Thanks. I was planning to get some shit done tonight before I clicked that.
Arcade games are never going to be as big as they were, or make any sort of sizable comeback outside of the lolretro stuff indie devs vomit onto live arcade.
Using 'retro' as a label only encourages niche status, and I've been sick of hearing it for a long time now.
BIL wrote:The real issue is appreciation of the game itself, and that's not something you can impose onto people.
Exactly. I wonder if pipe organists complain about how kids these days only want to play electric guitar. HOW CAN WE GET THEM TO PLAY PIPE ORGAN?
Or maybe it's more like those threads on Slashdot, reddit, etc. asking "How to get my 8-year old son started with programming?" People will rattle off dozens of languages and debate why they're good or bad for beginners, but they often omit step 1: make sure your kid is actually interested. You may fondly remember writing BASIC games in middle school, but most people probably wouldn't find that fun.
Observer wrote:How about Crimzon Clover's idea of making you BUY the continues with your own skill by playing well and raking up as much point items as possible? And once you spend the continues, they are gone, so you have to keep buying them. Between unlocking and having a shop to purchase them, I pick the second option. Coupling this with the score reset and no replay (if available) saving should be good.
BUT...
People will bitch anyway. Too short, too hard, too 2D, too retro, too intense, too loli, too manly, too this, too that, tatoo, Tuthankamun, etc.
yeah this always seemed like a great idea to me (didn't mars matrix dreamcast version have a similar thing?). hopefully makes them play the game long enough for them to start to understand what 1ccing is like and encourages mastery of the scoring system. people will complain, but this plus a lot of achievements and maybe some sort of persistent player profile (keeping track of furthest the player's got on 1 continue, general areas he finds difficult, etc) is going to get you pretty much everyone who could possibly be interested in 1ccing. those who aren't are never going to enjoy it...
You know, the recent proliferation of shmups featuring cute/moe/gothloli/whatever fucking terminology you want me to use girls coming over to the US has got me thinking: is that sort of games why shmups aren't so popular here in the US? I'd think that more military-based shooters would be the way to go if you wanna appeal to (male) Americans and their need to overdose on MANLINESS.
Five bucks says when I go into a game store to go get DeathSmiles, some ignorant jackass will go "hey, isn't that a hentai game?" and harass me all the way back to the parking lot until I run their ass over.
Last edited by gs68 on Thu Feb 25, 2010 8:34 pm, edited 2 times in total.
gs68 wrote:Five bucks says when I go into GameStop to go get DeathSmiles, some ignorant jackass will go "hey, isn't that a hentai game?"
I'll be taking that 5 bucks. Nobody at your Gamestop knows what 'hentai' means. They'll call it a weird japanese game, possibly followed by or spoken in some hilariously stereotypical japanese accent.
gs68 wrote:Five bucks says when I go into GameStop to go get DeathSmiles, some ignorant jackass will go "hey, isn't that a hentai game?"
I'll be taking that 5 bucks. Nobody at your Gamestop knows what 'hentai' means. They'll call it a weird japanese game, possibly followed by or spoken in some hilariously stereotypical japanese accent.
gs68 wrote:Five bucks says when I go into GameStop to go get DeathSmiles, some ignorant jackass will go "hey, isn't that a hentai game?"
I'll be taking that 5 bucks. Nobody at your Gamestop knows what 'hentai' means. They'll call it a weird japanese game, possibly followed by or spoken in some hilariously stereotypical japanese accent.
No, I'm talking about fellow customers.
Most of the customers are going to be even more ignorant than the guy behind the counter with the neckbeard and the mustard stains on his Gamestop shirt.
What a game - especially arcade(y) game, not a turn-based strategy, flying/driving sim or football manager - needs to win people's hearts? I'd say it needs to appear as something pretty special at the first sight. Remember the first time you saw Metal Slug in the arcade? I suppose Ikaruga had similiar impact on many people (as vector graphics easily adapt to the wide range of resolutions, it will probably remain quite impactful for years to come).
In this day and age I think a game colourful, bright and cheerful would caught people's attention. Whether you're gonna play as a greasy machine or a magical girl doesn't matter that much. Overall feel of a game is about much more than that. I pity Treasure, because as fab as S&P2 looks, people keep bitching about it being a Wii exclusive. Cripes, it's not like it would be any better on some other platform, you know. Would marketing a shmup to the people who bitch about something like that make much sense? I somewhat doubt it.
