried to ape the Japanese games. That said, I think there is only one European developer worth keeping an eye on these days and that is Llamasoft/Jeff Minter. Space Giraffe was absolutely STG to the core, and Grid Runner+++ is looking to be similarly weighted. The PC version of Space Giraffe is being released soon and will have a mode with toned-down graphics for those people who aren't too keen on the psychedelic effects of the original.

[MadScientist]

One of Minter's games (Revenge of the Mutant Camels maybe) featured enemies on flying toilets, so maybe the term 'Shit 'em ups' that someone suggested earlier does fit.

[captain ahar]

One of Minter's games (Revenge of the Mutant Camels maybe) featured enemies on flying toilets, so maybe the term 'Shit 'em ups' that someone suggested earlier does fit.

anything he makes is awesome, if only for his obsession with camelids.

they are so adorable. ^_^

[FIL]

My memory of it is pretty hazy, but I do remember enjoying Uridium 2, except for the stupid SHOOT THE CORE parts which remind me of stage 3 of Strider.

European made shooters don't have to be bad, sadly a lot of them are made by demoscene coders who aren't necessarily very good game designers.

[Gungriffon Geona]

Demoscene coders are fuckwin on most everything except game design. that's really not what they're meant to be doing, and they very well know that fact. doesn't stop them from trying however. :/

Though, does Chris Hulsbeck count in this? if so, he gets the exception for Turrican.

[Jockel]

missing out on decent titles such as nanostray 2, geometry wars

nope wait not made in japan, game is shit, sorry *wanks off over radiant silvergun*

Actually i think those games ARE shit ^^"
Nanostray because of the imo lousy level design and geometry wars due to it's random nature and enemies ALWAYS SPAWNING IN YOUR FUCKING FACE!!!!!111111oneoneone

[Gungriffon Geona]

Actually i think those games ARE shit ^^"
Nanostray because of the imo lousy level design and geometry wars due to it's random nature and enemies ALWAYS SPAWNING IN YOUR FUCKING FACE!!!!!111111oneoneone

never seen things spawning super close in Geometry Wars ever. I dn't like it much but it's a damn fair game series even when you last ages and the difficulty goes insane.
no clue on Nanostray, but Nanostray 2 was awesome as all hell.

this sorta shit is making me wonder if my own game design would get labelled garbage just because it's not fucking weaboo enough or doesn't have giant slow patterns of worthlessness.

[captpain]

this sorta shit is making me wonder if my own game design would get labelled garbage just because it's not fucking weaboo enough or doesn't have giant slow patterns of worthlessness.

[sfried]

this sorta shit is making me wonder if my own game design would get labelled garbage just because it's not fucking weaboo enough or doesn't have giant slow patterns of worthlessness.

THIS!

^^"

RAGE!

Nanostray 2 was awesome. Definitely more awsome than sum Team Shanghai fried rice crap I've seen over the past few years. They ditched the health meter and favor of non-checkpoint lives, made the powerup system have a commited approach, and also balanced out the weapons. It isn't perfect, but it is far from crap as it could possibly get. Just because it's made by ZE GERMANS doesn't mean it's bad because Germany = Euroshmup and Euroshmup = shit.

People nowdays just buy games but and never call them shit just because of some moe moe animu designs. These same people believe the Japanese are infallible when it comes to art and everything they make is art, even when it's so blatantly obvious it has issues.

[Jockel]

People nowdays just buy games but and never call them shit just because of some moe moe animu designs. These same people believe the Japanese are infallible when it comes to art and everything they make is art, even when it's so blatantly obvious it has issues.

If that was pointed at my post, you are pretty much putting words in my mouth
I can't exactly tell why, but i absolutely had no fun at all with Nanostray 1&2.
But rest assured it was not due to the fact that they were developed outside from Japan or did not contain enough lolis.

Yeah, i don't like it because it was developed by Ze Germans!
(BTW hard to respond to your posts if you ninja-edit them all 12 seconds)

[sfried]

If that was pointed at my post, you are pretty much putting words in my mouth
I can't exactly tell why, but i absolutely had no fun at all with Nanostray 1&2.
But rest assured it was not due to the fact that they were developed outside from Japan or did not contain enough lolis.

