Well, yes, that's the thing. For many new gamers, shmups look like a relic of the past that keeps floundering and refusing to die completely. Hell, around here (I'm Spanish), the whole genre is known by the uninitiated as "matamarcianos" which is the nickname for Space Freaking Invaders since the beginning of the eighties! That's why they call it "retro" - they don't mean "it's an old game" they mean "it's a throwback to very old games".kengou wrote: Not to belabor a point, but I'll point you to http://gruegaming.blogspot.com/2008/06/ ... -knew.html. Out of 12 sample shmups, 5 got 70% or higher, and 2 out of those 5 got 80% or higher. For a vast majority of review websites, 60-70% is not considered "good", but generally "poor" or "average" at best. Considering how much most of us (I assume) love shmups, I'd call that "criminally bad" compared to what scores these games OUGHT to get, and compared to what other crappy games get in the 90s on a lot of sites.
Of course, this has a little merit in that many shmups do seem superficially very alike to old ones - Cave shooters, for example, evolve slowly but surely, and certainly comparing one with the next might give you the impression the changes are minimal. It takes actually playing it with a bit of depth to notice the changes.
However, my annoyance is more that the evolution in some other genres is about as slow but they don't get all this flak. The FPS genre evolution is more or less defined by the interval of time it takes for Valve to get off their asses and make a new game, ever since quite a while ago - Half Life was a big quality step for the genre, and then there were a thousand imitators (not to mention the fact that that one mod turned online FPS multiplayer from something only for big fans, like in the times of Quake, to something everyone had tried at least once), and same with Half Life 2. Before Valve, the evolution was basically defined by Id Software at first - Doom and Quake had many imitators, but no one really could beat them. It's as much of a slow-evolving genre as shmups. Yet they don't get scorned for it. It's like shiny graphics and "immersion" manage to hide it from the reviewers. There are of course things like Bioshock which try new approaches to the genre, but they're drops in an ocean of standard WWII games.
Platformers... let's be honest here, platformers are Nintendo's turf. They have been the shot that started every single platforming era - Super Mario Bros revealed the formula for sidescrolling platformers, Super Mario 3 perfected it, Super Mario 64 created the 3D genre singlehandedly, and Super Mario Galaxy reinvented it yet again. Most of the things in the middle are shameless imitators with no real evolution, among which there are, of course, some gems (Mischief Makers and Banjo-Kazooie come to mind), but in general, the same comment applies here than on my FPS rant above. Believe me here, I might be a newbie at shmups but I've played enough platformers to fill out a room.
In the same way, shooters evolve and have their fads, even if slowly. First there were the statics, ala Invaders and Galaga. Then the horis had a huge time in the sun, see Gradius and R-Type, which were huge sales successes everywhere. Then horis started to diminish as arcade verts grew exponentially thanks to some really great games (I remember spending worrying amounts of my allowance on some of them). Right now, it seems bullet hells or semi-bullet-hells are all the rage (great for me, because I enjoy bullet hells!). This evolution seems pretty paralell to some other genres. So why are shmups so maligned?
My guess would be that shmups can't really disguise their mechanics. An FPS can hide its bog-standard mechanics behind cool weapons, nice scenery, and a storyline. A shmup dies or lives by its mechanics, and can't really hide them. And people have become unused to games that are purely mechanical - right now, even puzzles have storyline and special stuff, but shmups have problems to implement them.
Still, I think games ala Ether Vapor, which shuffle the mechanics every so often with the bonus stages and changing the type from vert to hori to railshooter could get some better reviews. It's just how most reviewers are wired.
...Holy shit, I really need to take my anti-ranting pills. I hope I made some sense there in the middle of the stream of thought.
What a mess. These, and the slipshod port of Ys VI we got have given Falcom a bad name in the US, whereas they are in actuality one of the premier developers in Japan. It's a shame they license out their works to companies who aren't competent.
