Thoughts on "Arcade games are designed to steal your money"?

[BryanM]

Vampire Savior

I'll go back and put some more time into it sometime, always nice to learn something new. Elevator Action 2 was certainly something that fell through the cracks.

crazier concepts... Chain combos, air dashing, characters having unique transformation mechanics that allow them to split in two or fly around the screen as if they had shmup controls, etc.

They're not too different from the old Rainbow hack to me.

It's ok if lots of games are fundamentally the same in their bones. It's just how physical reality is and what our brains like to deal with. So many real life sports overlap. So many theme park rides are just a tracked loop. Novel/movie plots and tropes that are the same, etc.

Sometimes it really is just about the vibes and aesthetics: normal hockey and death hockey where all the players wear black (always makes it hard to see which team someone is on) and have iron spikes sticking out of the uniforms and sticks, and deadly impalement happens frequently... technically totally 100% the same game, but doesn't quite feel the same, does it?

I like to compare it to food. You gotta eat, and if you have an appetite for it who cares if it's the 10,000th pizza you've eaten in your lifetime. Conversely I've seen burnt out gamers complain of doing the equivalent of eating nothing but hamburgers for 30,000 hours and it's like... what did they expect.

After years of FPS war, maybe it's time for them to fly back home and try spending some time walking around a duck pond, or something. Reflexively begging internet people to "Read another book" anytime they bring up Harry Potter has become a pastime. There's like millions of books people have written and published on the internet, they give them away for free!

[Squire Grooktook]

They're not too different from the old Rainbow hack to me.

AFAIK normies wouldn't know about the Rainbow hack. I certainly never even heard of it till I got deep in the scene.

It's ok if lots of games are fundamentally the same in their bones.

I'm still right though.

[Despatche]

There's a ton of hobbies to kill time with.

I was just talking about your initial statement with the funny numbers, not any of this.

Almost everything has better extrinsic value than playing video games.

This is completely wrong, and gets moreso wrong every year. We are rapidly approaching the point where video games are all we have left.

Nope, they have names like "Darkstalkers", "Melty Blood", "Dragon Ball FighterZ", "Granblue VS", etc.

You just so happened to pick four games which are all wildly different from each other, while also actually literally sharing heritage. The fuck.

Like you could go on about Street Fighter II vs Fatal Fury Special vs Fighter's History vs Fight Fever, and maybe that would be a workable list. You didn't, and that's why I said what I said. As much as I appreciate the attempt to prop up Smash, some of that game has SNK DNA, so...

Blast'em up are literally move and shoot. Platformers are "move to the right". Racers are "go around in a circle".

If different enemies, formations, music, platforms and art are "false novelty" then why have graphics or different games or anything at all.

This is reductionist madness and I will not entertain it. Darius or Mega Man stage select concepts literally doesn't work properly, they get undermined by anything resembling competitive play.

They're not too different from the old Rainbow hack to me.

The only game that even remotely resembles Rainbow is... Hyper Fighting, a contemporary SF2 version. Hyper Fighting is dumb.

It's ok if lots of games are fundamentally the same in their bones.

Ugh. This would be a perfectly fine statement if someone like me or Squire was saying it! You might as well be saying that all the reviewers going on about how Dodonpachi or whatever is a few steps removed from fucking Space Invaders were correct. (They're not.)

I already hate when people look at two very similar things and swear they are worlds apart. I hate it even more when people look at two wildly different things and cannot mentally process the myriad differences between them.

[dan76]

Playing some of the newer arcade light gun games like Dark Escape 4D and Tomb Raider Arcade under emulation it's clear to see there are unavoidable attacks that WILL take a life / deplete energy. This is really shitty design as no matter your skill you will always have to pump more money into the machine. There isn't much to get better at, it's just time spent for cash. Older arcade games were not like this. Almost all of them could be 1CC'd or looped.