The rear gate is closed down
The way out is cut off
Okay so I've been a lurker here for a while and first I want to get this out of the way: I'm no old-school smupper, considering I restarted playing the genre a year and a half ago, and before that the last thing I did was 1CC Blazing Lazers on my Turbografx-16 when I was 4. Apparently I hadn't lost it, as I figured out when I finally got a pce emulator working.
I'm a pretty big part of the music gaming community and have been involved in it for a very long time. Taking from that, I'll explain why shmups feel like a niche genre to me and (hopefully, in my opinion) will always be a niche genre.
I was never a fan of difficult games, from the time I started playing at 3, until about the time I started playing IIDX at 15. I'm now 22, fyi. IIDX 6th Style was a game that looked pretty and sounded cool (especially YESTERDAY 7k, oh man), and I liked it enough to spend 250 bucks on modding, a controller, and the game itself to finally play it. When I did, I was greeted with the most difficult experience in gaming I ever had and having spent $250, I tried to get around it and have some fun by doing something I hadn't done for years: entering a cheat. Those of you who know what I'm talking about know what a huge mistake I made by doing that, and basically forced myself to get accustomed to playing 3s and 4s right away. It took me 8 straight hours of play to finally unlock the game, 4 hours just to pass the first song (YESTERDAY on the easiest difficulty). Needless to say, 7 years later I'm destroying 95% of the game. Well, at least on singles.
In that time (and even slightly before in the case of DDR and bm 5-key) I gradually developed a yearning for harder and harder games, and most of these were music games so I gravitated towards those. I had fringe experiences with fighter and shmup meets at TGA when I went for bemanifest both years it happened, but it wasn't until later I realized these games also represented what I wanted: sheer difficulty, whether that be perfect execution and reading your opponent's moves consistently, or squeezing that hitbox through a few pixels of bullet-free space a thousand times in one game.
This is the first downfall of the shmup genre.
Games have been easy since I have been playing them, with few exceptions. Even what I consider the best games of all time are FAR easier than spending 7 years on one game only to realize you're still just in the top 25% of Japanese players for IIDX. Sonic 2 took me half a year to beat. Super Mario World and Super Mario Bros. 3 are a joke. Metal Gear Solid 1 isn't very difficult on Extreme. Some of the most notoriously difficult games for their time never made it to the US in their original state until decades later, like Super Mario Bros. 2. Play the SNES version then play the FDS version and tell me they don't feel very different, physics-wise. Ikaruga only got semi-popular when it was rereleased for the Gamecube.
IIDX is no different here: The US release is just not the same game. The scoring system is completely different AND dumbed down, the difficulties have been changed to make it more friendly, there is a 5-key mode to confuse you more and make you worse at learning how to play when you try 7-key (just like how medium will ruin you getting good quickly in GH, RB, or DJHero), there is no art, the new songs are all terribly easy and don't have a hardest difficulty, and the hardest difficulty has to be unlocked by playing EVERY SONG IN THE GAME. That's like playing Metal Gear Solid 15 times to unlock Extreme, considering a game consists of 3 songs. It got terrible reviews and I completely agree with almost every point in them, minus the music being "generic techno and trance". Oh, and don't even talk to me about "Beat'n Groovy," what an abomination.
If you want to see your precious scoring systems for battle bakraid and maniac modes in mushihime, you probably don't want a stateside port. I seriously wish you guys luck with Deathsmiles, but considering I'm not really a fan of horizontal shooters except G-Darius (for the laugh factor mostly) I'm not about to buy it.
The second downfall is far less tangible and something I feel is difficult to put into words.
When I started playing shmups again I thought I could approach it like IIDX and go for scores alone right away, which wasn't a bad approach and would have been a good idea with Blazing Lazers, but I restarted with Mushihimesama. I tried to eke out every little point possible, and juggling it all was extremely difficult to do without dying even on original mode. This also taught me subconsciously never to bomb EVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE, because even if it saved my life I could have had more points if I had just been better at avoiding those purple bullets. I got the other Cave shooters for PS2 minus Ibara and also tried older games like Parodius (and discovered I didn't like horizontal shmups), slowly progressing in Mushihime from stage 2 boss to stage 3, to getting the extend, to stage 3 boss, to stage 4, and although I haven't played it in a while the best I could do was nearly getting to the stage 4 boss without bombing lol. Eventually I came to like Espgaluda a lot more (a good thing considering it's far more forgiving imo) and started playing to 1CC the game instead, lowering my standards. I still didn't bomb, thanks to that ingrained idea that the button wasn't even there though. I don't own a 360 at all but I do own Futari and have Espgaluda II coming in the mail, and with my experience in Futari I'm seeing that they're quite different games from IIDX.
