Vourtron is back with another Pax Prime 2014 column, enjoy:
Well, Another PAX down, and another quest for the next shmup.
This year and last, there were hundreds (I’m just throwing that out there) of good and crappy homemade games, and not one of them was a shmup. That’s two years in a row. Man oh man! Whoa is me! *swoon* faint*.
I better go over some terms first, so you all can catch up on this stuff:
1. Shmup: Google shmup. It’s basically anything like 1942 and beyond, but not very far beyond. Other words for this incredibly tight game style are “Bullet Hell”, “Danmaku”, “STG” (that last one is Japanese for ShooTing Game.)
2. Nerd: Here’s the equation for nerd, INCREASED PASSION + DECREASED EMPATHY = NERD. Here’s the hints to tell if someone is a nerd.
a. If anyone’s eyes ever glaze over while they start talking louder and faster for a long time.
b. I thought they liked shmups, but apparently that’s not a qualification.
c. This decreased empathy makes for an underdeveloped sense of embarrassment, so maybe I’m just going to embarrass myself with this article.
d. You might have to be a nerd to LIKE shmups, so trying to get some coherent info out of these nerds was almost impossible.
e. And I checked with the nerds over at shmups forum (Google it), but since I’m a nerd for shmups myself, I’m just going to give my own version here.
After two years of no shmups at PAX, I got the notion that maybe there was a repeat of the 80’s Atari story. As I know it, in the 80’s, Atari printed a cartridge called E.T., and they made so many of them, that every store had a few copies on the shelf that they couldn’t sell (and the common opinion was that the game sucked), and from that, the preconception about Atari in general was, “Don’t carry Atari products in your store, they won’t sell”. (I did hear, during my research for this article, that Atari had mismanaged a lot of other basic stuff that led to their demise outside of that. Including paying too much money for the E.T. license in the first place. And rather than sucking, I’ve heard the game described as fun and very modern for the time- I heard that it was an early example of a new kind of video game I’ll call a “read the manual even one time” game.) Anyways, this whole phenomenon, however it happened, KILLED the home game industry in the U.S. and it was dead for years. In the interim, the E.T. cartridges got buried in the desert, and eventually Nintendo released their NES into a blank market that henceforth sustained the Genesis, Turbografx 16, SNES, Playstation, PS2, XBOX, etc. And the Atari Lynx? My emulator says that it’s a sweet system, did the culture still say otherwise? Was it Atari’s fault again?
The other thing that happened at PAX was that a single guy, who had made a very shmup-like game (it was an Arena Shmup, look it up), said off-hand that he’d try and make a real shmup (traditional definition) only if he wanted to, “End up living in the streets, penniless”.
Whoa! Is that true? Is there a shame on shmups? Is it a bad financial move to make a shmup? Why would anyone think that! Remember, I know a shmup ain’t no Assassin’s Creed, but the PAX zone I expected to see a shmup in was just one hundred screens in this order: 90% platformer with an art-style gimmick, gameplay mimic, and seriously 2D floating platforms, too- Atari style. Then, 8% just gimmick, like a non shmup/non platformer fun-gimmick. Then, 2% chase shmup, like Nokia’s SNAKE in shooting form. And then an extra .5% free roaming spaceships like asteroids (maybe Atari is finally back!). And last but not least, an extra .5% for the three arena shmups I saw. 101% homemade, creative, stupid, fun, lame homemade games, 0% “shmup”.
So, I posed my theory about “Which shmup killed “Shmups”” (like Atari) to the wonderful guys and girls over at shmups forum (which represents the shmup love in the English speaking world), and I also discussed the sitch with the people sitting around me at the coffee shop, and here’s some of what I got.
1. (From me- I’m not some kind of alien, so I’m presenting this as fact): Shmups are fun. They are physically fun. They turn on the fun when you press go and they don’t turn it off till you walk away from the machine. It is physically and emotionally fun to blow up the bad guys and dodge their bullets. I will credit feed through a shmup, having the most fun on the later levels when it’s the hardest and I’m blowing up the most frequently, and also dodging the most bullets and blowing up the most bad guys. I won’t settle down until I reach MAX BOREDOM of all that unbridled fun. If I ever reach that level of jaded-news, then I’ll just play my first quarter, as intended, for score (or distance), and the fun is BACK! And I mean ALL THE WAY BACK, and beyond. The myriad platformers don’t do that, certainly. MOST games don’t do that. Shmups ONLY do that!!! They’re so fun!!!
a. (the person next to me): Well, I don’t think they make games for fun, now. Lots of games are designed around abstract endorphin release addiction like with collecting swords or clearing a NOT funly designed dungeon, just to get it cleared out.
b. (person sitting on the other side): I don’t think they’re fun, I think they’re confusing. I can’t tell what’s going on and I feel out of control. Maybe people process things differently and you’d have to have a powerful visual processor (in your brain) to connect with what’s going on. Me, I like RPG’s, because I process things a little more abstractly in general (like as concept and language).
c. (from the shmups forum): “We’re all nerds, with stunted senses of empathy, so we don’t know isht about other people, but some of us will take the lead and try to make a guess as to why modern video-game-enthusiast-but-non-shmup-lovers may have a problem with shmups”. (Nerd to non-nerd translation leader): I think that your Atari-based shmup theory is ridiculous, and that shmups have just been slowly out-evolved by other games, and the gaming culture has also evolved away from shmups. Shmups could make a comeback if they had a social element, a story element, and an instant accessibility element built in on top of the regular shmup element (all three of those are the opposite of how shmups are, btw, except for the last- I think that shmups are the single MOST accessible kind of game!! A caveman would relate to a shmup. And on this note, the complexity of the finer details of many modern shmups is what is under attack, usually. Shmups can have a duality- the “scoring system”, or the way it’s designed to be played for maximum score, which can involve doing things in a certain order, memorizing certain shoot-down techniques, even dying on purpose at certain times, if you can possibly believe that, and lots of other crazy stuff, can be built into the experience to the degree that most people can’t even figure it out. But the whole thing is wrapped in such a crazily accessible package, i.e. shoot the bad guys and dodge their bullets, that I don’t see a problem). Anyways, people could make shmups and sell them if they’d just add that shite to them. Then people would learn to love them again. Oh yeah, they’d have to sell them for 3, 5, or 10$ though, like all other video games shy of Assassin’s Credence.
d. (from me): I think it was Ikaruga and Sina Mora. Those are the last two shmups that I’ve seen coming out on multiple systems, probably not making money (??? what do I know?), and probably sitting on the virtual shelf, on the T.V. screen, and not getting clicked on enough. And they’re both on the extreme fringe of traditional shmuppage, certainly on the edges of the “just absolutely and fundamentally fun” line that runs straight through the genre. If I wasn’t hardcore INTO shmups, both of those shmups would elicit the layman’s shmup responses from ME, like, “this is a little too visual for me”, and, “Maybe this isn’t just the right kind of fun for me”.
So… Ikaruga and Sina Mora may or may not be to blame. A culture that enjoys games, not for the physical fun of playing, but for other reasons might be to blame. Straight up, not cheap enough shmups might be to blame. People might just be different and like different things- I don’t think that would necessarily be to “blame”. And the real question remains: are shmups really extinct? It’s been two years. One guy on the shmups forum said that new shmups are totally insignificant, and that there are so many old ones to play that I shouldn’t care about this.
My conclusion: “Bullet Hell” is such a stupid stupid term. “Bullet Heaven” would be appropriate.
-Vourtron