Why shmups are such a niche genre

[Obiwanshinobi]

What i dont get is that run and gunners like Contra were and still are very hard games to beat. I would guess that new games of Contra sell a hell of alot more copies then the latest Raiden or Gradius game.

Contra: Shattered Soldier and 4 had all production values you could reasonably ask for, and yet hardly set the world ablaze. Personally I enjoyed Shattered Soldier a lot, but there goes a comedy review.

[gs68]

Personally i think there could do with been a few more easier shmups been made. And to everyone who thinks easy means a bad game, i would dissagre a game can still be fun and easy if designed properly.

Gradius Gaiden.

[Obiwanshinobi]

I think Rez makes for a relaxing shooty experience. This could be done in 2D too (maybe with some RayForce depth to it), but it should have a neat scoring and brutal rank system under the skin (without interrupting the journey with just one bullet).

[BIL]

...spiralling, ever present frustration forcing you to babble so loudly and so profanely that your elderly neighbour destroys her hearing aid for good and locks her door for a week...

Wow, that Shattered Soldier review is a concentrated wail of self-righteous despair. And incompetence. You can't use charge attacks during bosses, you say? It is a memoriser, but hardly an extreme one. If you're not able to stay alive while firing charge shots, it's not your memory failing you.

[gs68]

I think Rez makes for a relaxing shooty experience. This could be done in 2D too (maybe with some RayForce depth to it), but it should have a neat scoring and brutal rank system under the skin (without interrupting the journey with just one bullet).

If by "neat" you mean discouraging delaying layer transitions or boss milking, then sure.
Boss milking has caused me to stop playing Rez HD for score.

[lgb]

So. Redeeming features? We did enjoy the co-op mode for an hour or so, which we played along with another Contra vet who found the game equally disappointing. However, it was only in the company of one of our other friends, an abject hardcore gamer who claims his Jaguar is superior to the Xbox, that I started to encounter an alternative viewpoint to my own. "This is what defines hardcore," he proclaimed, hands aloft. "The fact that you don't like it doesn't make it any less brilliant!"

this had to have been made up

[Exarion]

Shoot 1up is starting to drop off in sales, though its still going strong, and is getting amazing reviews for an indie game. However, only one even mentions the idea of playing for score, which is the same one that also mentions the (rather simple) scoring system for the game. Have any of these reviewers ever been to an arcade? I think we're in an even worse situation than the people who run time trials in arcade racers. At least they can find their games in multiple arcades, unlike us, whose games are ignored in 200+ game arcades.

[gs68]

Have any of these reviewers ever been to an arcade?

They probably have...and then credit fed and called it a day.

[MyGameCompany]

Holy mackerel, Batman! It's been a couple of months since I've been on this board (been sick, been busy working on my latest indie game, etc), and I can't believe this thread is STILL going! 15 pages now! Wow!

[ATH-A700s]

Have any of these reviewers ever been to an arcade?

They probably have...and then credit fed and called it a day.

And then never bothered to go again and never gave the games they played another thought.

[Herr Schatten]

Iron mackerel, Batrider!

Fixed.

[Exarion]

I've come to the conclusion that most gamers are interested in much easier games than we thought. When attempting to introduce some of my MMO loving friends to valkyrie sky, they said the game was impossible (though they might have seen some of the game's later stages, which I think are worse than the second loop of a raiden game). Given that WoW has just become even easier, I'm going to have an even harder time convincing them to play an actual game rather than a time-based slot machine. However, my fighting game friends are interested in senko no ronde, though I've never played it and as such am not sure as to how much they would like it.

[toaplan_shmupfan]

It's likely that most gamers want their games to be fun (although often they are disparaged as casuals) throughout the game. Finishing a too easy game isn't fun, the game offered no challenge. Getting stuck in too hard sections too often isn't fun, the game was nothing more than an exercise in frustration and memorization rather than rewarding skill.

The objective, then, should be to try to find the balance between too easy and too hard for the gamers that want their games easier, while providing Ultra/Arcade/Mania type difficulties for the hardcore gamer.

