What will shmups be like in 10 years from now?

[Dave_K.]

Completely abandon the 1 credit 'scrolling adventure' structure (stupidly easy level 1 that is expected to be replayed every new game, followed by slightly less stupid but still easy level 2). People can take a challenge and play for score if the stages are short and you don't have to waste 30 minutes getting there.

So you are saying Deathsmiles type difficulty selection before each stage? Or are you saying shmups shouldn't have a difficulty curve at all? Otherwise I think what you are describing is a score attack mode.

[Vyxx]

Quite honestly this whole topic scares me.

[kemical]

shmups will remain the same.
The spirit of shmups will continue to live on and further influence other modern shooters such as FPS and TPS, trust me on that. Modern shooters will continue to get more and more like classic shmups / oldschool games.

[Aguraki]

No "Shmup": Seriously, the term sucks and is probably holding the genre back. I'm still pissed that "shooter" got stolen by the FPS crowd who already had a nice acronym, and you can't say "shmup" in public without sounding like a dipshit. We don't want these games to look like the genre for dipshits. Some marketing genius needs to come up with something better and get people saying it.

I always refered this genre as shoot'em up,and only recently I discovered the term shmups,which I agree sounds a bit lol(but more game/toy'ish?)

[Frederik]

Completely abandon the 1 credit 'scrolling adventure' structure (stupidly easy level 1 that is expected to be replayed every new game, followed by slightly less stupid but still easy level 2). People can take a challenge and play for score if the stages are short and you don't have to waste 30 minutes getting there.

I agree.

While shmups are rooted in arcade culture, I´m not sure if it makes sense to keep this structure for each and every title till the end of time. The concept of controlling an avatar, shooting things while dodging things still has a lot of yet unused potential, and I think there´s a lot of room to try out new concepts without watering down the basics. Here are some ideas, concepts and inspiration of what still really hasn´t been done (at least to my knowledge):

(Large wall of random crap nobody cares about incoming. I had too much free time and too much tea.)

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Gigantic bosses:
Warning Forever, Radiant Silvergun

Warning Forever is a very basic game, but with a very interesting premise - the bosses change depending on how you beat them. As much as I like the game as it is, I would love to see it fleshed out, with more graphical detail and single moving parts. Even more interesting would be if the round would never end - as soon as you destroy a part, a new, stronger or different one grows out. You could try to control what kind of beast you end up with. Recently I´ve been toying around with the boss rush in Batrider again, and it´s fascinating to find out in what many ways you can manipulate the bosses - if you don´t destroy them elegantly enough they suddenly start to get really pissed off (take the support helicopters on the Sky stage boss - if you only partially destroy them they start firing a very dense, nasty pattern that´s very hard to dodge).

Radiant Silvergun is another game that does this right. I just got to play it recently for the first time and was fully prepared to hate it - chaining scoring systems are one of my least favourite concepts, and building a game that requires chaining to even get your weapons powered up enough seemed like absolute bullshit to me. Oh well, Saturn mode pretty much does away with that, and I could focus in the one thing it DOES do right: Fantastic bosses. I especially like the one that keeps pulling in new parts after you destroyed the other ones. Or the one that starts of by trying to slam you with his giant arms. Or the one that traps you in a cross-shaped area. Or the one that basically is the entire stage - rotating around you, trying to crush you, while firing missiles as big as half the screen. THAT`S what I call a boss!

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Bite-sized challenges:
rRootage, Ketsui Death Label

I love score attacks, level select, basically everything that gives me small challenges that might at times be incredibly hard but still only a few minutes long. While I in general like the idea of "the better you are the farther you get" in arcade games, the consequence is that with growing skills each session gets longer and longer, until you have to grind through a full 2-loop game until you have a chance to beat your old score. As Rob says, why not start with the hard part right from the start? Another game that does this well has nothing to do with shmups: Trackmania. Instead of doing full races, you just have a short track that you have to master and earn medals to progress. I think I put more time into this game than in any other title recently, just because the structure of the game is so enjoyable. It´s also so easy to fire up the game, play for ten minutes and turn it off again. I don´t see why you couldn´t do a well-made shmup in the same style. I guess we already have level select for something like that, but these usually only serve as a training for the main thing.

