"What's so great about shmups anyway? I finished this in 25 minutes."

[72.8% Water]

It's beneficial to us fans that these Cave ports sell well, so I think it is valuable to share, for the newbies or the curious, a little bit about what makes these games so cool. The article that got me playing shmups is this gem below:

http://insomnia.ac/commentary/arcade_culture/

He talks a little about what arcade games are all about, why there is less crap and a higher percentage of great stuff in arcades when compared to the library of a console, and in the meat of the essay he talks about why it is so important not to credit feed if you want to enjoy the game, and even how this might explain why arcades stayed alive longer in Japan than everywhere else.

What got you in to shmups, folks, and what do you love about them?

[Slurp Dog CDXX]

I've loved shmups ever since the SNES days. R-type was my jam. I think a big part of it stemmed from being pretty competitive with my friends in school, in the days before online play, so it was easy to just take a picture of the TV, bring it in and brag about our scores.

Also, I've always really loved the idea of mastering a game. Not just beating it, but really digging super deep into it and dissecting every tiny thing about it. Shmups are really appealing for that aspect too. It's also why I love fighting games and have a knowledge of the Souls games that can only be described as encyclopedic.

Plus, there's the challenge aspect. I can enjoy easy games, sure, but nothing satisfies me like really hard games. Just the feeling of having accomplished something worth being proud of, or the rush of having that one time where everything just goes perfect.

[squerc]

I am pretty sure that it all comes down to what age are you,I am 28 now and I have been lucky to go to the arcade when it was still a thing,in my country on the place we hang out when we were kids(8-13)we used to have 2 arcades that were changed every 2 months or so,and everyone was really hyped everytime a new one would come,and we alwais finished them all,no matter how many coins we needed.I remember mortal kombat,I remember metal slug,tumblepop,pang and others,well the best times happend when some ♥♥♥ shmups were available,everyone was so shocked of how many bullets there were on the screen,and back then just beating the first 2 levels with a coin was a huge task,well I never forgot those moments and now that my videogame experience is much wider I find out that all the games can be done with 1cc,the task was not even imaginable back then but still some rare cases around the world were able to perform in what I feel is the pure essence of skill in videogames,and I alwais wanted to be that one but I soon realise it's a bit too much for me,mostly now that I feel I don't have the reflexes that I had 10y ago,but the magic of these games will alwais be forged on my mind

[Pawnstar]

It's kinda addictive, and one of the "impossible games to beat" when I was a little kiddo. Some of these games still remain impossible to me though, lol

One achievement I am particularly proud of is the completiton of the danmaku game B-Wings 15 years after I last touched the game. It was on emulator of course, but still, the satisfaction of beating a childhood game is great.

[Fredrick2k3]

I am a big fan of the article in question, but you are going to get hate for it.

[dart monkey]

"The starting point of this essay then -- and make of it what you will -- is the observation that games released in the arcades are of a much higher quality, on average, than games released for the home console market."
Any credibility this article might've had went out the window with this single sentence. Claiming that arcade games are somehow inherently superior to console games is just plain stupid.

[Konky]

Its more about beating the game without a single continue and then getting a high score. It is about score than "completing" it.

[cyxceven]

Originally posted by Spoose:

"The starting point of this essay then -- and make of it what you will -- is the observation that games released in the arcades are of a much higher quality, on average, than games released for the home console market."
Any credibility this article might've had went out the window with this single sentence. Claiming that arcade games are somehow inherently superior to console games is just plain stupid.

And yet, they are. Checkmate.

[FireShark]

Originally posted by Konky:

Its more about beating the game without a single continue and then getting a high score. It is about score than "completing" it.

Score is one way to look at it, but for me the challenge and replayability are my favorite.

Currenlty there is a little series called Dark Souls that has kinda made "hard" games popular again, and to some extent the recent popularity of "rogue-likes". Anyone that enjoyed the challenge of Dark Souls but hasen't really gotten into shmups owes it to themselves to learn about this genre becuse they would be missing out of some of the best games ever made.

[Red]

Originally posted by cyxceven:

Originally posted by Spoose:

"The starting point of this essay then -- and make of it what you will -- is the observation that games released in the arcades are of a much higher quality, on average, than games released for the home console market."
Any credibility this article might've had went out the window with this single sentence. Claiming that arcade games are somehow inherently superior to console games is just plain stupid.

And yet, they are. Checkmate.

