Why does no one like shmups anymore? I get why we all find 80s shmups boring but in the 90s bullet hells came out and saved the genre from stagnation.
Why does no one like shmups anymore?
Why does no one like shmups anymore? I get why we all find 80s shmups boring but in the 90s bullet hells came out and saved the genre from stagnation.
Ikaruga is that true shit
Lots of people like them. But no people will admit it because the genre has been appropriated by vile NPCs.
Bullet hell is what destroyed the genre, not saved it. If you look back you'll see tons of shmups that were incredibly mainstream going all the way to the birth of the genre, Carol Shaw's River Raid, one of the best and most popular games on the Atari. Gradius, UN Squadron, Abadox, R-Type, everyone played these games. Then Cave showed up and blew it all to hell, shoving it into a corner that it never recovered from because there's nobody making shmups that actually have thoughtful design anymore, instead opting for bullet hell patterns because "muh challenge."
The trend was shmups crashing in general but got a life saving injection thanks to Cave that extended their lifespan into the 2000s. But cave wasn't enough to save the whole genre from turning to shit. Based Ikeda is only mortal.
Seems like this is a common problem lately. People take an old formula and ramp up the difficulty over 9000 making it unplayable for anyone who isn't a cringelord turbo autist. Probably just a fad that'll die out like POGs and emo music.
It's because it's a lot easier to make something "interesting" (in the broadest sense of the word) by making it difficult. Nobody will remember a game that's forgettable and easy, but if you take those otherwise forgettable levels and mechanics and just make them a billion times harder, people will flock to it to jerk their gaming ego and gladly eat it up as long as it isn't so badly designed that it's unplayable.
This "hard" game quickly becomes too easy for the dedicated players while still being too hard for most people, leading to the cycle that creates stuff like bullet hells, rhythm games, kaizo romhacks, and IWBTG fangames where the only point is catering to an autistic niche by making everything as difficult as possible, because that's way easier to create than a low-difficulty but unique and innovative game (which the designers don't have the skill to put out).
>Nobody will remember a game that's forgettable and easy
Counter arguement: Mega Man 2
will remember a game that's forgettable
probably dumbest sentence i read this week
Why do people blame CAVE for "ruining" shmups with bullet hell and making them fade into obscurity when 2hu is only shmup that normies even recognize?
I recognize that the vast majority of 2hu fans are posers that don't even play the games, but the small fraction that actually do most likely outnumber the playerbases of any other shmup these days
The other thing that came out in the 90s was first-person shooters. If you want to be in a spaceship or airplane, shooting at things, most people prefer something that feels closer to being in a a spaceship or airplane.
First person flying and shooting games, both flight sims and space sims, were already a thing since the 80s. Games like Star Raiders, Elite and Wing Commander just had a different audience than shmups.
>Why does no one like
Wow what a great way to start a thread.
>I get why we all find 80s shmups boring
Who is we? Xevious is a great game. That isn't even mentioning later well known horizontals like Gradius or R-Type. There are plenty of great games before Bullet Hells took over.
>Why does no one like shmups anymore?
It's a stale as frick genre that prioritizes memorization over any actual skill or problem solving. Also if you've played one, you've basically played them all.
I hated them with passion, then something clicked a few months ago.
Seems that no one likes shmups because there are multiple kind of hatred towards them:
If you don't know the genre and play some bullshit that mimic badly shmups, you say you hate them because 'they just kill you with a wall of bullets'.
If you start to play them and know them, you can hate them because the difficulty is very high (on the classics) because they are arcade games designed to be coin munchers.
If you know the genre too much happens.
If you are autistic enough to go for points beyond a 1cc, you hate them because 'learning' is not fun. The full extent of the jam is bullshit ihmo.
If join vg community to talk about shmups, you will hate them in not time because that thread is poison and nobody talks about shmups. (I learned that quickly and now I only talk shmups on vr).
If you love the genre beyond all this bullshit, you can hate them because new successful games are mostly fan games of old classics that don't innovate a genre that 'died' more than twenty years ago.
Shmups needs a break out success like Spelunky/Isaac that don't give a frick about roguelike players elitism and just make a fun game.
>The full extent of the jam is bullshit ihmo.
Full Extent of the Jam is one of the worst things I've ever read. It literally opens with a list of reasons why the game he chose for scoring is bad, and then just tells you to copy the frick out of other people. I don't know how anyone could get excited reading it
It works and people who want to progress like the pragmatism.
>Critiques his own game
Anyone who got good at a game can find dozens of flaws in it. Only people who play games superficially or just for story might think their game is flawless 10/10 gem basically stuck in honey moon phase
I add that is not bad to get autism for a certain game. For some reason I loved let it die, even if it was super repetitive. I also loved Bayonetta 1 enough to do 3 loop while upgrading difficulty (only stylish game that made me do that). And I also finish a lot Castlevania 1.
I understand the autism to become proficient in a useless endeavor, but it should not be a rule.
Autism for shmups games with almost 0 variance is the cringe bad kind of autism though the illusion of skill and challenge
>the illusion of skill and challenge
I like bullet hells because I think the patterns are pretty.
>f you are autistic enough to go for points beyond a 1cc, you hate them because 'learning' is not fun. The full extent of the jam is bullshit ihmo
You forgot the majority of players who hate them because they KNOW the genre inside out , they are good they have 1ccs and scores and understand the empty repetitive dry boring essence of the genre which, like speedrunning, revolves around repeating runs until a goal is reached to then start repeating runs to reach slightly harder goal. Those runs being samey as frick. It's not the learning that's bad but the repetition of run attempts which play out 99% the same over and over minus the parts where you blow up and die, and this groundhog day loop becomes stale as frick but necessary to progress. Running the same inputs over and over in the same way is disgusting stupid game design which lack the variance that other games provide while also providing challenge and learning requirements, fps or fighters or rts need practicing and memorization but they keep each "run" fresh due to pvp variance, there are surprises and a better balance between memorization and real time thinking and execution.