It´s basically the difference between the original Super Mario Bros and Super Mario World: Instead of having to play through the whole game each time you sit down to play it, have some kind of level structure (as somebody mentioned, something similar to Darius or Star Fox, but a lot more elaborate), maybe even a "overworld map". Beat level 1 on easy, unlock the easy path. Beat it on hard, unlock the hard path. You could even put in "secret exits": If you do some special tricks on the level bosses you could trigger an even harder, secret level/path. And you could continue from anywhere in the map without having to play through the easy stages all over again. That way the game could be order of magnitudes longer than your average arcade shmup, but you could still fire it up for a quick 20-minute session and progress through it.

Think about it: Has a save function and a map system really killed the jump`n`run? I´m sure you can find somebody who would say so, but Wario Land 4 or Yoshis Island are fantastic and often quite challenging games without an arcade structure. So I´m saying that while shmups are mostly arcade games, the "arcade" part isn´t necessarily what makes them so great (at least in my opinion), but the joy and elegance of playing them, getting high scores and surviving.

And again: This wouldn´t have ANYTHING to do with the quality of the shmup mechanics itself. Ketsui Death Label, aside from having a terrible life-unlock system, broken scoring and in general feeling pretty cramped, had at least an interesting take on this: A lot of different, short modes, ranging from grandma-easy to pretty tough, each with its own highscore table. Batrider is very close to feeling like a proper console game as well: More ships than your average fighting game (18 to be exact, each with 4 versions; and while not every ship is perfect for scoring, trying to master the game with each of these ships increases the replayablility immensely), four modes (easy, normal, hard, Boss rush), stage order select, tons of hidden bosses, as well as a lot of in-stage secrets.

Adding to that, each of the modes or stages could have a medal system, or grades, to give extra incentive to play them as hard as you can. Because really, you can laugh about achievements on the XBOX 360 all you want, but unlocking stuff can be a powerful motivator, even if the thing you unlock is barely worth the effort - just having ANY type of goal and reward ahead of you is more tempting than making up your own goals.

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Do away with creditfeeding:
Metal Slug Advance

This obviously isn´t a shmup, but to me it´s a great lesson about how to port an arcade series to a console. MSA is quite a downgraded game compared to the arcade entries: Smaller bosses, smaller explosions, shorter stages. However, they ditched the credit system and incorporated a lifebar. Sounds sucky, but since you only have one life it basically replaces around 3 or 4 lifes from the arcade games. The thing is - you can´t continue here. Well, you can, but start back at the last checkpoint, not spawn in the same place you died like in the arcades. However, you will lose every guy you saved and every card you earned (these cards are hidden throughout the stage and can contain powerups or unlock hidden parts of the game). This means that you can beat the game quite easily, but there are tons of rewards if you try hard and beat the stages without dying.

This is in sharp contrast to Metal Slug 3 for the PS2 - the game looked a lot better, with much cooler bosses; however, the game was so unbelievably drawn out, filled with "respawning enemy"-sections, these annoying zombie parts and an incredibly long last stage that only someone with the patience of a Moai head would willingly try to play through this in one credit. Let´s face it, a lot of arcade games and especially games like Metal Slug weren´t made to be played with just one credit, especially when they are that long - because what arcade owner would want a single player to play for an whole hour on just one coin? In consequence, at one point I just decided to creditfeed through it and then sold it pretty quickly later on. I wanted to really learn how to master this game, but the game was just so massive and brutal that I just gave up on it. (The only Metal Slug game that I really like playing on 1 credit was the first one, which is a lot easier to handle.)