Yeah, i don't like it because it was developed by Ze Germans!
(BTW hard to respond to your posts if you ninja-edit them all 12 seconds)

I pride myself of my ninja-editing skills.

To be honset, I loved Iridion II more than Nanostray II because of its off-hand accessibility.

Once there was a guy who had been brought into fold of the wonderful world of console gaming™, or more like non-PC gaming since this story does involve arcade elements. While already trying the ropes at Smash Bros. Melee, I showed him the charm of good ol' console/arcade games. At the time I only had a GC hooked up with a GBPlayer, so I let him play the only GB game I had setup at the time: Iridion II. It was not long before he got to grips with the control and people were commenting on the 80's-esq music that reminded them of some other 80's-esq videogame tune...

Maybe around 2 hours later and a couple of deaths, he finished the game, and left with a smile on his face or some other indication that he enjoyed it, along with thanks. If it was some other game, say, like a yank-em-up, or maybe Guilty Gear XX, he would've probably felt alienated either because of the bad gameplay, or the wrong approach. Iridion II was a nice introduction into shmupdom, which was forgiving enough while trying to retain the core essences of a good shooter.

[Turrican]

Is there ANY japan-made shmups where your ship has inertia? On purpouse?

Aero Blasters. The stages with inertia almost ruin the game.

I was playing Side Arms and Forgotten Worlds earlier and was noticing that both these mid-80's Capcom games have some of the traits which would later categorize 'euroshmups'. Large sprites, big hit-boxes, and in FW you have an energy bar and a weapons shop. I know these were both very popular where I grew up (N. Ireland), so I was thinking maybe these were a big influence on some European developers.

There is your clue. Both games are exceedingly cheap and poorly designed. You are correct, they could be considered euroshmups stylistically.

Necrothreading of old, for the sake of the argument. I think there's a general idea in the posts above. Europeans were just looking at the cool games of the moment. It may very well be that Aeroblaster's inertia may be responsible for the entire intertia plaguing the european scene. Imagine that. (Aeroblasters surely had caught more attention that we give to it today: Turricans are full of sprite grabbing from it, not to mention the speed corridors).

Likewise, I bet Capcom's shops in Forgotten Worlds are responsible for shops in Xenon 2 and such.

In short, the European scene was naturally inclined to catch up with the new offerings of the market. Especially those which seemed to favor an home system / console friendly approach. It is highly likely that under scrutiny, one could see these same tendencies to become adopted, in those days, even by Japanese home-oriented developers (Compile, but certainly not just them).

To sum it up, the "flaws" that everyone always mentions do not originate in Europe, but in trying to consolize the genre. This was done in East AND West: the real difference is that in the East, a school of arcade cabinets programmers did follow its own path (they, you could say, began to reject Gradius and R-Type's complexities, and favored a back-to-the-basis route); while this could have never happened in the West, first and foremost because the West had basically stopped (or, we could say, Europe never had) a local industry of videogame arcade cabinets.

I've come to this thread searching for the word "euroshumps", after realizing that on Vita, the "West" has got a lively scene ignited by Jeff Minter's TxK, and with niche products like Sky Force, Soldner X2, Aqua Kitty, now Hydorah... While the Japanese have put all their collective strength into Dariusburst... A sign of the crisis? If you look at it this way, it's rather depressing how they collected Sega's, Raizing, Capcom and other heores in the DLC packs for what sounds like a last hurrah.

[OmegaFlareX]

It may very well be that Aeroblaster's inertia may be responsible for the entire intertia plaguing the european scene.

I doubt it, arcade Air Buster was 1990, and the console ports came a year after that. I've played plenty of jank on C64 from the mid-80s that have similar slide-y controls (although the only title that comes to mind is a really obscure one called Plasmatron).

[Despatche]

No, the flaws definitely originate in Europe. Your conclusion is based on the longstanding confusion of what makes a euroshmup. It's not specifically shops or lifebars or inertia or whatever. It's the fact that there was a very particular strain of games coming out of Europe during a very particular period of time, heavily based on various elements of Japanese arcade shmups (some being directly inspired by terrible computer ports of said games), but with so many of the directors and programmers behind these games having zero design sense and zero respect for the player.