I first noticed it with Star Wars Battle Pod - if you succeed on a level you still have to put more money in the machine to carry on playing, wtf? They are literally saying £1 = 2minutes 30 seconds. Raw Thrills is guilty of it, which is disappointing considering their heritage. At least Sega is keeping it real, House of the Dead Scarlett Dawn is a doable 1CC.

[Austin]

I first noticed it with Star Wars Battle Pod - if you succeed on a level you still have to put more money in the machine to carry on playing, wtf? They are literally saying £1 = 2minutes 30 seconds. Raw Thrills is guilty of it, which is disappointing considering their heritage. At least Sega is keeping it real, House of the Dead Scarlett Dawn is a doable 1CC.

That's a huge problem with the industry today, but it's not one that can really be helped when the machines cost $15,000+. They have to pay themselves off somehow.

[Sumez]

I don't think that's the biggest problem the arcade industry of today has

[BryanM]

The customer base has just shifted to the very affluent. I think Japanese style games got the better deal with the save files and gacha roulettes.

Even then, you'd have to be out and about. Instead of having your private arcade or war theater setup with the projection screen over head and your custom Steel Battalion cockpit made of stainless steel. Maybe even has a rotating chair and theater canvas.

... daamn, I wish I didn't live in a submarine and had the space for stuff like that.

[jehu]

It's worth noting that 'pummel players mercilessly, and grind their face in the dirt' is a suboptimal commercial strategy. I remember finding it psychologically distressing as a kid when these games got too predatory - and would promptly steer clear of offending machines. I didn't have enough money to 'see it through to the end,' and I no one I knew did either.

At least theoretically, making the most money possible requires steady engagement from the player. The game must be tough enough to kill the player plenty, sure, but it must create the impression of being 'fair' enough to reward repeated play. The games that I put the most money into were hard, but felt fair - like it was 'my fault' when I died.

If this balance is abided by, I think it actually encourages the creation of interesting games. The interests of the player and the interests of the arcade operators almost align here. And I think most developers were attentive to the 'challenging but fair' market incentive, though there are plenty of exceptions.

It's messier than what I have here, but I am adamant that pure 'steal your quarters' design - at least as an approach that 'defines' arcade game design - is a pervasive myth.

It would also be interesting to see if American operators relied on more unique players (leading to weaker games) than Japan's catering to repeat players (leading to better games). I'm skeptical, but it's an interesting hypothesis.

[Technicolor]

As a thought experiment…
I feel like a shmup designed around consessions to the modern “barcade” environment would benefit from leaning more towards a caravan style. Each stage could be fairly long and designed for play in isolation, complete with separate leaderboards, and you’d be able pick whichever stage(s) you want like a rhythm game. Unlimited lives with a score penalty on death also seems fitting and would let designers crank up the pattern difficulty.

This would also open the door for the shorter play sessions that seem necessary now…though I’ve seen some barcade games like this that let you pick multiple stages per session, so maybe that isn’t inevitable? You’d also lose out on more fleshed-out visual narratives and (probably) Raizing-style suicide systems, but I think this sort of setup would be closer to viable for a barcade shmup.

For every well-designed arcade game there were like 15 shitty ones that absolutely had no purpose beyond swindling kids out of quarters.

The thing about this is that you can apply it to anything, ever. Sturgeon’s Law and all that.

The problem is that nobody is willing to make a distinction between "hard game that wants you to keep putting money into it to beat it (not credit feed it)", "bullshit impossible game that can only be 'beaten' by credit feeding", and "older game with no ending where your goal is to get as far on one credit as possible".

I have to imagine things get complicated once you factor in home releases. The failings of western arcade culture are one thing, but the home environment completely guts the incentive structure that these games were built around. It makes sense to want to minimize the number of continues you use if they cost actual money; a 1cc is the logical conclusion of that. A continue on console instead becomes a weird workaround for how a console game is “supposed” to work, especially through the lens of someone that’s probably never stepped into an arcade.

