Define euroshmup...

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Twiddle
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Post by Twiddle »

There are about a dozen excellent games that have neither the Japanese refinement or the European attempt to force gimmicks in the gameplay without integrating them into it.

USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!
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Twiddle
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Post by Twiddle »

Total Carnage is way cooler than any euroshmup will ever be.
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Frederik
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Post by Frederik »

pixelcorps wrote: usually contain japanese text , even though the people that make it come from fucking croatia.
Yeah, fuck croatia and their stupid east-euroshmups!
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Nuke
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Post by Nuke »

Wash your mouths with soap and play Apidya,
Wings of Death, Disposable Hero, Z-Out,
Io and last but not least, the Reap.
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Frederik
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Post by Frederik »

I was being sarcastic, by the way.
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Post by Nuke »

Not directed at anybody in particular but the haters.
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Post by TVG »

I'm not really sure if i should be pissed off or laugh.
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Nuke
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Post by Nuke »

Neither, you should check those games out.
You might at least find one game you like.+

Oh, I almost forgot Iridion 2!
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Post by Fenrir »

There shall come the day when everybody remembers how cool Armalyte is 8)
Alas, Ikaruga is going...

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Twiddle
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Post by Twiddle »

nanostray was almost decent, then touchscreen weapon switching
so long and tanks for all the spacefish
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<Megalixir> now that i know garegga is faggot central i can disregard it entirely
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BrianC
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Post by BrianC »

Despite all the hype about it being unbeatable, telling from this YouTube video and the other 4 parts, it's possible to 1LC Project X.

Jeff Minter also made some excellent shmups and shmupish games, though most take from US designed games. Gridrunner is ace and so is Tempest 2000. I also liked what I tried of Gridrunner++ (which seems to be a proper shmup), though I only played the demo of it.

I like Nanostray and Iridion II. Despite the shortcomings, ie the score system and perspective oddities, the enemy patterns and levels are well designed and they play quite well. The touch screen switching in Nanostray is a bit awkward, but they at least provided another shooting method and it doesn't keep it from being a good game. There is an alternate version without the touch screen weapons (the JP version), but it's not as easy to find.
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Post by BulletMagnet »

Twiddle wrote:nanostray was almost decent, then touchscreen weapon switching
Supposedly Nintendo (or their publisher, or someone) told them to put that in just to be able to say they utilized the touch screen, even though they hadn't planned to originally...and supposedly they're going to remedy this in the sequel. (please tell me I'm not the only one who remembers reading that!)
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Post by Twiddle »

Yeah, it's not their fault at all, which is a shame.
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Post by BrianC »

BulletMagnet wrote:
Twiddle wrote:nanostray was almost decent, then touchscreen weapon switching
Supposedly Nintendo (or their publisher, or someone) told them to put that in just to be able to say they utilized the touch screen, even though they hadn't planned to originally...and supposedly they're going to remedy this in the sequel. (please tell me I'm not the only one who remembers reading that!)
Yes, I heard this (I was planning to comment in my previous post, but I forgot), but I doubt it was Nintendo, who always gets the blame for stuff that isn't their fault. I remember reading that it was the publisher that told Shin'en to use the touch screen, so that would be Majesco's fault. Hopefully, they won't make the same mistake for Nanostray 2.
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Post by Enhasa »

Euroshmup is a pretty stupid term, almost as bad as JRPG. (The worst is probably CRPG, because the C can mean computer, console, as well as other things.)
BrianC wrote:I doubt it was Nintendo, who always gets the blame for stuff that isn't their fault.
Geez, if you think Nintendo has it bad, think about MS and Sony...
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Post by BrianC »

Enhasa wrote:
BrianC wrote:I doubt it was Nintendo, who always gets the blame for stuff that isn't their fault.
Geez, if you think Nintendo has it bad, think about MS and Sony...
MS and Sony have nothing to do with my point. Pretty much all companies get the blame for things that isn't their fault, but I was replying to something specific, namely the touch screen usage. More and more games are coming out for the DS that don't have forced touch screen usage, including some designed or published by Nintendo, though Nintendo still makes a couple games with it. My point is that it was probably Majesco's fault in this case.
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Post by neorichieb1971 »

Japanese shmups typically make you feel special. Small hitboxes, lots of weaving bullet pattern characteristics and memorizations. Artwork is colourful, games become rare and expensive.