What I´m trying to say is that when "mainstream" players CAN creditfeed, they most likely WILL, especially when they feel the game is unfair. Titles like Ikaruga get it kinda right: You start out with only one credit, which FORCES you to get better, at least at first.
I think this simple credit-unlocking system took care of the problem of "this game is only 20 minutes long LOL", and instead gave it the reputation of "hard as ball, oldschool action, frothing demand etc", because none of the reviewers were able to just blast through it from the get-go. When I play games on MAME I always turn off the continue option, because I know that when I get the choice to just continue I will most likely do it. I want a game that FORCES me to learn it, not gives it to me as an option. If life was all just about our own made-up challenges, doing the dishes would be fun as well.

You don´t have to make up your own honor code to not creditfeed right through the game. I firmly believe a lot of "modern" gamers today still love to be challenged - even the most "casual" games have their masters - people who break records on Doodle Jump or whatever. The problem is that when you start out with what basically is GOD MODE switched on right away, it´s very hard to learn enough self discipline to not abuse credits. I guess us long-time shmup players are so used to playing on 1 credit that we forget that almost all other games have a very different structure.

This is why I think that the future of the shmup on home consoles will have to find a different premise than the current credit system. I think the model of MSA is perfect: Unlock the next stage by beating the one before it. Or at least something other than "here you have unlimited continues, but promise me not to use them!".

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What´s that pink stuff?
Batrider, Radiant Silvergun

This is more of a personal gripe: The obsession with the bullets, in contrast to the enemies or the stages. That´s one of the reasons I can´t get into Touhou: A blooming flower of bullets explodes gracefully on the screen, fired by an enemy that is about as big as your average desktop icon. Sorry, but that´s not a boss to me, that´s a little graphical excuse for unleashing nicely programmed patterns, 90% of which is never even going in my general direction.

Now, I´m not saying that I don´t appreciate elegant looking patterns once in a while, but the obsession with just cramming as much stuff as possible on the screen is getting a bit ridiculous in my opinion. Death Smiles II smears the screen with pink stuff, giant rings, skulls, numbers and sperm - up to a point where it´s hard to see the scenery or the enemies themselves. Don´t get me wrong, the game looks kinda fun, but I´m not even remotely interested in playing it - just watching is enough for me so far. It just doesn´t seem like somebody is actually attacking, it feels more like a template for bullet cancelling. Some of the bullets move so slow it feels less like a shoot em up and more like watching a slimy strawberry pudding slowly sliding down a slightly unstable breakfast table (try saying that fast three times).

And after taking a little break from shmups in general, watching videos of Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu Black Label Arrange Megadeath Version 4.7 really leaves me baffled - there are about a million bullets onscreen, half of which seem to dissolve instantly, while the top half is reserved for around 12 different score counters and gauges, dominated by gigantic gold numbers so huge I could see them across the room with my glasses off and my eyes closed. It all looks rather... funny.

Again, I haven´t played either of those games yet, but I find it interesting how different it all looks from not only the early games in the genre, but even compared to titles from 10 years ago. In Batrider, the bullets travel fast and are aimed with deadly precision. No slowly crawling fluffly clouds of death, but really like something that has been shot from a turret. An even better example is Radiant Silvergun (again): Here you get assaulted by missiles, huge rockets, search lasers, flamethrowers and more, all the while trying not to be crushed between huge enemies and walls, boxes, cargo ships and tight corridors.

What I´m saying is that Cave games especially have started feeling less like a shooter and more like slot machines, with bursting neon colors, gigantic flashing letters and numbers going up in a way only Gigawing used to do. Especially the bullet-cancelling trend makes the bullet itself feels so abstract, almost like a weird fetish. I thought we had reached the limit with Mushihimesama, and then with Futari, but Death Smiles II and DFK are taking it to new extremes.

