FrederikJurk wrote:Hibou wrote:
To intellectualize things for nothing so they miss their primary goal a is common european mistake, and you can see it in a bunch of other domains. For example it's pretty visible in many french movies, and in a bunch of 1960-1990 novels too.
Not to go too much off topic here, but I´d like to hear more on that. I am not sure if this really hits the heart of the problem why we feel that euroshmups are so weak compared to their asian counterparts, but it is an interesting theory.
You know, what I describe in my first post is not so exagerated. I've read genuine texts just like mine about console players, action movies watchers or sci-fi books readers. With the exact same explanation of their vileness.
So sometimes, games (or movies) have been made with one main idea: do something as much different as you can, and hide messages in it. In the few worst cases of all, they're things made with a heterogenous collection of tricks, in order to make it appear very deep AND argue about the despicable simplicity of everything that was made before.
See what I mean, a common attitude here in Europe (and France
) was to write books, or make movies, or in our case develop games
just hoping to read reviews like the following about it:
Killroy's new shmup. What to think about it, and why it won't export well. Our specialist wrote:
- Stage 1, first ennemy: the true humanist idea behind it.
- Stage 1, mid-boss: the hidden social satire.
- Stage 1, second screen's background: why you can't understand the drawing if you haven't read Karl Marx.
- Stage 1, music, second theme: what you didn't hear because it's not there, and why this planned absence means so much.
- Stage 1, the way the boss exploses: a very strong pacifist message. Did you notice how a part of it was still moving after you destroyed, did you understand that shooting it was not a long-term solution, and are you now convinced that war is never a good choice?
And now the game's secret:
At the end of stage 1, if you have understood that war won't lead you to a victory because stage 2 cannot be survived, you will sell all your weapons to the weapon-shop dealer. At the beginning of stage 6, the shoot button of course doesn't shoot as you don't have weapons any more. But it plays music notes: one hit for A, two for B, etc...
Now if you can play the missing part of stage 1 music (remember?), you will go to a secret diplomaty management game! And there you will be able to negociate with the ennemy. If this negociation is a success, you will play a last level where you shoot flowers to your new friend's wives and ice-cream to their kids, and then see the real ending of the game.
Of course if no journalist is well-educated enough to write this review by himself, the game's author will publish a 400 pages book explaining it. 10 pages about the game, 390 about people's dumbery and why in the end the author feels flattered to remain misunderstood.
Now when a game has been made specially so you can write reviews like this about it, do you expect a good or even consistent gameplay?
Of course this pure caricature. But I'll take the bet that at least a part of the nauseus feeling you have with the worsts euroshmups (the worst ones of course) does come from that. From a vague feel to see a pretentious game with no real interest, and to somehow be taken for a moron by a the authors.