Producing a game and publishing it on arcades is a far harder thing to do than publishing a game on steam nowadays. Of course arcades have less ♥♥♥♥♥♥ games overall because their game count is immensely smaller than any other current platform.

The freedom Steam and other digital stores give to developers is still a far better thing than the opposite, even if this means having ♥♥♥♥♥♥ games being published along with great games that would otherwise never see the light of day or require the developer to sell his IP to a big company and have his game ruined by the likes of EA or Activision.

[Not Root]

So what he's arguing is that Sturgeon's Revelation is less applicable in arcades? True or not, how is that useful? If you take the concession of entirely ignoring redemption and prize games, but not shovelware targeting those that don't even call themselves gamers, he's technically right... for all the wrong reasons, and in such a way as to make the claim pointless.

Arcades today really don't have a serious claim to being a superior medium, not here anyway. Their greatest strength is as a social activity*... which is useless if you can't get someone in the door in the first place. They're inherently resistant to long campaigns, complex story, complex controllers, single-player games, saving your game (a HUGE one -- more on this in a moment), slow pacing, immersiveness in general... there are entire genres that are thriving and prolific on PC and/or consoles that are effectively off-limits to arcades, and the reverse is largely not true.

Initially, consoles were similarly restricted, but due instead to hardware**. Massive arcade boards could load up on ROM, RAM, and SRAM to store however much they please. Consoles had to work with tighter profit margins and smaller form factors, severely limiting the data size of the game and therefore its overall playtime. This made the expensive SRAM and its corresponding battery unattractive as well.

Then there was a turning point. Advances in ROM density gave consoles a hell of a lot more storage space to play with, and this elicited a response from developers. Games, simply, got bigger. Difficulty curves became shallower, not due to games becoming easier, but because it takes longer to move along it and there's more to do along the way, a wider variety of challenges to train on. Consoles (and the PC) suddenly could do everything arcades could, and an order of magnitude more.

Bigger games meant you really should have a way to play through the game in more than one sitting. Suddenly, that SRAM was much more attractive. Developers worked in the ability to save your game, come back tomorrow and pick up where you left off. Out of a 12-chapter game where each takes a good hour, you could do chapters 1 and 2 on Monday, then on Tuesday (or, hell, next week) skip past those and go straight to chapter 3.

And that took away the primary motivation to credit-feeding. When you eat a bullet and get faced with that countdown, it's an ultimatum -- you can go back and re-do everything you did before, or you can accept (or buy) a handout; there is no alternative. But if instead you get to return to a previous point in the playthrough, that changes. Failure no longer means a playthrough simply ends***. When the Cyberdemon makes impressionist art out of your entrails, you don't give up on the whole thing or submit to a magical health refill in the middle of the fight. You reload your save at the start of the Tower of Babel and jump directly to locking horns with him anew. You get no ladder, but your grip slipping doesn't translate into you falling off the building entirely. You hone your skills and make progress through the game on your own merits, but faster, because you're not spending most of your playtime constantly repeating what you've proven a hundred times you can do trivially. And for the same reason, it's easier to stay motivated and keep coming back.

I haven't addressed difficulty. Home games have struck a compromise between coddling the player and demanding elite skill. That compromise is choice -- difficulty settings. MOST games integrate a "You will die. Constantly." setting. Gamers go for this. There's actually an attitude that, usually if you're playing on easy, you aren't really accomplishing anything and just there to see the sights****. When you want to achieve something, you crank it up. The game gives you the option of having it try its damnedest to reduce you into a fine paste, and there's usually a number of options in between.

But are our hard modes up to arcade standards? Well, there's a problem. How in the HELL do you compare, just for examples, Metal Slug, to Doom? Making a useful judgement about the relative difficulty of two games that lack a host of fundamental game mechanics in common is simply impossible. Now look at high-level play on home games: they're almost universally in genres that don't exist in arcades. So, that's a question that, really, can't be answered. But I like to think that, since neither market has a motivation to put a "cap" on its highest difficulty options, things are basically even.

----

* To this end, western arcades ultimately killed themselves. They turned their back on video and pursued the short-term profit of redemption games, both alienating their old fanbase and cultivating a bad reputation among parents. This never happened in Japan, probably for dozens of contributing factors I won't even begin to get into. For us, there's still hope -- "barcades" and similar are popping up in most major cities, specifically targeting adults and fielding a variety of games from the 90s and earlier. They're making a killing.

