The future of SHMUPs.

[Teufel_in_Blau]

Real hardcore shmup fans though don't even care about new titles. They are happy with their pcbs and mame, and will play those golden classics for centuries to come. Even when VR takes off, there will be someone out there posting his garegga high score.

It's hard to go back. Yes, there are many interesting indie/ doujin shmups out there but seriously after playing something like Futari or Galuda 2, it's hard to go back to those rather basic graphics with odd and repetitive soundtracks. There are exceptions, yes, but very few and far between. It's like eating great steaks with Guinness for a long time and suddenly you are supposed to eat at McDonalds for the rest of your life and drink some of those terrible American lite beers.

[Squire Grooktook]

Real hardcore shmup fans though don't even care about new titles. They are happy with their pcbs and mame, and will play those golden classics for centuries to come. Even when VR takes off, there will be someone out there posting his garegga high score.

It's hard to go back. Yes, there are many interesting indie/ doujin shmups out there but seriously after playing something like Futari or Galuda 2, it's hard to go back to those rather basic graphics with odd and repetitive soundtracks. There are exceptions, yes, but very few and far between. It's like eating great steaks with Guinness for a long time and suddenly you are supposed to eat at McDonalds for the rest of your life and drink some of those terrible American lite beers.

Subjective I guess. Futari and Galuda were both very slow to grow on me, but Cho Ren Sha hard modes manic rng dodging grabbed me from the first minute and never let go. I don't recall ever even caring about the one background, let alone being bothered by it. Likewise, say what you want about shit aesthetics, but I'd rather be dodging Touhou's creative rng hell patterns then most of Cave's recycled boss danmaku.

Even in the hardcore community, there always seems to be this debate between people who either hold "aesthetics should never matter ever!" and people who think "aeshtetics really matter to everyone, they just don't want to admit it!". Really, it's subjective. Personally I would rather play a superior stick figure shmup with great pattern design then a flashy and well presented game with slightly inferior design. I can use my imagination for the rest.

[Kollision]

Shmups are the undead. They are dead, and yet still alive...

good one

and it makes perfect sense

[trap15]

but porting that and making sure it works on the majority of PCs is a monumental task.

They could port the Nesica version of AK Shin without any problems tho.

Yes, port the game that nobody cares about. Except for me.

[Doctor Butler]

Can't add much that hasn't been said already, but a vast number of doujin games are shmups. In fact, derivative bullet-hells are to the doujin-community what mediocre platformers and pretentious walking-simulators are to the western indie-scene. They're production has been ceaseless, so it's hard to call them "dead" with such a consistent stream of new content being released.

...It's like eating great steaks with Guinness for a long time and suddenly you are supposed to eat at McDonalds for the rest of your life and drink some of those terrible American lite beers.

It's like the nineties have ended all over again!

Yes, port the game that nobody cares about. Except for me.

Don't worry, I like Akai Katana Shin too.

[MathU]

Has anyone else noticed a surge lately in Western-developed independent shooters? I dunno if they're just getting more willing to spam their games on the forum or what but it seems like 90% of the new game news for a while now.

Are more shooters only a good thing for the genre? Most don't seem to be striving towards the quality exemplified by Jamestown sadly.

[Pretas]

Has anyone else noticed a surge lately in Western-developed independent shooters? I dunno if they're just getting more willing to spam their games on the forum or what but it seems like 90% of the new game news for a while now.

It's largely due to the mobile development glut and the fact that STGs (with touch cursor movement) are one of the easiest game genres to reliably pull off on a smartphone, next to puzzle and strategy games.

[mastermx]

Too bad STGs suck when they are played with a touch screen. Otherwise smart phones would have become the main platform.

[Knockworstface]

Too bad STGs suck when they are played with a touch screen. Otherwise smart phones would have become the main platform.

I disagree. The Cave games play great on iOS. Sky Force 2014, Raiden Legacy, R-Type, Tengai, Plasma Sky, Icarus-X and Sunny Tam's Danmaku games are all extremely polished and play great on touch screens. It's a much better platform than PCs. I don't get how people can play shmups with keyboards and mouse....but at the end of the day it's all a matter of opinion. I'm glad developers are seeing that touchscreen devices like iPads and iPhones are the gaming devices of the future.