Could you replicate those incentives through other means? Maybe you could set up a digital release where the free demo requires you to buy credits, but once you spend enough money you unlock infinite continues. Or “rechargeable” spare continues past the first for any run… though that might invite mobile energy bar comparisons. I dunno.

Darius or Mega Man stage select concepts literally doesn't work properly, they get undermined by anything resembling competitive play.

I’m curious now— could you elaborate on this some more?

[BryanM]

I remember finding it psychologically distressing as a kid when these games got too predatory - and would promptly steer clear of offending machines.

The low difficulty of some games like Altered Beast and Golden Axe definitely helped their popularity.

Each stage could be fairly long and designed for play in isolation, complete with separate leaderboards, and you’d be able pick whichever stage(s) you want like a rhythm game. Unlimited lives with a score penalty on death also seems fitting and would let designers crank up the pattern difficulty.

I think about this often. Three stages tied together for a ten minute play session (the optimal maximum length of time someone can focus). Every credit gives you a spin on a gacha to unlock new characters. Etc.

The big problem is it'd be absolutely massive to make, the equivalent of many games. The rhythm games have it so easy; ONGEKI really only has unique art assets for its characters. The boss guys in the background get recycled. The only cost involved in making a new stage is laying down the notes and buying the license of a song. Ridiculously cheap and easy.

While doing a Golden Axe style game... just one character has tons of animations. Tons of special attacks. And every entity in the game costs at least that much; gigantic bosses and animated backgrounds even more. It's Dragon's Crown times three at a minimum, and for a forever game with infinite updates, a monthly expansion that's at least 0.5 Dragon's Crowns.

It's really fun to think about, but it's not realistic without AI. We can make games for ourselves with really janky cheap art like from Skykid, though!

Urgh, one game that comes to mind for having a lot of copy and paste is The King of Dragons. Too long for a play session. ... man it's been a while since I've played it, think I'll do some today....

Could you replicate those incentives through other means?

Create an immersive sim where you have to work at a job or scrounge alleyways for money, to use at the in-game arcade.

This can be a way to throttle playtime and make it feel "special"..... but also note this is essentially how that one Universal Studios game worked. The real world in that game would have to be fun, too.

It's a lotta work.

[Squire Grooktook]

Wasn't the "millions of stages that are like full games with their own leaderboards" basically what Darius Burst did with Chronicle Saviors mode. It was easy there because it was all recycled assets and copy/paste. Which is probably fine. Roguelites pretty much are the closest to an arcade-style game revival for normies because they trick you into thinking you're getting new content when really you're basically playing the same single sitting gauntlet every time.

I’m curious now— could you elaborate on this some more?

I'm going to guess he probably means there's always an optimal route for competitive play which undermines there being a choice in the first place.

I'm not entirely sure I agree, it kinda depends on the game IMO (not every game is meant to be played "competitively" anyway).

[Austin]

I wish I could find some damn pinball here. It's like it doesn't exist at all here and it's really weird. Maybe nobody in Japan aside from the dude that made Slap Fight MD cares about pinball, and the only reason I know he likes pinball is because his company's URL is literally pinball.co.jp.

And he hasn't updated it since 2017. Great.

Pinball Map is updated by users and it looks like there are quite a few machines in Japan, though they seem to generally be scattered about. A few places appear to have ten to twelve machine collections but I'm not sure how accurate that is as of this writing. It's worth looking into at least.

https://pinballmap.com/map?address=japan (just click the search button)

[Despatche]

I'm bumping this I guess. It's pretty weird to have automatic notifications now.

I have to imagine things get complicated once you factor in home releases. The failings of western arcade culture are one thing, but the home environment completely guts the incentive structure that these games were built around. It makes sense to want to minimize the number of continues you use if they cost actual money; a 1cc is the logical conclusion of that. A continue on console instead becomes a weird workaround for how a console game is “supposed” to work, especially through the lens of someone that’s probably never stepped into an arcade.