Keep this in mind, I am a really serious music gamer and probably only CStarFlare knows what I'm talking about here, but when I play IIDX or pop'n or Guitar Freaks or anything like that I play for no less than 2 hours straight, and usually I play for the entire day, around 10-12 hours straight through. I restart songs 30, 40, 50 times trying to get 5 more points or get a full combo or a perfect combo or a 100k or a AAA or whatever. Shmups though, I play maybe 8-10 games on original, get owned every time, and put the game down. I like that, it's a very enjoyable experience even though it's frustrating, and I'm not feeling like the games are serious work like I do with music games. I don't even do that with mainstream games, I just play them through as much as possible every time, and they aren't as enjoyable after I play them once.
The shmup genre has that spark of brilliance, that ability to play a game that is incredibly short (by today's standards) 20 times and still be captivated by it many hundreds of plays afterwards. It's a relic, a lost idea of gaming where replays CREATE new strategy and new discoveries for the gamer. My friend would say Castlevania (the original only) comes closest to that, and I'd agree. The difficulty of the game is pretty one-dimensional except for a few dimples like Death, and only becomes linear on the first loop, when you've finally gotten used to the controls and can begin learning what weapon is best, how many pixels are between the enemy, your hitbox, and the edge of that moving platform under the castle, how you must move to get to that platform in time to not get hit by that enemy, how to change enemy spawns to make that movement possible, where you can take damage to take a shortcut, and where every hidden item is.
Playing shmups is sort of like that, and you learn by losing and replaying THE ENTIRE GAME over again, not my missing notes or taking a little too much chip damage or missing that headshot or losing a life and restarting at the beginning of level 6. And then there are shmups with the loop like Castlevania, and that's more of the same done very well (though I haven't been successful at getting any loop yet lol).
This type of gameplay can't be called rewarding for obvious reasons, but it's like watching Blade Runner and realizing the same number is present in every single shot in the movie, that the neon sign on the building in the background is some obscure line from a sci-fi book few people read, or that Harrison Ford's character is a replicant. You will find something to think about on every play, some enemy you can milk or some spawn point you can leave alive to get even more points and get that extend in level 2 instead of 3. No one will ever play that perfect game because they don't know every single enemy location, every trick, or every point at which rank changes. Very few people understand Blade Runner on that kind of level, but there are people like my father who watch it all the time and realize something new every single time; that is a good shmup and that's what shmups have stuck to since the time Castlevania came out, as there are other games with similar mechanics around that time. There is enough in the game to be too much, but not WAY too much, and that balance is important.
As I said, most people aren't gonna watch Blade Runner more than twice in their life, if even that since it's considered an "old" movie, and that ruins it for most people. One or two plays is all they can take and because they're not actively thinking while they're playing (hey, just like watching movies!), the depth is lost on them.
So, terrible ports that don't make sense due to excess original difficulty or the inability to understand the Japanese ideas behind the source and being in design (though it became this way only through humanity's increased laziness throughout the 20th century) a niche concept brings shmups popularity down to levels even lower than Japanese music games, unfortunately. There are other culprits like score-whoring and the like but those are more a regional difference than a genre downfall in my experience, seeing as how so many Japanese music games make score omnipresent, while American ones fuck up the scoring system and don't even give a flying shit about who is really the nation's #1 best and most consistent player (he can, in the words of youtube, "Get a life" anyways, but from me a big nico おめ to him).
Sorry for the long explanation, but I'd rather go into detail so people can understand instead of leaving open ends in terms of what I'm trying to say.
gs68 wrote:You know, the recent proliferation of shmups featuring cute/moe/gothloli/whatever fucking terminology you want me to use girls coming over to the US has got me thinking: is that sort of games why shmups aren't so popular here in the US? I'd think that more military-based shooters would be the way to go if you wanna appeal to (male) Americans and their need to overdose on MANLINESS.