I don't understand the hate that some people have for touch screen devices for gaming. If any platform is suitable for STG/Shmup games....it's the touch screen platform.

[mastermx]

Touch screens don't limit ship speed which breaks the game imho. And when they do limit ship speed it feels awkward to play.

It's a lose/lose situation. I still have stgs on my phone though, I just don't take em too seriously. Being able to swipe through patterns at a variable speed makes tough patterns easy.

[Pwnix]

You know you don't have to use a keyboard and mouse right? Most 360 controllers will work on Windows and pretty much any Arcade Stick made for ps3/360 will work on PC iirc. Also the Keyboard isn't too bad. It works for Touhou, I mean it's generally (at least in Touhou) like two buttons and the directional keys. Using the mouse would almost certainly be weird though. I suppose controller support may not be super common but I don't know. That can be gotten around too with joy2key or any other similar software. Oh and while I'm here, now that I've looked into the doujin scene a bit I would like to know what everybody's preferred doujin shmup purchasing service is. Where should I go about buying them? I'm not afraid to navigate sites with no English support just fyi.

[JBC]

I feel like SkyForce 2014 on iOS is a decent indicator of the future of shmups, like it or not. It's not a bad game really, but could use some improvements. No IAP for one thing.

I found myself getting bored of the game's natural progression & wished for more variety in certain sectors, but it still reflects the potential of the modern shmup. The modern shmup being the one that can hold market interest.

[Squire Grooktook]

Does anybody have any real data about how recent digital distribution doujin/indie titles like Crimzon Clover, Ikaruga, Astebreed, Resogun, Jamestown, etc. actually did? I keep hearing all this doom and gloom, but we've very recently had a batch of fantastic titles, and no one seems to be able to provide any remotely concrete data on how much of a profit they made vs how much they expected/needed/wanted/etc. It's always just a nebulous "they did bad". What is bad? What would good have been? Source please.

Question probably extends to most of the shmups that have been sold for cheap on the internet for a while. Gundemonium? Exceed? Ether Vapor? Alltynex? Not expecting these games to sell like hotcakes, but the fact that their localizing publishers haven't been driven into the poor house seems to contradict a lot of the "THE FUTURE IS IN THE PAST" end of the world panic in here.

[DoomsDave]

Sky Force 2014, Raiden Legacy, R-Type, Tengai, Plasma Sky, Icarus-X and Sunny Tam's Danmaku games are all extremely polished and play great on touch screens.

Excuse me?

It's a much better platform than PCs.

Come again?

Touch screens don't limit ship speed which breaks the game imho. And when they do limit ship speed it feels awkward to play.

It's a lose/lose situation. I still have stgs on my phone though, I just don't take em too seriously. Being able to swipe through patterns at a variable speed makes tough patterns easy.

This^

I can 1cc Futari Maniac on my ipad nearly every run and struggle to get to the 5 stage on Original on the 360 Arcade port.

[Pwnix]

No limit on ship speed? I never had thought about that before, but that would totally screw everything up. I guess it would be difficult to do a phone shmup without limiting the speed since it has to keep up with your finger. I know it's a popular opinion, but I hate how much focus there is on phone games. I just don't want to play games on my dumb phone. Phone games are like the shitty entry level into games for people who missed the "window" so to speak to get on the game train as a kid. It's acceptable gaming for the layman. It's unfortunate most of them don't move on to proper games with proper controllers and proper fun.

[TransatlanticFoe]

I don't want to play games on hardware that's going to be fucked after 2/3 years and certainly not via a shitty touchscreen interface (which is fine for slow-paced games but useless for anything where you need you fingers to not block the screen as you play).

We have increasingly huge high definition screens, and everyone wants to use a tiny handheld screen. We have immense power in local hardware and everyone wants cloud services. WTF is wrong with people?

[DestroyTheCore]

Let's face it: the shmup community is all about purists who live in the past and refuse radical changes.