The dangers of the projectiles, the enemies and the surroundings in RSG or Batrider feel a lot more tangible to me, and I predict that the slower and (I tried to avoid the word so far but I need to use it now) more epic style of shooter like RSG, Gradius or Soukygurentai will return someday. I think that mediocre rehashes of 1942 or an XBLA port of Radiant Silvergun get more mainstream attention than a lot of Cave releases is due to the fact that while these names carry a certain mainstream status (like Gradius and R-Type), non-insiders can actually tell whats going on here. And we´ve seen a lot of releases on XBLA or other platforms that show that people still love to dodge and shoot (see: Geometry Wars and all its countless clones).

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tl;dr

I´m sure every gamer can understand the simple joy of dodging an attack while shooting enemies, which is why I´m sure that shmups will be around as long as there will be videogames, because it´s just such a fundamental game concept. The main problem we have right now is that the biggest remaining developer is producing a very narrow style of game - again, I admire the production values of Cave games, and I find it fascinating to see in what direction they are taking their games. But I think that there is a lot more still to do in the genre, and I´m positive that we can move away from the strict arcade way of handling a game without automatically ending up with a subpar euroshmup. Maybe Treasure will finally release whatever the next game in the RSG trilogy is - I certainly think we finally need another "epic" shmup.

And just throwing this in there - I still badly want a really good portable shmup. Not a squashed port, not a terrible quick rehash of an old series in bad polygon graphics, not something I have to navigate with my greasy fingers, but just a solid, deep shooter I can control with a d-pad while sitting on the toilet. Really, I´m not asking for much.

The End.

[TodayIsForgotten]

You seem to have missed the last ten years of FPSs. They are very different now than they were 10 years ago: essentially you're talking Goldeneye vs. Modern Warfare. The "levels" have actually gotten smaller, in that the single-player campaign is more linear. Multiplayer maps are indeed sometimes bigger, but they're sometimes smaller. I'm not going to go into all the specific changes, but trust me, the genre is very different now than it was 10 years ago.

Genres inevitably change, and 10 years is a long time in the videogames industry. Shmups will continue to change, as will all other genres.

If i bought a 1990-1996 Nissan 300zx and then i go and buy the return of the Z which was then the 350z (and now the 370z) or the mustang or camaro. They are way different cars even though they use the same moniker.

I understand what you're saying, but you're going to tell me that the same core ideas in golden eye aren't the same as today? It's not like we're comparing early wolfenstein/doom type games. Then ya, that is a way different game vs today. Adding in new weapons, new layouts and vehicles to ride only adds to the game, it doesn't change it. Adding in the ability to see with an HRV or the use of gravity alters the game which you could then say change it. But, how many games really do this? A handful vs the 100s that stay true.

Objectives of yester vs today are more realistic but an objective is an objective. Playing counter strike now will not feel dated. You fire a gun, you run around with 360 degrees of vision, you hide behind walls, you can crouch, run, knife and jump. You can throw grenades and flash bangs.

You can apply the above to shoot em ups with path select, graizing, powerups etc.

Saying things will change is the wrong word to use in my opinion with today's technology and evolution. Unless we go virtual/real... 99% of new ideas are fabrications of existing idea's. Unless shmups/fps see a complete redo. It's safe to say much of nothing will change other than new idea's to add to the existing core values instilled in said genre/games.

With the way the topic is worded it means to me what is the future of shmups. And the future is not going to be anything of significance.

[R-Type]

With shit like kinect, you'll be playing something like the matriX, and someone will try to shoot you, you'll dodge bullets like you were Neo and it'll establish the new foundation of dodge hells. Will it be fun? Maybe not, but it sure as hell it will be fun to wacth others play.

[Dragoforce]

Great post Frederik. I agree with you on everything except the last part. While I do enjoy the realistic feel of Batrider, I do think that the succes of Touhou games shows that people in general want flashy bullet patterns. It seems like a long time since we last saw any kind of intresting or cool boss design.

[neorichieb1971]

If shmups make it through 5 years I will be surprised. I'm waiting for the mass market to dive like it did in the Atari days. I'm wondering how many more gimmicks they can throw at us before people realize they are playing the same shit over and over.

I'm personally waiting for the TV you can climb into. That would be rad.

