Euroshmups and Arcade games

[Mischief Maker]

So ever since I’ve gotten back into shmups in a big way, I’ve seen several games referred to derisively as “Euroshmups.” The obvious follow-up question is, “what makes a shmup a Euroshmup?” To this question a laundry list of features may be listed, along with “general poor quality,” but in the end no satisfying answer is given, just, “I know one when I play one.”

But I have to admit that it’s not just slavish Otakuism. While Japan makes its share of bad shmups, side by side the best of the Euroshmups, like Jets ‘n Guns, always seem to fall short of the best shmups coming out of Japan. This is despite the fact that top Euroshmups usually have more content and as good if not better graphics and production values. Why is that?

In my opinion it’s because Euroshmups are designed with home systems in mind while J-shmups are designed with the Arcade in mind, even if the game will never see the inside of one. There’s nothing inherently cultural about this, it’s a difference in design philosopy. Stray from that Arcade philosophy, and even veteran Japanese shmup developers will create Euroshmups; R-Type Final is a perfect example.

So what is so special about making a shmup for the arcades that makes them turn out so much better than Euroshmups? 3 main differences:

1. Good Arcade games are built around a scoring system that rewards the player for taking risks.

2. Arcade games are intended to be over (or at least loop) in 30 minutes or less.

3. Arcade games must be difficult, yet fair.

Risk-Rewarding

Scoring may seem like an unnecessary anachronism on a home system, but it’s the heart of a good arcade game. And considering the success of modern games like Tony Hawk’s Pro skater and to a lesser degree the Devil May Cry series, it’s not that foreign a concept. When the scoring system rewards the player for taking risks, then when the player gets better the emphasis shifts from merely getting from point A to point B in one piece, to looking good while you do it. A well-designed and integrated scoring system gives the player options.

Think of it from an arcade designer’s viewpoint. The money a successful arcade game brings in comes one quarter at a time. You want both to keep the player dying and prevent them from getting bored. When a player starts getting good at the game and can beat the first couple levels no sweat before hitting the harder stuff later on, that’s several precious minutes where the player isn’t dying and is at risk of getting bored and losing interest. When you throw a risk-rewarding score system into the mix, a player going through the easier levels starts playing things dangerously to get an early boost to their score before switching gears to survival later on. This keeps the early levels from getting boring, since getting better at the game is actually opening up a whole new level of gameplay to take on.

From a design standpoint, building the game around its score system helps you to avoid a number of pitfalls that bog down Euroshmups. Some of the biggest complaints lobbed at these games include features that at best do nothing to improve the gameplay, at worst break the game, like inertia, weapon overheating, etc. The only justification is the same rallying cry for 99% of all bad game features: “It’s more realistic.” If instead the game is being built around rewarding the player for scratching bullets, then maybe inertia will need to be scrapped. Maybe if the designer really wants weapon overheating in the game, they can incorporate the overheating mechanics into the score system, maybe giving bonus points for the player keeping their heat level in the danger zone.

Short game time

Most arcade shmups are designed to last about 6 levels that are 5 minutes apiece. This sounds even more counterintuitive than playing for score on a single-user computer. Why is a shorter game a good thing? The reason is, it doesn’t give the designer any time to screw around, whatever goes into that precious 30 minutes must be fast and furious and good, and that means a lot of merely okay ideas will end up on the cutting room floor.

It’s funny how in an arcade a player who is only out a quarter will simply walk away from a game that gets dull, as opposed to a home-game player, who is out anywhere from $20-60, and will put up with tens of hours of crap in the faint hope that maybe something neat will peek out in the end. R-Type Final would bomb in the arcades. The dull and dreary first level, and the blah second level would drive most players and their quarters away long before things start to pick up in level 3. The same with Jets’n Guns Gold, which has tons of excellent and hilarious levels that are unfortunately interspersed between horribly dull levels (Like Ben Affleck’s wardrobe or the DNA-collecting level) that wear out their welcome before they’re even halfway finished. No arcade game could ever get away with boring the player like that.