People make fun of arcade games for being "quarter munchers", but the real quarter munchers were these bullshit games being thrown out on the C64 and the Amiga almost daily. I'm sure some will call it "racism" these days, but this is the situation as it happened, and it continues to happen to a certain extent with junk like Sine Mora. Occasionally you would get such a game out of the Americas, but they are so few and far in-between that they basically don't exist. And yes, Japan absolutely could make actually bad shmups, but there were just so few of them compared to the genuine scourge of euroshmups.

I'm not sure why you're comparing a bunch of small indie games to what's basically the only regular retail shmup left. Like, that's it, anywhere in the world, it's Dariusburst. Japan still releases stuff through Comiket and such, but the enthusiasm just isn't there anymore, anywhere. There aren't people coming to this genre anymore, there are only people leaving.

[Shepardus]

I'm not sure why you're comparing a bunch of small indie games to what's basically the only regular retail shmup left. Like, that's it, anywhere in the world, it's Dariusburst. Japan still releases stuff through Comiket and such, but the enthusiasm just isn't there anymore, anywhere. There aren't people coming to this genre anymore, there are only people leaving.

Not to mention that he's looking specifically at Vita releases for some reason, which has never really been a place to look for shmups.

It's not specifically shops or lifebars or inertia or whatever.

Yeah, certainly, there have been Japanese shmups that have worked perfectly fine with shops and lifebars or similar things (can't think of any with inertia though...). It does a disservice to everyone to lump anything that isn't the norm in today's arcade-style shmups under the "euroshmup" label and use that to call them bad. It doesn't get at the root at what actually makes euroshmups bad (by certain standards, anyway).

[Turrican]

I doubt it, arcade Air Buster was 1990, and the console ports came a year after that. I've played plenty of jank on C64 from the mid-80s that have similar slide-y controls (although the only title that comes to mind is a really obscure one called Plasmatron).

I was under the impression that inertia meant a specific way of adding weight to your ship (think Project X), and not a synonim for floating or sluggy controls.

No, the flaws definitely originate in Europe. Your conclusion is based on the longstanding confusion of what makes a euroshmup. It's not specifically shops or lifebars or inertia or whatever. It's the fact that there was a very particular strain of games coming out of Europe during a very particular period of time, heavily based on various elements of Japanese arcade shmups (some being directly inspired by terrible computer ports of said games), but with so many of the directors and programmers behind these games having zero design sense and zero respect for the player.

I feel we've come full circle with your post, Despatche. It's pretty clear that "euroshmup" can't be defined by gaming elements (shops, life bars and such), but only by the zero design and zero respect factors, which means that euroshmup means just "bad game". Indeed it happened like this, and although I don't think it's racism on anyone's part, if the term doesn't define a certain set of qualities, it's just useless.

I'm not sure why you're comparing a bunch of small indie games to what's basically the only regular retail shmup left. Like, that's it, anywhere in the world, it's Dariusburst. Japan still releases stuff through Comiket and such, but the enthusiasm just isn't there anymore, anywhere. There aren't people coming to this genre anymore, there are only people leaving.

It's the sad reality. I wasn't comparing them, just reflecting on how a culture is dead in its origin root, while small ripples of nostalgia-driven products survive (and to an extent, flourish?) only in the periphery. Isn't that something to pause a moment and reflect though... Polish, Swedish and Germans raised up with sure exposure to the "genuine scourge" of euro badness, try to make a living by at least repeating that badness. In Japan on the other hand, you're depicting Dariusburst like Mishima's seppuku or something. (And we could argue that Irem had gone into R-Type Final with the same sentiments a decade ago!).

[qmish]

I feel we've come full circle with your post, Despatche. It's pretty clear that "euroshmup" can't be defined by gaming elements (shops, life bars and such), but only by the zero design and zero respect factors, which means that euroshmup means just "bad game".

Then how would you explain "western school of shmups" and people who genuinely (granted, most of them come from old pc background. same folks who grew up on original x-com and mechwarrior. "advanced" "complex" "realistic" means more to them than "arcadey") love them? Which may include stuff from Raptor and Tyrian to Jet'n'Guns and whatever else "with many weapons to buy/upgrade, many missions/routes, etc. etc."

A sign of the crisis?