Euro shmups make you feel like shit, BIG hitboxes, lots of weaving enemy formation characteristics that inevitably end up in you dying. Artwork is usually dull, games go in the bargain basket and ultimately get sold for 2.99.

Euros do have some good music though :D

Some would argue that PAL games don't come with spine cards and are not worth keeping sealed :lol:

My favourite western shmup is Hybris and Katakis. So if it ends in an "is" I will probably like it.
This industry has become 2 dimensional as it transcended into a 3D world.
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Post by ED-057 »

Euroshmups seem to me kind of like they are designed by children. I know that when I was 10 I would not have been really interested in precisely-tuned gameplay, on account of my non-existant skills. If a game had awesome graphics and music on the otherhand, a cool intro, perhaps some other story-related game interruptions, what more could I want? I would play that crap all day, looking forward with excitement at possibly being able to buy the really expensive cool weapons for my ship.
They even invented "fake" supposedly japanese game lineups to get as much japanese as they could (Apidya anyone?
and they spelled Apidya wrong in kana :p it has a tenten where it should have a.. er.. whatchamacallit. small circle/hollow dot thing.
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Post by ccovell »

ED-057 wrote:and they spelled Apidya wrong in kana :p it has a tenten where it should have a.. er.. whatchamacallit. small circle/hollow dot thing.
Worse than that, they used a "cha" character with tenten, something just insane... (Sounds like the French "ja") :shock:

It comes out as "Abijya" or something like that when read.
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Post by Turrican »

ccovell wrote:
ED-057 wrote:and they spelled Apidya wrong in kana :p it has a tenten where it should have a.. er.. whatchamacallit. small circle/hollow dot thing.
Worse than that, they used a "cha" character with tenten, something just insane... (Sounds like the French "ja") :shock:

It comes out as "Abijya" or something like that when read.
Yeah. More in general, the whole Japanese-mimicking in that game (for example the goofy characters in the intro) is definitely the part which has aged the worse.

Stuff like Agony will never gain the same amount of respect Apidya has (and rightly so when you just consider gameplay) but at least the artistic design was something genuinely european/occidental.
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Frederik
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Post by Frederik »

Nuke wrote: Oh, I almost forgot Iridion 2!
Yeah, and it really pushed the hardware like no other GBA title ever. The backgrounds are astoundingly animated (actually, I read that they are short looping videos).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOtHxCnQ8ss

And I even liked the shots to hits ratio, which made you play very thoughtfully. Too bad it doesn´t save the highscores. I liked it much more than Nanostray.
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Post by Ixmucane »

moozooh wrote:Ok, here goes my opinion.

However, what I'm trying to point out here is that, while most traditional shmups have stable and studied gameplay mechanics revolving around one-two distinct features and more often than not come out balanced (at least in regards to those features), western shmups try to encompass much more than that, and the gameplay (again, more often than not) becomes dispersed between the multitude of features that actually steal the focus from what a shmup is supposed to be: shooting and dodging bullets. This is further illustrated by the fact that even relatively small Japanese developers (like Cave) can produce 1-2 shmups a year that would have some different twist to them, and westerners basically try hard not to repeat what they already did several times.

Apparently, it wouldn't really be a wild guess that the reason most of them weren't successful because it was really hard to concentrate on polishing the actual gameplay when you had all this stuff to consider and balance. It is also the reason the modern game development fails so badly these days (see: about 80-90% of the current gen console lineup); it requires quite much more effort to make really good gameplay when you want to stuff a game full with ten thousand "unique" features, and there's a deadline coming, and then you have to work on other game also full of everything (and for that reason, ironically, coming out so generic as a whole). This, and milking money out of established franchises, is what I also consider examples of western influence over video game market as a whole.
I read an article in one of the latest issues of Wired about the development of Halo 1, 2 and 3 which gives a very similar account of Bungie's dissatisfaction with Halo 2.
While Halo had three main weapons with good roles, Halo 2 added many new ones that threw balance out of the window, and development was rushed. For Halo 3, which of course has even more toys, they invested enormous amount of playtesting to make the game fun.

Which leaves us with independent developers with orders of magnitude less skills and resources than Halo's authors that try to make games of similar complexity. Good luck.
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Post by jp »

I really enjoyed Iridion II. Nanostray was cool if not for the retarded scoring system. And invisible barriers. Yes, those two things made that game less than awesome. Everything else was alright though.