One game that satisfied all those objectives, IMHO, was the Strikers 1945 release for the PSOne. Although the Monkey level had an insulting name suggesting it was stupidly easy, it still provided a very easy transition into the game (minimal shots at the start, all shots not shootable but very slow at the start) while still presenting a ramped up challenge to the later stages--1cc'ing the Monkey level still isn't going to be all that easy for anyone not familiar with a Psikyo type of shmup--that last Stage 8 boss still puts up a decent fight even for the Monkey level. As the levels got more difficult (Child, Very Easy, Easy) more shots appeared in shot patterns, shots got faster, etc. but still a fair and gradual challenge. Normal was a fair challenge. The harder levels still exist for those who have beaten Normal and still want more of the challenge.

The other approach I think was done well was the Genesis version of Twin Cobra. All the enemies, all the shot patterns with no reduction in bullets, same rhythmic timing for those shot patterns, but starting from Easy A the shots were very slow so as to actually be able to see and dodge the bullets. Easy B, Easy C, and Easy D provided gradual transitons to the game's default difficulty level, Hard A. Hard B through Hard D still existed for those who wanted faster enemy shots than Hard A already provided.

[dai jou bu]

However, my fighting game friends are interested in senko no ronde, though I've never played it and as such am not sure as to how much they would like it.

They probably won't like it too much unless they're very open-minded. Based on my experience, most fighting game fans aren't really interested in Senko primarily because they've been too accustomed at the Street Fighter standard setup that they can't be bothered to learn anything else. Either that or they want more melee combat.

You best lithmus test for these fighting game friends of yours is to ask first if they like Virtual On, since Senko no Ronde is essentially the spiritual successor to it. If they have an Xbox 360, tell them to get VOOT 5.66 and tell them to use the cypher or the gys-vok as both of them have danmaku-esque projectiles and were the ones used in the last match for Sega's big VOOT tournament held for it around 5 years ago.

[Exarion]

Senko no ronde used from gamestop was $2.99. Nobody liked it, including me. On the MMO front, valkyrie sky apparently has another reason for being unpopular: it's still broken. 360 arcade sticks cause your character to move up and left constantly, the default controls are unusable on both a hori stick and a madcatz stick, and attempting to remap them is near impossible due to the fact that the buttons are recognized differently on the controls menu and in actual gameplay. In particular, attempting to have shot/bomb/skill1 bound to B/X/Y resulted in them being bound to A/Y/B, and the defaults are A/B/Y. There are also plenty of bugged spawns that will fire from offscreen, get stuck onscreen, and do other weird stuff. The hitbox indicator is slightly off from where your hitbox actually is. There are also quite a few crash errors still present, including one that happens every time you try to fly somewhere unless you log in flying. And when the game crashes, the crash message won't spawn on top of the game window. You have to alt+tab to it, at which point it spawns many times, making a ping for each message spawned. This isn't even a complete list. Maybe it's a good thing they didn't try it, as it would probably hurt their perception of shmups.

Also, the novice of modes cave's games are rather accessible, if the person is willing to actually try and doesn't expect the game to let them win every time (unlike most games, most notably WoW). Galuda 2 allows the player to be hit 33 times before continuing, assuming you never get an energy item or an extend. Getting max use out of all of those bump the count up to a possible maximum of 129, and that starts in stage 3. I believe most gamers could handle a 1cc of that.

[Pirate1019]

[...] if the person is willing to actually try and doesn't expect the game to let them win every time [...]

You're talking about a creature of myth.

[shmupsorrow77]

Shmups are a niche genre because the shmup mechanics and game design sucked. I was a big shmup fan in the early console era but as a gamer I want to experience flying planes/spaceships in 3D with better graphics, leaving the gameplay in 2D is what killed shmups.

I moved on to games like Descent freespace 1 and 2 and those are the kind of "space battles" I wanted to experience.

The shmup community doesn't get it - games are about what we want to experience from our imaginations, not the abstract 2D meta-game of shmup land. Games are much more then the abstract meta game. The autistic shmup community never learned this fact, IMHO the hardcore 2D shmup fans who don't enjoy 3D shmups like Starfox 64 and Freespace 2 (PC) have a form of brain damage.

A game like Starfox 64 was is in my opinion where they should have pushed shmups to, if I were Konami I would have hired the starfox 64 team to see if I could reboot gradius in 3D. Starfox 1 for the SNES still holds up well today if you go back to it there is a lot of good ideas that could have been built upon.

[szycag]

IMHO (...) shmup fans (...) have a form of brain damage.

In my humble opinion, rape victims shouldn't have dressed so slutty.

[Kollision]

Someone kill me please

[shmupsorrow77]

IMHO (...) shmup fans (...) have a form of brain damage.