I don't totally buy this. I understand that what I'm about to say is a personal anecdote, but I have very little actual physical real-life arcade experience. Despite this, when I really sat down to look at arcade games for the first time, which was not in an actual arcade setting, I immediately understood what a "1CC" was supposed to be long before I ever saw the term. I very quickly started applying this to console games of all stripes, and I cannot imagine doing otherwise, because it's such a consistently useful metric. Over the years it's become abundantly clear to me that something terrible happened to the way people perceive those things called "game flow" and "challenge", and all the drama over the continue feature is at the heart of this. I am now at the point where the actual term "1CC" sounds terrible to me, because it sounds like some weird alternative way of playing a game when it's clearly meant to be the very basic way of playing many games.

I’m curious now— could you elaborate on this some more?

I'm going to guess he probably means there's always an optimal route for competitive play which undermines there being a choice in the first place.

I'm not entirely sure I agree, it kinda depends on the game IMO (not every game is meant to be played "competitively" anyway).

For what it's worth, I mostly threw Mega Man in there because it's a very similar mechanic, and because games like Garegga and its followups also use this particular mechanic. Mega Man and etc generally handle this idea better since you eventually play every stage... usually.

That aside, the vast majority of games that use selectable stages are meant to be played competitively in some way. Mega Man is not really this, but Batrider sure is! The end result is that there is really only one true way to play Batrider, only one true way to play any given Darius, which utterly undermines the entire mechanic altogether. I also don't buy that these mechanics benefit "casual" players (whatever it even means to be "casual") in any meaningful way that triumphs over the clear need to fix a competitive problem.

It even manages to suck from a storytelling standpoint, which does matter when the kind of storytelling you'd be doing here is the kind that tends to gets singled out and praised. A lot of why people like Ray Force as much as they do is because the entire game is actively designed as if it was one gigantic tapestry of adventure, instead of simply being a disparate collection of themed levels.

[Rastan78]

only one true way to play any given Darius, which utterly undermines the entire mechanic altogether.

Well scores are usually tracked in Darius games by the final stage so you can still play lesser scoring routes and compete. It's just like separate score tracking for different ships in any other game. Not everyone plays Gain in Garegga.

Yeah there does end up being an ideal route for each end boss scoring wise. But in Darius Gaiden IIRC 26 of 28 stages are used in high level play. That leaves only 2 stages that are redundant and never appear during world record level scoring runs.

[Technicolor]

I think about this often. Three stages tied together for a ten minute play session (the optimal maximum length of time someone can focus). Every credit gives you a spin on a gacha to unlock new characters. Etc.

The big problem is it'd be absolutely massive to make, the equivalent of many games. The rhythm games have it so easy; ONGEKI really only has unique art assets for its characters. The boss guys in the background get recycled. The only cost involved in making a new stage is laying down the notes and buying the license of a song. Ridiculously cheap and easy.

Honestly? Depending on the game, it can go as low as 2-3 minutes a pop nowadays. I've seen setups where you're just playing Fruit Ninja on a big touchscreen with a one-minute timer. Most of these barcades also use cards nowadays, so the credit pricing can be flexible as well.

Regardless, though, three shmup stages for three minutes each...that means that with nine stages, all the stages combined add up to about 30 minutes of total content. You could cut corners with the backgrounds by keeping them fairly simple, or reduce the stage count by having B and C layouts for each stage that reuse the backgrounds with different enemy layouts-- maybe depending on what order they show up, like Great Fairy Wars.

...Actually wait, Great Fairy Wars is kind of perfect for this. Why don't we have that at our arcades instead of a seventeenth ticket gambling machine?

Wasn't the "millions of stages that are like full games with their own leaderboards" basically what Darius Burst did with Chronicle Saviors mode. It was easy there because it was all recycled assets and copy/paste. Which is probably fine. Roguelites pretty much are the closest to an arcade-style game revival for normies because they trick you into thinking you're getting new content when really you're basically playing the same single sitting gauntlet every time.