Deadly, but fair

Eugene Jarvis, one of the designers of Defender and Robotron, once said that a successful Arcade game must threaten the player with death at all times. To that I would add, yes, but if the player does die, they must walk away satisfied that it was their fault. More than anything, the two biggest complaints about Euroshmups are that they are too easy AND that they will suddenly and unfairly kill the player with something they would have never seen coming. This does not mean you never give the player a breather or two, or never have something big and fast swoop in from offscreen. It does mean that you keep the challenges coming at a steady pace and make sure the player gets some kind of warning before something big attacks from offscreen. Tempo is an underrated facet of game design.

Keeping the three big facets of Arcade design in mind won’t guarantee your next action game will be a classic, but they can make the difference between finishing with a good game, and finishing with a great game. Designers of the west, let’s take back the word “Euroshmup” and change it from a mark of shame to a badge of honor!

[kengou]

Personally I find it's just a design difference. Most Euroshmups I know are bad because they're just poorly designed. Games by Cave and (in my opinion to a lesser extent) Psikyo and Raizing, have interesting enemy designs, bullet designs, scoring systems, and weapons, all designed well. A Euroshmup will usually just have enemies randomly coming down the screen shooting bullets at you without much thought to the actual layout or bullet patterns or tactical challenges to the player, or else will fire undodgable masses of bullets but give you a life bar to compensate for bad game design.

The reason shmups from Japan are generally higher quality is because shmups never really died in japan, whereas they did throughout the rest of the world, mostly.

[zinger]

Personally I find it's just a design difference. Most Euroshmups I know are bad because they're just poorly designed.

You're missing the point. Mischief Maker is trying to figure out why they are poorly designed, and his explanation makes a lot of sense. It's because of the same reason that even Japanese console shooters are generally lesser games than those in the arcades.

It's an interesting subject, icycalm wrote a great article on it here: http://insomnia.ac/commentary/arcade_culture/

Now someone needs to explore the reasons to why arcades survived in Japan while not in the west.

[kengou]

Personally I find it's just a design difference. Most Euroshmups I know are bad because they're just poorly designed.

You're missing the point. Mischief Maker is trying to figure out why they are poorly designed, and his explanation makes a lot of sense. It's because of the same reason that even Japanese console shooters are generally lesser games than those in the arcades.

It's an interesting subject, icycalm wrote a great article on it here: http://insomnia.ac/commentary/arcade_culture/

Now someone needs to explore the reasons to why arcades survived in Japan while not in the west.

Yes you're right, my bad. I only kind of skimmed the OP before posting. Now that I've read it it's an interesting take on the subject and I agree with it.

[Enhasa]

Now someone needs to explore the reasons to why arcades survived in Japan while not in the west.

I think population density is generally underappreciated.

[moozooh]

Now someone needs to explore the reasons to why arcades survived in Japan while not in the west.

I might try giving a short answer that is not necessarily true but might provide an insightful outlook on the problem.

Japan is peculiar in two distinct aspects.

First, it's a nation built up by internally-inflicted pain and suffering. You can see it in their history. You can see it in their popular TV programs that show people humiliated and put under stress in every possible form. It wouldn't be surprising if they were openly aggressive towards the other nations, but instead the Japanese are for the most part very humble.

As a result, pretty much any normal Japanese can give an average westerner a good lesson in basic perseverance. Their history and their lifestyle reflect it very well. They can stand the challenge even if it seems impossible, return to it, and eventually succeed when the success is designed into the system.

The second aspect is what I call "the rice culture mentality". Look at the history of agriculture. Westerners raised various cereals, Japanese planted rice. Now what's the big difference?

The difference is how to plant either, if not taking into account the technology that appeared only a hundred or so years ago. With various cereals and related crops, you take a handful of grain and throw it around. With the rice, you take each single pea independently and plant it. This is one of the major reasons of the minimalism inherent to Japanese on an ethnic level. When you live like that for aeons, you get to see the great in the small.

I hope this was helpful.

[FIL]

Now someone needs to explore the reasons to why arcades survived in Japan while not in the west.

I think population density is generally underappreciated.