[Pwnix]

I can't comment on how true that is for the community as a whole, but I want people to experiment with the formula and be creative. But not all new things are a singular entity under the banner of "new". I think what is new now (to an extent) is counter to what a lot of people want but is not necessarily counter to what makes money. Phone games can be fun and they are what they are. Porting games to phones however, is ludicrous. It never works. It didn't work back in the day with the N-Gage (which was still more suited to playing games than modern day phones) so it won't work now.

[Cata]

Honestly indie games are the most innovative and creative games imo so I'm okay with the indie scene taking off

[pegboy]

All I will say is that gaming on a phone with a touchscreen (or any device with a touchscreen period) is a fucking joke. If that's the future for shmups I'll happily stay as far away as possible and continuing playing the hundreds of classic games already out there.

[Despatche]

Does anybody have any real data about how recent digital distribution doujin/indie titles like Crimzon Clover, Ikaruga, Astebreed, Resogun, Jamestown, etc. actually did? I keep hearing all this doom and gloom, but we've very recently had a batch of fantastic titles, and no one seems to be able to provide any remotely concrete data on how much of a profit they made vs how much they expected/needed/wanted/etc. It's always just a nebulous "they did bad". What is bad? What would good have been? Source please.

Question probably extends to most of the shmups that have been sold for cheap on the internet for a while. Gundemonium? Exceed? Ether Vapor? Alltynex? Not expecting these games to sell like hotcakes, but the fact that their localizing publishers haven't been driven into the poor house seems to contradict a lot of the "THE FUTURE IS IN THE PAST" end of the world panic in here.

this is a real question that needs to be answered. the hearsay needs to stop.

Let's face it: the shmup community is all about purists who live in the past and refuse radical changes.

only a very tiny minority here can even remotely be considered "purist", and it may as well be a different word to you at that point. on the other hand, all human beings generally just take what someone says and runs with it, regardless of their own possible feelings on the subject.

all human beings also have some hidden directive that forces them to "date" whatever they're seeing or doing and completely "move on" from those things after a certain time, regardless of anything and everything. almost every time, a bandwagon is formed from this that nearly everyone will try to follow, and nearly any attempt to reexamine "dated" things is forbidden. aside from the very few exceptions (which are always considered to be "produced in a bubble"), only certain works that are deemed as "retro throwbacks" can even dare to escape this.

the directive won't even allow actual retro throwbacks most of the time, only pale imitations of... typically caused by another not-so-hidden and far more terrible directive known as nostalgia.

[Captain]

I've always wondered if there are people out there that appreciate euroshmups.

Does someone actually like all of their features, or do they just not know better? (of course, there -are- good euroshmups, but most people agree that non-euros are still better)

Would this mean that the developers of such games just have no idea what the masses want? (shmup players i mean, since they aren't the most prominent "mass" when it comes to gamers). I wonder how many devs never even played a proper shmup, or make it based on what they think sounds good, not based on how it affects gameplay or what the players generally think about it.

The standards for a good shmup aren't defined enough. This is the biggest problem. You can have a well-meaning developer making a failure of a shmup simply because he doesn't know that he's doing anything wrong.

[nasty_wolverine]

Whenever "doom and gloom of shmups" topic comes around i ll just paste this again.

what killed shmups is probably a very broad question. I can probably try and answer but, well lets see. I ll try to keep the events in chronological order, but probably not be correct.

PHASE 1
(1985 - 1990) - the FLOOD of mediocre or euroshmups during the early 90's, trying to jump on the success bandwagon of rtype, gradius and darius.
(1993 - 1997) - advent of danmaku, raising the already high barrier for entry even higher.
(1995 - 2000) - the inherent 2D-ness of the genre blocking it out of the PSone console era into the current gen. console outputs have been way less than the previous generations
(199? - 200?) - death of the arcade scene
(2000 - 2005) - hardly any localisation of games in the PS2 era

At this point, most people almost forgotten what shmups are. except a few that go "yeah those kinda games, those are old as shit. was pretty fun though". And a few, that have been with the genre for a very long time, and probably looked as crazy people who play outdated games.