[Aquas]

shmups will remain the same.
The spirit of shmups will continue to live on and further influence other modern shooters such as FPS and TPS, trust me on that. Modern shooters will continue to get more and more like classic shmups / oldschool games.

I like this prediction. I am reminded of one of Lost Planet's bosses... shot missles from the sky in fixed directions, with the spread centered at you. Totally reminded me of a STG bullet spread.

Fuck it, Space Harrier remake.

[Obiwanshinobi]

I can't see console first person shooters becoming more arcadey and twitchy as long as they keep emulating mouse and keyboard with a joypad, which never will be quite up there. There's a reason why the likes of Quake, Tribes or UT never really took off on consoles. Develop some control methods adequate for the joypads AND FIX YOUR WRETCHED FRAMERATES, othewise you'll remain within the realm of shooters as sluggish as a snail on the slope, with "tactics" and "simulation" stickers tacked on for the sake of consolation.

[TrevHead (TVR)]

I too think console FPS gaming sucks due to me hating using a joypad instead of a mouse and keyboard. Imo most console FPS players use pads because thats how they 1st got into the genre with Halo. Its just the same with Cave iphone shmups, Ive seen lots of posts and comments from new iphone Cave gamers who say touch controls are so good that its much better then an arcade stick and that they cant imagine anyone using it over touch. Who knows in the future we might have a simlar situation with shmups and FPS atm, with us stick/pad lovers been the same as FPS m&k lovers a small minority and seen as stuck up elitists due to that fact.

As for joypad FPS games they too could go out of style. When kenect / move games take off and the tech is used to create rail shooter / FPS hybrids which if done properlly could be as quick and responsive as mouse and keyboard. We could even see multi platform online FPS gaming a possibilty with console and pc gamers evenly matched, unlike atm where tests showed crap pc players totally teabagging elite console gamers.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Cave iPhone games (which I did not play) seem to be a different story for, as I understand it, they have analogue controls as opposed to digital controls. Sticks, d-pads and keyboards are better for digital controls, but I don't have a problem with 2D shooter having analogue cotrols as those iPhone games appear to have. Everbody seems to agree that they have been successfully redesigned with analogue controls in mind.
Halo and its descendants, on the contrary, just keep trying to do something joypads are not terribly good at. Yes, you can , to an extent, recreate m&kb controls with a joypad, but to make your game even mildly enjoyable and accessible you have to make the pacing slow, the aiming more or less blatantly aided and so on and so on, ending up miles away from a twitchy, blazing fast action of Quake.
I found Twisted Metal: Black more akin to the aforementioned fast paced PC first person shooters than something like Halo or Black. Huge levels, silk smooth performance, projectiles with your name written on them reaching for you in glory of vapour trails and Doppler effect, crazy stunts, frantic jousting and all that.

[Demetori]

If they change anymore they won't be shmups. The only thing that will change is the path they choose to follow, I.E what console is the most profitable, etc. And I guess better use of said machines. Maybe new control schemes in the future?

[dieKatze88]

I think we're going to see a lot more like Otomedius, At least in structure.

For those who haven't bothered with the Arcade version, or arcade mode in Gorgeous, you get 3 stages and you're done. Sounds a little familiar? Maybe like those music games Konami pioneered 10 years before Otomedius? Yeah. Like that. The trick is the persistent data storage of the eAmusement network makes coming back for more worth it. You unlock something every time, win or lose, and the game lets you pick your starting rank. This could be the future for shooters (I too am in the "Fuck 'shmups'" category of people. Call of Duty is an FPS, and the next time I hear it called a 'shooter' I'm going to go to jail for murder) in arcades because of what it offers operators: consistency of playtime. If you D-Burst spam in Otomedius as Madoka (Because she's the only one you can truly reliably chain out for the entire game, although if you're clever with placement you could probably do it with Diol Twee as well), you can extend a stage time, but you still have a VERY finite amount of time on the machine. Operators don't make money when one player plays one game for three hours. I'm guilty of the crime, I used to sit in front of TGA's Gradius IV for hours on end making that game my bitch, although at least I paid a flat rate to get into TGA. In a "regular" arcade, where shooters are low priced games, it's even worse when one player plays the game for 3 or 4 loops and the operator only makes a quarter.