While I don't think people look too deeply into gaming aesthetics enough to care, I would guess that the goth-loli shit gives a few American gamers pause. Amongst JRPG fans, I've heard a few people bitch about how creepy some of the games in that genre can get (games like Ar Tonelico). When I played that game Tales of Symphonia, I was really annoyed that one of their characters was designed to be (no shit) a twenty-something-year-old female who was perpetually trapped in a twelve-year-old girl's body.
As far as marketing shmups to Americans, I think the best bet is to stick to the retro guns, maybe including a bit more cartoonishness to give the games more character. One thing I really didn't like about the PS1/PS2 eras was just how gritty and lifeless the best American-released shmups became. R-Type Delta and Final might be great games, but the 3D, lighting, and water effects didn't do the best job of making the graphics pop out in exciting, memorable ways. I also don't see much beauty in the graphics Treasure used in Gradius V or Ikaruga. Those visuals only succeeded at ironically becoming more technically impressive and less fun at the same time. What's been missing is the level of character and straight-forward graphical artistry that makes an older game like UN Squadron stick out in a player's mind. There also aren't enough unique stages like the Gradius III bubble-level (not the best example, but quite a few non-shmup fans, including my fiancee, seem to remember that one years after playing the game) to make things stand out. Newer shmups' excessive attention to bullet-hell patterns makes things like boss design and level design far less of a priority, which couldn't be more out of tune with the expectations a lot of American gamers (not just casual dumbshits, mind you) have about the games they play. While Death Smiles seems to be loaded with crazy and exciting eye-catching shit, I would argue that the creepy lolita shit juxtaposed with the gameplay's hardcore shmupiness makes for a mixture that Americans just aren't going to get (or want to get).
Konami should just cut the bullshit and reissue Xexex as a download, if only to remind people of how beautiful and vibrant retro graphics could get, whilst providing a rewarding gaming experience. That game would have buried Axelay alive if it had made it onto a console.
What perplexes me is the fact that fighting games are still popular. I mean, they're rather simple and can be difficult, maybe it's the whole the multiplayer thing has rejuvenated it.
Syndicate wrote:What perplexes me is the fact that fighting games are still popular. I mean, they're rather simple and can be difficult, maybe it's the whole the multiplayer thing has rejuvenated it.
As a competitive fighting game player, it's pretty much as you say. Nobody in their right mind plays a fighter for the single player. It's all about the competition. While shmups do have somewhat of a competitive aspect, they don't have the same head-to-head mindgames and such that fighters do.
Not half as many people are scared of lolita as shmups.com thinks. I don’t know what to attribute it to though, perhaps a lot of old timers who remember when this was all tanks, helicopters and fields (and Sayo-chan and Cotton).
Modern arcade shmups are getting easier skill floors but this is only relative. Deathsmiles, Daifukkatsu and Mamoru-kun wa Norowarete Shimatta all had selectable routes and/or difficulties. But there’s little point complaining about difficulty in a 20-50 minute single player coin-op game. They need to be hard because that is the way the game makes money, people repeatedly play the game until (through a mixture of skill, memorisation and attrition) they beat it. And then they beat it again trying to perfect their run until they are satisfied or bored. And this can go on for years. Handing out any kind of free pass is utterly counterproductive.
In fighters the single player is irrelevant as they make money through competition, when active the machine gets credits dropped into it every 3-5 rounds. I don't know about rhythm games but I can imagine you won't be staying on it for 20-40 minutes, they are generally more expensive, and make most of their money through casual play.
I guess partly to blame is the philosophy of Bullet Hell is making itself look a million times harder than it actually is: Uninitiated spectators think you’re a bullet dodging legend weaving through a million bullets you’re tracking all at once, and players know you’re just tapping right and watching the top of the screen for anything you can’t stream. But as far as coin-op is conerned there's more money to be made from the latter than the former.
Last edited by Taylor on Fri Feb 26, 2010 12:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.
osrg wrote:Sorry for the long explanation, but I'd rather go into detail so people can understand instead of leaving open ends in terms of what I'm trying to say.
I found this interesting list, titled "Games for masochists". DOJ is number 2, Futari is number one, and it's implied that there would be more CAVE games on the list, but he limited it to two to stop them from taking up the whole list. It also contains this gem: "Also, I'm only considering the most difficult challenges in a game that the developers intend you to play (for example, credit feeding on the easiest difficulty for shooters doesn't count. If you don't unlock the True Last Boss, you've technically not conquered the game yet)." Looks like he knows what he's talking about.