In my humble opinion, rape victims shouldn't have dressed so slutty.

There is a reason the shmup genre is now fringe, the shmup community is in denial. If you can't make solid money with the games outside of japan that means there is something wrong with the games themselves. The evidence speaks for itself. No complicated explanations are needed - the games just aren't as good as their competition.

[BIL]

No complicated explanations are needed

You're right about this part, at least. It's as simple as lameasses like you being the majority these days.

"games are about what we want to experience from our imaginations, not the abstract 2D meta-game of shmup land. Games are much more then the abstract meta game"

Games are much more than games. Right. And you're calling others autistic?

[Taylor]

Quality is directly proportional to sales.

[clp]

No complicated explanations are needed

You're right about this part, at least. It's as simple as lameasses like you being the majority these days.

"games are about what we want to experience from our imaginations, not the abstract 2D meta-game of shmup land. Games are much more then the abstract meta game"

Games are much more than games. Right. And you're calling others autistic?

[BIL]

Hey, all the other crappy posters in this topic turned out to be legit.

[szycag]

IMHO (...) shmup fans (...) have a form of brain damage.

In my humble opinion, rape victims shouldn't have dressed so slutty.

There is a reason the shmup genre is now fringe, the shmup community is in denial. If you can't make solid money with the games outside of japan that means there is something wrong with the games themselves. The evidence speaks for itself. No complicated explanations are needed - the games just aren't as good as their competition.

You seem confused, I wasn't refuting your bullshit argument, there's no need. I was just showing you how humble your humble opinion was.

[shmupsorrow77]

Quality is directly proportional to sales.

Every system has exceptions to the rule. Sales are a good barometer of quality, if they weren't games like God of war or Modern warfare would not exist.

If shmups were so fun then why isn't the community larger? That's right because shmups aren't giving the fun experiences players desire. No complicated explanation is needed. What's needed is to pin down why people who used to find these games fun no longer do.

[shmupsorrow77]

Games are much more than games. Right. And you're calling others autistic?

This sentence is proof that you didn't understand what I said, if I made kratos a big giant green dinosaur before the release of god of war would that ruin the experience for a lot of people? The meta game and the presentation are equally important otherwise we would all be playing pong or GTA and shmups with crude stickmen and hand drawn kindergarten art.

[Davey]

I was a big shmup fan in the early console era but as a gamer I want to experience flying planes/spaceships in 3D with better graphics, leaving the gameplay in 2D is what killed shmups.

I moved on to games like Descent freespace 1 and 2 and those are the kind of "space battles" I wanted to experience.

If that's the case, it was never the actual gameplay that attracted you in the first place, it was the atmosphere and immersion. That's fine, but why not play games from other genres that are better suited for that sort of thing instead of complaining about how shmups haven't catered to your tastes over time?

The shmup community doesn't get it - games are about what we want to experience from our imaginations, not the abstract 2D meta-game of shmup land. Games are much more then the abstract meta game. The autistic shmup community never learned this fact, IMHO the hardcore 2D shmup fans who don't enjoy 3D shmups like Starfox 64 and Freespace 2 (PC) have a form of brain damage.

What's wrong with abstract games? Do people who enjoy Tetris have brain damage? Or Bejeweled? Or video game adaptations of chess or poker? Not everybody who plays games is looking for an escape into an alternate world.

If you can't make solid money with the games outside of japan that means there is something wrong with the games themselves.

Not really, it just means they make relatively small-budget games for a small audience. A game doesn't have to be a mega blockbuster hit to be profitable.

If shmups were so fun then why isn't the community larger? That's right because shmups aren't giving the fun experiences players desire.

Or maybe it's because not everybody on earth is exactly the same, and different people have different tastes in stuff. Not many people like shmups, but enough people do to keep a few shmup developers in business.

[BIL]

This sentence is proof that you didn't understand what I said, if I made kratos a big giant green dinosaur before the release of god of war would that ruin the experience for a lot of people? The meta game and the presentation are equally important

I understood perfectly well what you said in your previous posts. You were disregarding shooters as games entirely. "Presentation" had nothing to do with it.

Shmups are a niche genre because the shmup mechanics and game design sucked.

Do you have some form of brain damage?

[AraraSPAMWitch]

Anyone who uses the word "metagame" seriously in a sentence is a blubbering idiot.

IMHO