Tldr the shmup Genre has a harder time retaining GOoD players rather than stupid shitters who just hop games, never progress, lie about 2 alls and are in it to socializelikeric etc
>fps or fighters or rts need practicing and memorization but they keep each "run" fresh due to pvp variance
You have never been good at any of these if you think this.
I had like 100 sets vs a really good Q player on fightcade last week and each set had more variance, surprises, wtf moments and learning opportunities than my last 100 DOJ runs which were samey garbage ending around hibachi or big bee
I hate shmups too, really trash genre but I sank so much time in a couple I continue to play due to sunk cost fallacy and when I get roasted in real competitive games it's nice to cope with some trash single player games I'm good at
Congrats you learned how to counter different moves in a genre with a handful of players. Hope all that variance in a video game gives you the validation you need to make it feel like you aren't wasting your time.
>Validation
>Wasting time
I play after my work and daily chores are done mommy. 😉
projection if I've ever seen it
They are arcade games, therefore they are inherently hard to play at first. This bruises the egos of many players and they dismiss the genre as repetitive or memorization to feel better about themselves. You can tell these people aren't good at anything in life because everything requires memorization and repetition to get good at. And that's the thing, you need to get good at the game to actually clear it, which most won't do because they have to put effort into it.
>bullet hell
For frick's sake, bullet hells are trash. Congratulations, you're a fricking robot who can dodge 9000 slow moving predictable bullets onscreen. Try playing a real shooter with shit you actually have to react to quickly.
>Quick reaction
You mean sitting in safe spots and easily tap dodging aimed bullets lmao old shmups suck shit
>aimed bullets
You've never played a good shooter before, kid. I honestly don't think anyone on /vr/ has played anything released before fricking 1995.
Played so many and 1cced even more
Cope
I speak from vast experience
But the only good shooters were released before 1995...
this guy's games have random bullet patterns. good simple shmups done right
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/
well the boredom of playing fighting games vs AI is the same as playing any single player game seriously vs the AI, always trash
id say zero innovation and repetitive gameplay loops
Video game genres either change, or they stagnate and die.
The shmup is a very simple, very limited format, and nobody has found a successful direction for the genre to go in.
Bullet Hell gave the genre a new lease on life, but it a short, much more limited life, because most people are just not autistic enough to find fun in memorizing patterns to that degree.
80s Shoot em Ups were much more popular than Bullet Hells ever were, because casual players could be amazed by the graphics and music the genre was putting out at the time. Whereas today they seem very old fashioned. The actual games have always been only for hardcore players and as soon as Street Fighter 2 came out, the genre instantly became niche only.
It will always be a niche genre, but developers can at least sell units by not only designing their games for the more autistic players. For example, having normal modes that actually let you view the graphics on screen instead of pink dots, or having cool level design with hazards and stuff.
Jesus christ I hate Ganker 44J2SH
Shmups aren’t fun and the community is full of crazies
Shmups were a rudiment from early times when memory and CPU power was limited. As they got better, other genres were possible and they fell by the wayside. They are essentially the easiest type of action game you can program as the logic doesn't involve much more than moving some sprites around and checking for collisions--there's no real physics.
I'm not sure what sort of bubble you are living in where bullet hell games have ever been mainstream, or even popular at all.
To this day, you will see a Raiden or 1943 cab infinitely more frequently than DoDonPachi.
Early shoot em ups like Space Invaders and Galaga defined what a video game was.
no one said popularity is the issue, but quality and old shmups are shit while danmaku have some good fun qualities and also scoring and mechanical depth stop plus we dont live in 1980s so the fact they were popular when no competition existed is irrelevant now all shmups are dead but at least danmaku games arent total shit like old shmups
>Why does no one like shmups anymore? I get why we all find 80s shmups boring
long story short they were never good but back then they had no competition, like guys who only see 6s then one day a bunch of 8s and 9s and 10s appear, suddenly that 6 dont look so good
They're basically all the same. We had these games for fifteen years and all progress stopped after the first three. And a million of them came out in that time because they're super easy to make. People just got burned out. I wouldn't say nobody likes them though, they do have a niche following and they're usually the most expensive games on any console
They also get remastered a lot like that Psikyo collection and the Konami one which was all shmups instead of their actually good arcade games
>all progress stopped after the first three
You're joking? The genre stopped evolving around 1995. The first shoot em up is Space Invaders.
He distorted his perception of time, but thebpoont still stands
Early shmups were space invaders, Galaga, Galatian, etc. Then we got river raid and a few early scrolling shmups. And yes, by 95, everything ever to be accomplished was over with. But it always came in bursts. A popular face came out, 50,000 rip offs followed. 2 years later, same thing. Ad nauseum
Eityer way, 95 was 27 years ago. It's been a minute, and the majority of the genre's time in existence has been totally stagnant. Its a dead genre
Because it's a shit genre.
They're not particularly fun to play
They get very hard, very fast
They're generally what? 20 minutes long?
They reuse visual styles even more than anime fighting games and JRPGs do
What exactly is there to like there? At best They're a relic. At worst: absolute fricking garbage
And bullet hells did nothing but offer edgy, over stimulated 90's gamers a novelty to play with. They died with the 90's for a reason.
I think the only shmups I ever played that were actually good were in the hunt and Nitrous Oxide. And they're still pretty low tier anyway.
The only shmups I ever liked were Elemental Master, Super R-Type and Tyrian 2000. Aside from the good music in most of the genre, the rest of it can frick off. The communities for this shit are so fricking autistic they make Neo Geo fanboys seem tolerable.