While Otomedius' big failure in the setup was the fact that all the weapon drops were entirely random, and there were only 4 stages to choose from (5 on the home version only, although half of the data is in the latest build of the arcade version, but attempting to run that data in the arcade version with some clever mods results in a crash 100% of the time) but I could see an Otomedius style game with 10+ stages and a system for giving you a "Persistent game" so to speak where you save and reload a single instance of a game, have path choices like Deathsmiles, and eventually reach the end stages of the game after 3 or 4 credits. The option would also be there for just quick play, so you could practice stages and then do your run after you warm up again. This would give operators the steady supply of shiny little coins that they need to stay in business, but still give players a rewarding and engaging experience. It was the first time to my knowledge anybody had tried such a setup in a shooter, so its not surprising that Konami didn't get everything right, but Otomedius does make the genre more suitable to the modern arcade which is much more expensive to run than it used to be.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Metal Black is a first person shooter (that's what "FPS" stands for) between the regular stages.

[gct]

Wait I think in 10 years shmups will be like Ketsui in MAME :x

[TrevHead (TVR)]

Wait I think in 10 years shmups will be like Ketsui in MAME

Na itll be 20 years before MAME devs dare touch it. And in 10 years guru will be posting vids on his blog of emulated DFK and future Cave games (which some poor sap sent him the PCBs) and poking fun at everyone else because hes not gonna share it with anyone else

[Ed Oscuro]

Wait I think in 10 years shmups will be like Ketsui in MAME

Haha, I was about to write the exact same thing...in 10 years everybody will think they're hot shit for playing ugly ass 3D shmups in MAME.

But can you get 100% frames in Gradius IV?

[Rozyrg]

I figure if the indie devs of today stick with it and keep making new ones, they could be pretty interesting by then. A little experience goes a long way.

Granted there isn't exactly the hyper-competitive climate there was back in the arcade days; but still...

[TrevHead (TVR)]

Granted there isn't exactly the hyper-competitive climate there was back in the arcade days; but still...

As long as there's money to be made from games theyll be competition. While shmups arnt as popular as 15 years ago there still is allot of competition nowadays. Infact moreso then before due to game development becomming easier allowing any tom dick and harry to make a shmup and release them for $1 or free on various gaming platforms. Take into account this and and the fact that most gamers can't tell the difference between the good and bad means that many a great shmup is gonna get passed over by gamers who dont know better (remember for most gamers 2D = ugly and out of date, hell even Deathsmiles 360 has been called ugly and belonging to the snes era by more then one reviewer / gamer)

Add into the fact that most gamers are totally spoilled with all these cheap games and free roms that justifying even a Cave shmup for more then $10 is nigh on impossible. Hopefully with shmups starting to get more popular especially in some review sites, more ppl will beable to appreaciate a good quality shmup over tat and be willing to pay a decent amount of cash for the best games. Just like what they do for new 2d / 2.5d supermario games on the wii.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Wait I think in 10 years shmups will be like Ketsui in MAME

Haha, I was about to write the exact same thing...in 10 years everybody will think they're hot shit for playing ugly ass 3D shmups in MAME.

But can you get 100% frames in Gradius IV?

The future is now.

[DEL]

Frederik wrote;

What I´m saying is that Cave games especially have started feeling less like a shooter and more like slot machines, with bursting neon colors, gigantic flashing letters and numbers going up in a way only Gigawing used to do. Especially the bullet-cancelling trend makes the bullet itself feels so abstract, almost like a weird fetish. I thought we had reached the limit with Mushihimesama, and then with Futari, but Death Smiles II and DFK are taking it to new extremes.

^Good points.