Come on, look at all plaftorms, dammit. I dont see ton of (new) japanese shmups on other consoles either. "Crisis" just now? Have you not witnessed state of genre of last 5-8 years? 90% of new releases are indie/doujin, eh

[Sumez]

The euroshmup is simply an effect of prioritizing the spectacle over tight gameplay.

I think Despatche put it nicely - The developers have played cool games, so they want to make something cool, but they don't know what makes the games good, they just make something similar and focus on stuff they think would be cool. They add stores because they think it gives the game longevity through superficial elements, or maybe they add inertia because they feel it adds a nice "weight" to your ship, without realising the absurd implications it would have on even remotely high level gameplay.
Even today you see tons of aspiring indie developers making shooters with crazy inertia filled gameplay, simply because they have no clue. Not because they've played Aero Blasters.

That's not to say the spectacle isn't a great aspect of a shooting game. But I'm sure everyone here knows what actually works and what doesn't. The biggest issue of course, is that the people who play arcade'y games to their fullest aren't the people who determine their succes, and several of the euro'est euroshmups were super succesful - Xenon 2 and Raptor being obvious examples. The vast majority of people playing video games don't care about about the immediate experience of the gameplay, they see the game more like a guided tour of content, and we know the classic drill about "the game only has 5 stages, you can beat it in less than half an hour".
Hell, I even see the tendency rampant in modern retro gaming communities. People will savestate through Mega Man and say it was a great game, or they'll use 40 continues to get through Castlevania and say that they have beaten it. People will sit down and have fun with a 2-player Bubble Bobble game once every three or so years, popping in new credits every second stage until they reach one that they can't figure out, and then claim it's one of their favourite games.

As long as you can't fight that tendency, euroshmups will continue to exist, in all genres.

[pieslice]

I doubt it, arcade Air Buster was 1990, and the console ports came a year after that. I've played plenty of jank on C64 from the mid-80s that have similar slide-y controls (although the only title that comes to mind is a really obscure one called Plasmatron).

It could also be Defender and/or Stargate where the concept of inertia originates from.

[Sumez]

Defender would be the most obvious one. It's also an example of a game that does inertia well. I'd say Time Pilot might qualify as well?

I doubt people adding inertia to vertically scrolling classic shooters pay any attention to Defender, though. I recently tried someone's Galaga-inspired game that they were making for the NES, and even though you could only move left and right, the movements had an extreme amount of inertia both in starting up, but especially when slowing down, as if your ship was sliding around.
I think it's a completely excusable and honest thing to do - but it's also a pretty sure indication that you didn't sit down and try to figure out why Galaga is actually a fun game to play before you started making something similar.

[Shepardus]

I don't think inertia is something you need to be inspired by another game for - it's something that exists in real life, and it's quite plausible that people just add it for a sense of "realism." Or they add in some acceleration thinking it gives you more control over your speed.

[Sumez]

Yeah, the thing is that it works in some games. Super Mario Bros. is amazing for it. Meanwhile the majority of NES platformers that tried to do the same for the next five years, feel like horrible slipping around on ice.
Mega Man 1 actually has very slight inertia, which has killed me on occasions, because he won't stop on a dime. The next five games also do have it somewhat, but so modest that it only serves the effect of more precise single-pixel tapping.

[Xyga]

Lol inertia in Mario has always been the thing that I could never stand and practiclaly ruined the franchise for me. Anyway I hate inertia in any type game no matter what, always have, always will.

[Marc]

99% of European shmups sucked balls simple as. From dreck like Sidewize/Crosswize on the Speccy, IO, Armalyte, Blood Money and Katakis/Denaris on C64, though to dross like Xenon 2, Project-X, Star Ray, Silkworm on the Amiga. Dross. Every one of them has a flaw, or combination of major flaws, that just stops them being fun to play. The odd decent attempt slipped though but they were usually coin-op conversions - Speccy R-Type, C64 Salamander, Amiga St. Dragon. Only original games I can think of off the top of my head that weren't utter toss are X/Z-Out - not console/arcade quality, but a decent attempt; Uridium which was decent enough to be ported to the NES, and Apidya - which deliberately went for the console look and feel. Even the poorer end of Japanese games usually trumped what was going on in Europe.