Not sure what other euroshmups I've played. I love Tempest 2000 and Space Giraffe though... so there. 8)
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Post by Frederik »

jp wrote:I really enjoyed Iridion II. Nanostray was cool if not for the retarded scoring system. And invisible barriers.
See, I didn´t mind that weird perspective so much in Iridion II since there were always walls on both sides, which kept things easier to judge. Now in Nanostray you are in open space very often, combined with some weird camera movement, which is highly irritating. I usually stayed in the lower half of the screen, which translates into maybe the lower fourth in gameplay terms. That lava stage is particulary bad in this matter.
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Post by BrianC »

The invisible barriers didn't bother me too much and I like how they are used to make it so the coins outside the barrier can't be grabbed without the pull in. They should have done the barriers more like Every Extend, where the parts you can't go to are faded, if I remember correctly.
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Post by Emperor Fossil »

Fenrir wrote:There shall come the day when everybody remembers how cool Armalyte is 8)
I've never forgotten!
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Post by jp »

BrianC wrote:The invisible barriers didn't bother me too much and I like how they are used to make it so the coins outside the barrier can't be grabbed without the pull in. They should have done the barriers more like Every Extend, where the parts you can't go to are faded, if I remember correctly.
But if you're playing for score you don't ever want to use the pull-in.

Bah, the scoring in Nanostray was fecking retarded regardless.
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Post by Shatterhand »

Fenrir wrote: Damn straight. They even invented "fake" supposedly japanese game lineups to get as much japanese as they could (Apidya anyone? And Gem X, and stuff). But then again, as good as Apidya gets, and it's probably the most japanese euroshmup of all, I would never say that it plays and feels like a jap shmup. Even at the time, when there were rumours that it was a conversion of an obscure FM Towns title. I thought - that's not possible. It's great, yet it plays too... 'original' to be a conversion. Being japanophiles helped them to try and reach a higher standard, because at the time everybody thought that jap consoles were the shit and home computers were the boo. Just because. I sense history repeating :idea:
That was Kaiko actually, I don't remember any other company trying to look "Japanese" on Amiga. They only made 3 games unfortunately, Gem'X (Which was among the first games I saw on Amiga, and when I first saw it - coming from being an MSX user for years - I really thought it was japanese), Apidya and Super Gem'Z (Which was never released, as the master disk was stolen in an Amiga fair... but you can find a cracked and trained version on internet.... damn pirates!). If I am not mistaken, the team was made of just 3 guys, and all of them were from Germany, and had works with other development teams too. Their games, being japanese-alike or not, were all really excellent (Both Gem'X and Apidya happening to be in my previous mentioned Top 100).
Macaw wrote:Really, there is loads of superb shooters on Amiga. They are just not 'arcade style' and that is why so many people in this forum hate them.
Back at time, I could swear Battle Squadron was an arcade port. I was really confused when I actually found out it was an Amiga original, and never released at arcades. I personally think that, for an 1989 game, it had arcade-quality graphics, music and gameplay...
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Post by Turrican »

Shatterhand wrote:That was Kaiko actually, I don't remember any other company trying to look "Japanese" on Amiga.
The whole Manfred Trenz offspring tried to be "Japanese" - Just look at the countless sources he used for Turrican graphics - Aeroblaster and stuff. And let's not forget that Factor 5 even did a beautiful port of BC Kid. How much beautiful? Beautiful enough than when I got to play the Hudson's originals I had a letdown...

Of course something about being inspired by Japanese games did wonders, something else (ugly character design etc.) didn't.
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Post by Shatterhand »

Factor 5 ported BC Kid, but I think it was published by Hudson itself. They also published Dynablaster (Bomberman) and Yo! Joe!. Truth to be said, those are 3 of the most "consoleish" games available on Amiga.

Both Dynablaster and BC Kid are really sweet ports.


But yeah, I see your point. I always saw those games more based on "consoles" than on "Japan", though it makes sense as most console games are japanese :) . I just said Kaiko because they REALLY tried hard to look japanase, as far as put their name as "Kaiko - Japan" in the Gem'X title screen, and fill the game with japanese characters.

I remember when I first played Gem'X, the guy who was showing me the game (I still didn't own my amiga) said something like "Isn't funny how everything is japanese, but the girl says "Great!" and "You did it!" in perfect english?" :)
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