What you say about bullet cancelling in DFK is also relevant. The game starts to become more like a puzzle game with the bullet cancelling. Less about traditional dodging bullets. I'm not denouncing the game though. It can be whatever it wants to be....but does it want to be a shoot'em up?

[Obiwanshinobi]

I do feel that shmups keep evolving into post-shmups, Psyvariar and Vasara being prime examples of the process.

[Vyxx]

Granted there isn't exactly the hyper-competitive climate there was back in the arcade days; but still...

That's part of the problem imo.
Competition fuels innovation.

[TVG]

Cave soon abandons arcades and develops shallow and uninspired games, G.rev finally goes tits up.
The odd dev sometimes releases a doujin looking game once in a while, a bigger and more expensive game by a bigger name developper (like gradius V) but flops and nobody dares anymore. A few retro collections are made but no new games. Shmups become casual iPhone 45 games or part of minigames collections, arcades barely exist in japan.

[MR_Soren]

Halo and its descendants, on the contrary, just keep trying to do something joypads are not terribly good at. Yes, you can , to an extent, recreate m&kb controls with a joypad, but to make your game even mildly enjoyable and accessible you have to make the pacing slow, the aiming more or less blatantly aided and so on and so on, ending up miles away from a twitchy, blazing fast action of Quake.

I've tried, on numerous occasions, to explain how much more fun it was playing Quake on a computer than it is playing Halo on a console. Nobody gets it. The controls, the speed, the smoothness, the flow of the maps. Way better than any console FPS I've ever played. So, when I'm begrudgingly playing Halo and people are talking about how AWESOME it is, I'll try to be diplomatic. "Yeah... it's kinda like Quake... from way back in the 90s... if Quake was really slow, had a dumb armor system, boring maps, and awful analog joystick controls, but I guess I have to cut them some slack because this is on a console...?

Ugh. I must keep this in mind when I'm saying ignorant things about STGs.

Back to the topic, 10 years is a long time, and STGs are already a hard sell at retail. (Gonna punch the next person who says to me, "Shoulda been a $10 download!") I think it's going to take some clever gimmicks or great innovation for both arcade and boxed STGs to exist 10 years from now. Even boobs and lolis can only boost sales so much.

[MSW]

Shoot'em-ups will still be around in 10 years, pretty simular to how they are today.

Nothing needs to change, actualy continueing to keep them they way they are will make them more appealing...Especialy to mainstream gamers who have lost thier taste for the Skinner Box mechanics all to common in videogames anymore. Besides we already have new blood in the STG community, whom were way too young (or were not even born) back in the arcade hey day.

Seriously, even the interactive fiction genre still continues today...in a state of by fans for fans...and its way more nitche than us!

[Drum]

Halo and its descendants, on the contrary, just keep trying to do something joypads are not terribly good at. Yes, you can , to an extent, recreate m&kb controls with a joypad, but to make your game even mildly enjoyable and accessible you have to make the pacing slow, the aiming more or less blatantly aided and so on and so on, ending up miles away from a twitchy, blazing fast action of Quake.

I've tried, on numerous occasions, to explain how much more fun it was playing Quake on a computer than it is playing Halo on a console. Nobody gets it. The controls, the speed, the smoothness, the flow of the maps. Way better than any console FPS I've ever played. So, when I'm begrudgingly playing Halo and people are talking about how AWESOME it is, I'll try to be diplomatic. "Yeah... it's kinda like Quake... from way back in the 90s... if Quake was really slow, had a dumb armor system, boring maps, and awful analog joystick controls, but I guess I have to cut them some slack because this is on a console...

There are many cool things about Quake and plenty of problems with Halo, but Halo murders Quake in terms of core game mechanics. It's like comparing Darius II with Gradius II. Shame about the speed and stuff tho. Actually, Halo would probably make a better shmup than a FPS.

[Paradigm]

It can be whatever it wants to be....but does it want to be a shoot'em up?

Yes and that's exactly what it is. Ikaruga is also an STG.