Indeed, I don't doubt there is some nuance and subtlety to the various designs in these military shooters, and how it's not like the exact same RGB hexadecimal values for the colors. But one could say the same granular details exist for anything really, whether it's fruit loops, lollies [sic]...or fecal matter. In the end here it's still very much brown and not very pleasant to see and play.
And as I said with the Gun Frontier example, it's not necessarily a bad thing to have these earth colors everywhere if the game plays differently and tries things to stand out mechanically. I don't think one could separate the game mechanics and ignore them when discussing how samey and bland these games are because that's half of the reason why these games are "all the same".
Grid Seeker is another shmup that's somewhat classic in its setting and doesn't have a strong design slant like the Far West and pistol design of Gun Frontier, but I played it a decent amount and had a good time thanks to its bullet-canceling pods that let you recharge bombs. You could totally have straightforward planes and jets and helis and stealth bombers but add that little mechanical touch to distinguish the game from the plethora of other red wide shot/blue laser/shit green weapon/tankboatplane enemies/big tanboatplane bosses/recycled vietnam war BGs games.
And yeah space shooters also look very similar to one another, a montage of them could be hilarious haha. Now there's games like Dangun Feveron or DariusBurst where you get some space backgrounds but they look very different instead of just a black screen with some white pixels here and there. That said, I haven't explored space shooters enough to really tell if the game mechanics are similar or not. The eleventy billion Space Invaders clones likely are "the same", but outside of those I don't feel like there is something as ubiquitous as red wide shot/blue laser/shit green weapon.
Pixel_Outlaw wrote: ↑Thu Apr 10, 2025 10:19 pm
I believe "OP" said the following:
"I feel like the genre has gotten lost in this whole macho bullet hell stuff and sometimes I just want to sit down and blast some military vehicles without all these multipliers and explosions
clouding my view constantly."
I can only hazard a guess he meant that the visual clutter ruins the background art and setting.
I agree with you that bullet clouds obscuring beautiful backgrounds is a shame. From a gameplay perspective I am also not usually a fan of the more egregious denser bullet patterns forcing you to stay at the bottom to micrododge them, and something more dynamic with movement all over the screen is cooler in my book, either with few or many bullets.
But in the majority of old-school military shmups with sparse bullets and a screen all clear for you to potentially admire really nice vistas, you instead get...mostly the same unappealing and copy-pasted dirt, shit, sand, jungle, and sniper boat-infested ocean. What a waste.
Lemnear wrote: ↑Fri Apr 11, 2025 10:14 amHowever, it must be said that they are SHOOTER, it is difficult to find contexts that are not war or Sci-Fi, and the Fantasy ones (except for Loli) are very few. In your opinion, could the hardware limitations of the time have limited the artistic side?
I have no doubt that tech limitations in the 70s/80s led to many games going for a space theme, as you wouldn't need to draw elaborate backgrounds to simulate space. However, as soon as you are able to plaster dirt and sand all over the screen, I suspect you can draw any other kind of BG.
And the fun thing with shmups (and most arcade-style games really) is that they are quite free from thematic constraints. In a shmup you can play as anything. An eraser fighting against pencils and scissors, an otter shooting sunfish at lemurs, a black square in a white world, an evolving hungry creature wrecking various natural ecosystems by eating their inhabitants, a bird-like spaceship pit against giant robot fish, a one-armed advanced aircraft soaring through a cyberpunk city, a ship made out of pistols dueling another pistol ship, an iconic red motorbike diving in a virtual psychedelic world, a sword-swinging cartoon robot flying above buildings shaped like cell phones, a samurai dragon defeating goblins of various kinds, etc. Your mind is the limit.
Even in a contemporary military setting, there are a lot of different locations and set-pieces you can think of and make really appealing to fly through while not going into completely fantasy environments. For better or worse, war can happen anywhere.
Luxurious beach resorts, countryside lavender/tulip fields with windmills, elaborate radio towers inside cities, water purification tanks and facilities, mountainside hamlets with cozy Bob Ross wood cabins, ski resorts with telecabins, medieval-era castles close to villages with nice traditional looking houses, solar panel farms, space rocket launchpads, Olympic stadiums, specific city neighborhoods with strong cultural artifacts and architecture à la Chinatown, rocky rivers surrounded with lush vegetation leading into big waterfalls, commercial ports littered with colorful containers and cranes, half-snowy half-colorful tundra fields, busy highway complexes with many intricate interchanges, tropical atolls with unique wildlife, fancy science research stations in the poles, radome fields, artificial islands with fancy hotels and skyscrapers and whatnot on them, a rocky shore with an iconic lighthouse and cottage houses, geyser lakes, and so on and so forth.
That so many games resort to the same old brown dirt, brown jungle, and featureless water over and over and over is a deliberate choice to be as commercially safe as possible and/or failure of imagination. Now if that is what the players actually want...there is not much I can say anyways hahaha.
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