(This is another portion of my unfinished review of Crimzon Clover. Since it was the first true Bullet Hell shmup I was going to be reviewing for newbies, I thought I'd add a quick introduction on how to play Bullet Hell and why you'd want to try. Alas, "quick" wasn't what it turned into turned out to be and the article is stuck in draft limbo at the moment, perhaps never to be completed, but here is an observation I still wanted to share)
I completely understand where Simon P. Sampson was coming from here. I used to have the exact same attitude before I rediscovered shmups and learned what a difference playing for score and limiting yourself to one credit makes. I ate slept and drank RPGs at one time. Bullet Hell seemed to me the ultimate in alien masochistic video gaming weirdness from Japan, even weirder than the game where you shove a giant finger into a mannequin’s ass.I spend more time looking at my own poop than I do reading [your shmup reviews], and I read -everything- on Caltrops. So, if you're going to go down this road [reviewing shmups], I think you should do some outreach by finding shmups with a broad or eclectic appeal, because the fundamental shmup model is just so repugnant to so many people.
The only shmup I ever liked was Raptor. Are there other quasi-persistent shmups? Are there stat-driven role-playing shmups with inventories and choices and sidequests and... XP? I'm never going to read shmup enthusiast press, but I will at least skim your shmup posts, so if someone has elaborated on the Raptor model I'd feel obliged if you let me know. Honestly though, I can't imagine why anyone would like the 'core' shmups unless they were doing speed. Though on speed, -anything- is fun and engaging and a radiant bridge to a truer knowledge of yourself and the world.
But wait a minute, dial the clock back a decade before the NES and Arcade gaming was huge in the US. Robotron was a huge hit and born right here in the old US of A. American kids in the Arcade were turning programming errors in Sinistar to their advantage. So why is it today, a generation later, Arcades have all but died out here in the States and the idea of Superplaying a game is regarded as something only “Japanese” gamers do? Why did our taste in games turn from white knuckled tests of our skill to slow-paced pellet-dispensing RPGs? Clearly there is still the desire for challenging games, witness the enthusiasm greeting titles like Serious Sam and Geometry Wars, the proverbial slushee machines in the middle of the post-half-life desert. What turned us into such pussies?
Then a couple days ago I learned a crucial detail from an “Until we Win” video and it all made perfect sense why the Nintendo Generations of Americans don’t 1CC. You see, being a little kid in the late 80s, early 90s, one could expect to get a new Nintendo game to own, once, MAYBE twice a year. Whatever game you ask mom and dad to get you you’re going to be playing that thing backwards and forwards day-in-and day-out until you’ve mastered it inside and out in your desperate attempt to stay indoors and avoid the yellow face and the reek of fresh air.
But there was something American kids could do with their Nintendos that Japanese kids couldn’t. An escape hatch from the 1-2 game rule. For a paltry $3, you could RENT a game, and it was yours for 3 days. Make no mistake, those 3 days were serious business. We had to squeeze as much fun out of the game as possible in that short period of time before returning it to the store and success was a matter of seeing every stage until the end credits assured us that indeed a winner was you.
So, if American kids are going to chew your game up and spit it out in the 3 day rental period, how do you make your game enticing enough for the kids to come back and turn it into their 1-2 games to buy per year? The major strategy at the time was to jack the difficulty way up on the American titles. (Bayou Billy, anyone?) Ha ha! Now the game is impossible for you to beat in 3 days, it will take you months to master the gameplay, and you have no choice but to buy it if you ever want to see the end credits.
Not so fast, developers. We were going to finish our rental experience with the end credits by hook or by crook. If your game was too difficult to master in a weekend, we took the sinister route- we cheated. The Nintendo generation doesn’t have the Konami cheat code memorized for nothing, guys. Even when the developers excised all the cheat codes from the final product, we had 3rd party devices like the game genie to screw with the game’s guts and bend its rules to our will. And if the game was an arcade port with unlimited continues. Psh! Bomb and credit spam and you’re done in a half hour. Going to the arcade, bring the same philosophy there. I want to see the end of Teeneage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I’ll just bring a roll of quarters. Continue, continue, continue…
But wasn’t cheating a GAME missing the point? Why would we even think of cheating as an option to pursue? Well, for most of the Nintendo generation, their first and most influential game was Super Mario Bros. So you’re a little kid, you barely have any hand-eye coordination, your friends are over, and you want to show off playing your only game. What do you do? You show them you know where the secret warp zones are located. “I’m so good at this game, I can reach the final stage without even PLAYING it.”
But renting games was illegal in Japan. If you were a kid who only owned 2 games, THOSE WERE YOUR ONLY 2 GAMES FOR A YEAR. Cheating your way to the end credits would get old fast, if you wanted your money’s worth you would have to master the game for real; then up your game by playing with arbitrary limitations, or if the game had a good scoring system, maximizing that score.
So with American kids renting new games every weekend and cheating our way to the finish, what games DID we choose for the honor of being our 1-2 purchased titles? Certainly not arcade ports, those games could be finished off in a half hour! Enter the RPG. The distant bastard offspring of the PnP Dungeons and Dragons, RPGs were all about killing hours and hours as you savored the mellow morphine drip of escalating stats. I remember feeling so slick when I subscribed to Nintendo Power magazine and got a free copy of Dragon Warrior 1. Who cared that the game sucked and was boring, it was hours and hours of stat drip and my _3rd_ game of the year.
Spend your formative years reinforcing the notion that RPG=good and suddenly you want RPG crap in all your games, even genres where the addition of stats and experience points and random chance to hit actively damage the gameplay experience (I’m looking at YOU, System Shock 2!) So sure, RPG stats in a reflex-based shmup. Never mind if the action is exciting and challenging, just bring on the XP drip and I’m golden.
It's interesting to ponder if the younger generations of Japanese gamers, the ones who grew up with the hundreds of titles available through Emulation, or for rental price equivalents off Console online markets, are going to end up abandoning shmups and 1CC arcade runs the way Americans with their rentals have. After all, while Japan is home to bullet-hell shmups, it's also home to the JRPG, the lowest form of videogame.