12 pages encounting. I wonder what all the fuss is about.
a genre becomes niche when EA does not make that kind of game anymore. It has little to do with game design, but to do with money. Everything revolves around money.
This industry has become 2 dimensional as it transcended into a 3D world.
Not to mention technologically driven. Shmups don't technically push the boundaries of a console these days. What is the point putting all that power under the hood only for the game to be like Mushimesama?
This industry has become 2 dimensional as it transcended into a 3D world.
neorichieb1971 wrote:12 pages encounting. I wonder what all the fuss is about.
a genre becomes niche when EA does not make that kind of game anymore. It has little to do with game design, but to do with money. Everything revolves around money.
From five pages back
brentsg wrote:I cannot believe this has gone on 7 pages.
Shmups are a niche genre because not very many people like them.
/thread
This thread is about why so few people like them, and thus why they aren't profitable, as well as what we can do to fix those issues. DeathSmiles-US looks like it will help if we give it enough marketing, as aksys certainly won't market it enough.
Exarion wrote: Looks like he knows what he's talking about.
This is the first of these lists I've seen that doesn't include a mention of R-Type, and yet another among many that doesn't mention the arcade version of Gradius III.
Playing the older Gradius games certainly has the potential to become a masochistic exercise, as the player might end up going through the same easier stages a million times before losing everything on the 4th or 5th stages. Even so, I always have fun playing those games.
On the other hand, I tried my luck at the original Ghosts and Goblins in that Capcom Classics pack for the PS2 recently and will totally agree with anyone who puts that game series down as a form of self-punishment. Your armor is useless. Your weapons can barely stop some of the enemies. Almost any jump or attempt to climb a ladder is a big time risk. The game constantly loves to show you how much further your character has to go with that scrolling map display in the beginning. The last boss is only the half-way point to the real ending, etc.... After messing around with that and the equally-frustrating Trojan, I was ready to smash the controller against the floor. For some reason, shmups don't often make me feel that way. Even the thorniest memorizers I play don't punish me with cheap deaths I can't understand. I won't even touch fucking Battletoads.
neorichieb1971 wrote:Not to mention technologically driven. Shmups don't technically push the boundaries of a console these days. What is the point putting all that power under the hood only for the game to be like Mushimesama?
Futari Ultra mode does push the limits of the system, just not in the normal sense. Remember that the slowdown was removed in the 360 ports. That is because a large amount of the slowdown was due to the arcade hardware being unable to keep up with the amount of onscreen bullets. Anything that remains is where even the 360 can't keep up. Extra graphics, etc. would slow down the game even more, and make it much worse.
Taylor wrote:
gs68 wrote:I dunno why, but I take a little offense to "masochist" being used as a term for someone who enjoys challenging games.
Well, he did choose the xbox port for DOJ.
He's judging everything on the highest difficulty, so Futari is judged besed on ultra mode, and other games follow suit. I'd say it fits.
Masochism is treating pain as an end in itself... it's a silly term to apply in an overly literal sense to shooters, where the difficulty is there to be overcome, not used as some kind of self-inflicted mental torture. edit: unless you're fucked in the head.
"Unnngh!!! Shoot me down again you dirty, dirty sniper tank! Before I get that next medal!" *GAME OVER* "AWW YEAHHH" *new game start*
Last edited by BIL on Sun Feb 28, 2010 7:26 am, edited 1 time in total.
Futari Ultra mode does push the limits of the system, just not in the normal sense. Remember that the slowdown was removed in the 360 ports. That is because a large amount of the slowdown was due to the arcade hardware being unable to keep up with the amount of onscreen bullets. Anything that remains is where even the 360 can't keep up. Extra graphics, etc. would slow down the game even more, and make it much worse.
I doubt it REALLY pushes the hardware (the game engine can be just as well unoptimized). They probably just said: "so be it", considering it has been designed with the slowdown in mind anyway. I don't think we'll see this gen hardware pushed to the extreme in terms of 2D graphics (that would be insane and not very cost-effective). PixelJunk Shooter's physics engine is supposed to make neat use of the Cell's power, though.
The rear gate is closed down
The way out is cut off