I was thinking of this too. Any developer with games already released could just dip into their library, make a "greatest hits" type of shtick.

Sidenote, but I seriously think an Unconnected Marketeers-style procgen system is kind of the perfect replacement for continues in the modern day. Let players buy randomized wack shit, then penalize their score accordingly. You'd need to keep the shop items from being too juicy to be missed in proper survival runs... but it's otherwise a highly varied and casual-friendly system with room for imbalanced chaos, whilst getting out of the way of quality stage design for more serious play.

I understand that what I'm about to say is a personal anecdote, but I have very little actual physical real-life arcade experience. Despite this, when I really sat down to look at arcade games for the first time, which was not in an actual arcade setting, I immediately understood what a "1CC" was supposed to be long before I ever saw the term.

My arcade knowledge is probably even more limited than yours, so I can't really argue whether your experience is unusual. But it's definitely clear that at least some people struggle to "get" arcade games, and I'd have to assume continues as a system don't totally help. I remember seeing an old post from you talking about how they should be thrown out in modern shmups that I resonated a lot with, though I also think they should be replaced with some kind of alternative that fills the same "training wheel" role.

I also don't buy that these mechanics benefit "casual" players (whatever it even means to be "casual") in any meaningful way that triumphs over the clear need to fix a competitive problem.

Rastan's point aside, I think this mindset makes sense now in an era when casual shmuppers are a lot rarer and new shmups are usually indie. But I'd wager a lot of older games with those kinds of systems had large(r) casual audiences to work with. And...well, casual gamers like having more stuff. Most wouldn't know what the optimal routes are in the first place, and they'd probably care only so much about scoring integrity compared to actually seeing new stuff in the game. If you're the kind of person that likes collecting 1CCs, or even just someone who occasionally pops open a shmup for a quick half hour of fun? Darius Gaiden is functionally like seven games for you.

I will also put forth that I think multiple routes can add an interesting wrinkle on a community level, in that now players have to figure out which paths offer what scoring/survival benefits for what reasons. You can compare the scoring potentials of separate "games" that both use the same systems and relative numerical bounds. But in the end, having more ways to engage with a game you already like is really cool, otherwise shmups wouldn't even have scoring systems. So while I won't pretend that a game's content being potentially "obsoleted" in competition doesn't bug me on principle, I tend to agree with Squire that competition shouldn't be the only metric to judge a game, based on general game design intuition.

[BryanM]

A lot of tower-climbing kind of games like Gauntlet or Magic Sword really do recycle a lot of content.

I think the core of the issue with mainstream popularity when it comes to arcade style games, like Shm'ups, Beat'em ups, race'em ups etc is that there isn't any long term goals or decisions. When some internet goober calls Rygar and such "mindless", they don't mean it doesn't have tactical or technical demands, but that they're games where you run to the right and kill motherfuckers. Selecting what upgrades/weapons to use is often not even offered, and games like Diablo and Vampire Survivor and Mario show that transforming your avatar's capabilities can really keep a game from feeling stale.

Navigation seems to be a pretty big deal to the animal mind. Nothing makes you feel less free and less invested than being put on rails. I'm a big proponent of level select mechanics like in Mario or Umihara Kawase. Games like Mega Man or Deathsmiles only have the illusion of choice - even if you don't feel like playing a level... you're gonna have to play it.

I guess honestly standards have just gone up. Like how one-button, one-screen Atari games don't feel like full games anymore, so too goes arcade games in general. They're more suited to being subgames in "real" games, like plugged into Grand Theft Auto. How does it feel to know more total hours of human life will be put into playing the arcade games included in Zenless Zone Zero, than 95% of all arcade games ever made?

....Shit, I'm going to go play some Magic Sword..