PHASE 2
(1997) - War was beginning. Malc founded "the shmups forum".
(2000) - Mame comes around, apparently a lot of shmups were added around 2000, include battle trilogy, ddp, batsugun and a few others.
(2002) - Touhou comes around, embodiment of the scarlet devil was released around 2002, and lots more fanmade and canon games to come.
(2004) - Gradius V for the PS2. Gets on mainstream rankings, which only Ikaruga had the privilege to.
(2007) - THE HARDEST BOSS EVER video
(2008) - Ikaruga on XBLA
(2009) - first of the CAVE localised games, Deathsmiles. Bunch more to follow, with some being region free.
(2011) - Jamestown released. probably the first good euroshmup that was moderately successful.
(201+) - lots of shmups being localized. We got crimzon clover. then around 2013 shmups started getting on steam. good number of western indie game devs getting in on the action. we got resogun on the PS4, as a free gamefor PS+ members. other companies taking interest in shmups like Qute who made ginga force and eschatos. we got caladrius.

So, shmups didnt get "killed". it just moved underground. you will find a good game if you know where to look. and, we are getting a small but steady supply of new games too.

[qmish]

to not block the screen as you play

When i played Cave releases or Rayforce on my tablet, i've always chosen medium or small display size, so i could move fingers on area below it and that works in that way.

Still, i should mention that i'm huge touchscreen lover because of non-gaming reasons (electronic music apps - synthesizers, drum machines etc. are mostly the main reason i'm attached to tablet. I can open up a thread about that if needed, though guess if someone is into making music here - then they are more into DAWs/trackers or digital/analogue hardware, but whatever. I'm trying to take every interesting side from everything).

p.s.
And i can't say "ultrafast finger sweeping" is perfect working cheat

[Vetus]

I wonder how many people even gave Eschatos a try within this very community?

I did. And it's from the best shmups I've ever played. A big bonus is the old games they have previously released for Wondeswam (which they should be also released for 3DS eShop).

[Squire Grooktook]

I cannot put my love for Qute into words worthy of them.

Let's just say I like Eschatos and Ginga Force a LOT.

[DestroyTheCore]

What make Qute's games so great? I watched videos of Eschatos and Ginga Force and they both seemed alright.

[Squire Grooktook]

What make Qute's games so great? I watched videos of Eschatos and Ginga Force and they both seemed alright.

Basically, they manage to straddle a line between danmaku appeal and a more "classic" style. You have a tiny hitbox, and there are big bad dense patterns and other cool stuff like that, but you spend more time zipping around the screen at high speed whilst dodging fast patterns and maintaining constant offense then you do hunkered down at the bottom of the screen micro dodging like most danmaku shmups.

The enemy designs are also very unique: Rather then just show up and fire at you, they zig zag, dive, get up close and personal, bounce, teleport, and do all sorts of crazy aggressive movement patterns that are more reminiscent of back when devs knew how to make things other then bullet patterns hard. You find yourself not just strategizing around bullet patterns, but movement patterns as well which is very refreshing and gives a lot of the battles a unique flavor. This also extends to the boss fights in Ginga Force, where they tend to have lots of over the top movements and non bullet hazards (rockets, drills, taito bendy lasers, grenades, running you over in a tank, etc.)

Pacing is crazy. Eschatos in particular is structured sort of like Alien Soldier minus the boss rush aspect. Every wave of enemies is considered a "stage" and the faster you kill them, the higher your score and the more quickly you go to the next "stage". As a result, you can sort of "speed run" the game to score high, which kicks the pace into overdrive. The break up of the standard stage > boss > stage> boss linear routine also makes things feel a bit more adventurous and unpredictable. The stages also become longer and harder as the game goes on, creating a sense of escalation and rising tension (developer said this is what he was aiming for).

The scoring system in Eschatos is really clever. It gives you a multiplier for not letting any enemies in a wave slip by, which might sound a bit too simple but in practice is an amazing system since the whole game and its shield mechanic are heavily balanced around maintaining a constant balance of offense vs defense. Perfectly intuitive but deep and addictive as anything out there.

It's a bit hard to pick up on all this stuff in a video, but it's there alright.

Qute's games feel totally fresh. Neither a classic shmup nor an Ikeda styled danmaku fest. They're something new and innovative. And I want more.

[trap15]

Qute's games feel totally fresh. Neither a classic shmup nor an Ikeda styled danmaku fest. They're something new and innovative. And I want more.

So much same.

[Doctor Butler]