** PC was a different story, nearly from its inception having big hunks of RAM and full-blown hard drives sporting tens to hundreds of megabytes of fully writable storage, putting even cutting-edge arcade hardware to shame, not to mention getting CDs and DVDs before anyone else. And, indeed, it was the first platform to boast long, involved games and robust save systems. But, for much of the 90s it was an incredibly niche system, due to the expensive (and weak) hardware and general lack of publicity (because it lacked a vendor with a gaming interest -- IBM and the cloners were entirely dedicated to productivity and business applications). By the time it started to get noticed, it was VERY late to the party -- the shift towards long-term play happened years ago.

*** Outside of made-for-arcade, permadeath works (when it works) because the game includes an additional mechanic that makes each playthrough significantly different right from the outset. You're not fighting the same enemies in the same pattern; each new start immediately greets you with new discoveries.

**** And there's nothing wrong with that. His tone irks me -- committing to overcoming challenges should not be a cost to entry. A game should be whatever it wants to be, and people should play whatever they want for whatever reasons they want.

[Not Root]

To answer the question directly: during my first stint in college, the lounge off the cafeteria had a cab with Strikers 1945 II in it. I enjoyed it, and turned to MAME to practice without coin (broke college studient!), which led to branching out and an interest in MAME itself and emulation in general. While exploring imperfect emulation, particularly of early 3D hardware, the two combined, leading to me and a friend credit-feeding through Radiant Silvergun, without sound, running at about 40% speed, in the middle of one of the school's computer labs. Bullet hell as a whole has been a growing interest of mine ever since.

[Lime Cultivist]

I suck at shmups, but for some reason I can't stop playing them. Maybe it's a balance - I'll play a really easy game like Super Metroid and then switch over to a shmup for a huge challange. One of the first games in the genre I played was Xevious. I don't remember exactly how bad I was at it as a kid, but a while ago I played it again and got at least a 5x higher score then I could all those years ago, and that feeling of progression is pretty rewarding. There was also the time I beat Touhou 6 on normal 1cc for the first time - that was after months of playing and the moment of accomplishment was worth it all.

[72.8% Water]

Originally posted by Fredrick2k3:

I am a big fan of the article in question, but you are going to get hate for it.

Heh, I've been learning from icycalm for some years, I've seen it all before. Hopefully some that mull it over after the automatic defence mechanism relaxes will still take something useful away from it.

Originally posted by roothorick:

text

Compare like-to-like. Genres that are possible in the arcade are on average better in the arcade. Pointing out that you can't play a 100 hour RPG there doesn't change this. Even overall, despite the lesser variety, it's just harder to find a bad time in an arcade than it is in a store for console or PC games. Steam will let any old ♥♥♥♥ in :)

Also, the article wasn't written today, it was written almost ten years ago and is relevant for all of gaming history that arcades were relevant. Everyone knows arcades are on their last legs (even, as I understand it, in Japan). When the next great shmup is made it won't be made exclusively for the arcade. But it will learn from the arcade, or it won't be the next great shmup. And that's why the article is useful: to learn from the arcade.

[100% lob juice]

Originally posted by 72.8% Water:

It's beneficial to us fans that these Cave ports sell well, so I think it is valuable to share, for the newbies or the curious, a little bit about what makes these games so cool. The article that got me playing shmups is this gem below:

http://insomnia.ac/commentary/arcade_culture/

He talks a little about what arcade games are all about, why there is less crap and a higher percentage of great stuff in arcades when compared to the library of a console, and in the meat of the essay he talks about why it is so important not to credit feed if you want to enjoy the game, and even how this might explain why arcades stayed alive longer in Japan than everywhere else.

What got you in to shmups, folks, and what do you love about them?

That article was written by Icycalm - who is a really controversial figure in the retro gaming community.

That said, I agree mostly with that article (the part I disagree with is the idea that you should NEVER use continues, it is good practice to use continues for well, practice). I agree with most of Icycalm's articles actually, it's just a shame that he's a genuine narcissist and won't calm down with the pretentious nietsche ♥♥♥♥.

Also, complaining that an arcade game is "too short" is like complaining that a poem is not as long as War and Peace.

[100% lob juice]

Anyway I love arcade games and shmups for their "instant action" - there is no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ like cutscenes or grinding, you just get straight to the exciting gameplay. They are videogames in their purest form, and I love them for that.