[Bassa-Bassa]

^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.

[PC Engine Fan X!]

Back in the early 1990s, I used to watch the locals try their mettle at the American Technos arcade puzzler, Block Out, a 3-D wireframe version of Tetris. Some folks would get a perfect score of 10,000 points during the bonus rounds (definitely helps out with your overall score once game over appears). I used to be able to get to round 30 on a single credit of Block Out.

Another arcade puzzler by the name of Atari Games' Klax (circa February of 1990) that I had first come across it in April of 1990 at Marroit's Great America amusement park (just a little ways from Milipitas, CA to Santa Clara, CA anyways). I had gotten the NES Tengen game of Klax as a Christmas gift in December of 1991 and would play it for hours on end -- it finally clicked with me that there's no set pattern with the various colored tiles given to you at any given time as it is all randomized -- no two games of Klax are like, period. So you the player are supposed to deal with whatever colored tiles the CPU gives you -- try to cash in on with what tiles you do have on-hand for big points. It wasn't until a full-sized Atari Klax cabinet finally showed up at my local arcade joint called "The Regency Game Palace" in April of 1994. I figured with all that practice playing the NES Tengen version of Klax would pay off and it did. So on one fine day in May of 1994, I put a single token into the Klax cab and pressed the "Start" button. About two to two and half hours later of playing non-stop on the single credit still in play, I had reached Wave 100 (which if you do complete it, you'll score a cool 1,000,000 points added to your overall score) -- score two "Big Xs" on Wave 100 and you're done. I had finally reached over 6,000,000+ points on that single credit (which is still regarded as my personal best). I got no recognition/accolades for achieve that particular Klax score and it was never acknowledged by the staff of the Regency Game Palace either. Sadly, the Regency Game Palace arcade closed it's doors for good in July of 1994 due to losing it's business lease. What's cool about playing/owing a Klax jamma pcb is, high scores and high score initials are save for posterity (even if powered down for the night and re-powered up the next day -- how cool is that?).

Fast forward to the 2001 California Extreme show held in San Jose, CA that year, Ultracade reps had brought in an Ultracade cab set on "Free Play" with Klax loaded up. On the last day of the 2001 CAX event, I started a Klax session on the Ultracade cab and proceeded to reach Wave 100 once again with some Ultracade reps watching me. Finally beat Wave 100 and it was quite something to achieve/pull off. One of the Ultracade reps was none other than LX Rudis, a former Atari employee (whom had done the cool BGMs for the NES Tengen Klax game). LX told me what he saw when I was playing Klax, that he had never see a person play Klax as good as I did on that final day of the '01 CAX show -- he also said that Klax is an easy game to start off but a hard game to master. I told LX that I had practiced at home with the NES Tengen Klax game and he said that he was the one who did the BGMs for it (which was a cool revelation for me at that particular point in time). The real reason why the Klax jamma pcb doesn't have any BGMs was due to the chip shortage of 1989-1990 and running out of memory to actually have it on-board as well -- at least the Atari Lynx version of Klax has cool BGM tunes to listen to (LX Rudis had a hand in getting the Lynx Klax game made). You might recall Atari Games' "Off The Wall", an arcade puzzler with some cool novel twists 'n' spins to the classic arcade Arkanoid formula (circa 1991) has some cool BGMs to listen to while playing the game itself.

Of course, with Tengen of Japan's Klax release for the PC Engine gaming platform, it has more user-end adjustments to muck around with compared to the original jamma based pcb of the same name (thus making it the "definitive" version of Klax to own/play bar none). Both the full-sized and smaller cabernet versions of Atari Games' Klax cabs sport two dedicated four-way digital based Atari logo branded joysticks as the proper way to play it as originally intended/meant to be played.

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Klax pcb Factoid:

LX Rudis' name appears in the pcb version of Klax's credit screen -- he was responsible for the audio portion of it.
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PC Engine Fan X! ^_~