Thats a very interesting point for the UK where most arcades were situated in seaside resort towns.

As for the bit about bad design, I think a lot of that comes from the home computer demoscenes where games are made by people who are good coders but not always good designers. I think thats especially true these days where a lot of the indie/demoscene is driven by nostalgia, so games end up being very old fashioned or just plain wrong due to the creator not having played an stg properly for years.

[Taylor]

Arcade culture and rice aside, the root of many problems in ‘Euroshmups’ is they are made by budding designers who see them as easy games to make – not shmup fanatics.

The genre is very deceptive; as we can tell from the many reviews lambasted for ignorant comments on what is too short, too hard or too complicated. It’s unsurprising ‘Euroshmups’ draw the same conclusions and make long, easy games with scoring no more complicated than score multipliers and wacky reinventions.

The west also doesn’t have anything like the dojinsoft scene or Comiket conventions in Japan that provides the greatest incentive to make these games. Our independent scene is handled very differently.

[gs68]

Now someone needs to explore the reasons to why arcades survived in Japan while not in the west.

To many, there is one very simple answer: price.

Why pay US$0.50-$1 to play once when you can buy the thing for $50 and be done with paying for it?

Meanwhile, let's pay $10 each time to watch a movie and $1.50 each time for a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

[Ceph]

I think FIL's explanation is spot on.

[JoshF]

I think a lot of that comes from the home computer demoscenes where games are made by people who are good coders but not always good designers.

Sub Terrania

[Veracity]

You're missing the point. Mischief Maker is trying to figure out why they are poorly designed, and his explanation makes a lot of sense. It's because of the same reason that even Japanese console shooters are generally lesser games than those in the arcades.

No u. I don't presume to speak for kengou, but what I read into his claim was that Mischief Maker's numbered points are only good/bad design principles whose connection to an arcade environment is, at best, tenuously causal.

1. Then there were few to no good arcade games before about 1995, which seems unlikely. Heavy emphasis on abstruse risk/reward scoring gimmicks didn't really take hold until arcades were already declining.

2. The length thing I more or less agree with, in that arcade games can't afford to drag on forever. There is a problem here in that console publishers treat "60+ hour epic" and the like as selling points. But arcades have dumb traditions of their own - looping games are a bit daft, kind of a concession to accommodate wildly disparate skill levels, and I don't really know why we're still subjected to them when Raizing and Cave have shown that simply letting people select their mode up-front can be successful.

3. Maybe the home market is, as a whole, more prone to treating games as interactive experiences in which challenge should be minimal or even absent, but does this really impact shooter development, even euroshmup development? And I don't know that arcade "fairness" is as ubiquitous as you suggest - sudden difficulty spikes at critical points to keep people playing who might otherwise be done with your game and move on are obviously incentivized by the arcades' pay-per-credit model, but plain irritating in a home environment. If there's an issue here, I think it's more that the market for difficult games has declined overall - so fewer are produced/successful for the home, and arcades aren't doing so well.

icycalm's related article, as seems to be his wont, had some interesting insights amid a bunch of posturing and factually questionable balls.

I'd certainly rather play an arcade derived or inspired game than the hundred-stage slog with 42 weapons (40 of which are redundant) that "euroshmup" archetypically seems to mean. Still, I think slavish adherence to arcade principles (by developers and consumers alike, probably) can hold back home-targeted development almost as much as it helps. I wouldn't mind seeing more unconventional stage structures like Shoot the Bullet's scenes or Space Giraffe's option to (analogously) save-state your way to a higher score. Stage select in home ports usually addresses this adequately, but it's sometimes missing and, even when present, may not really be helpful (it's kind of meaningless if you're contending with non-negligible rank, or in Gradius V if you don't know how to cheat). Arika's are the only console ports I know of with "simulation" modes that do stage select with state recovery from replays.

Oh, and Gradius is a euroshmup. Horizontal, life bar, distracting mess of a weapon system. I guess the power-up bar does give it the only obvious semblance of an optional scoring mechanic, but score's still largely about how many times you can loop it. Have they all looped (more or less) indefinitely, or did some of them actually end?