Why Shmups Are the BEST Genre, Gameplay Density Matters!
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- Опубликовано: 25 июл 2024
- I made this video because I am tired of reviewers not understanding how much value shmups have to offer, and how most other gaming genres tend to be more fluff than actual gameplay meat. These days, overall gameplay time, seems to be the dominant metric of determining value, but it is not a reliable way to look at quality game design and is generally over-inflated to the point of wasting the player's time in most mainstream games.
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My absolute favorite genre is fighting games, but I also like shmups, beat em' ups and run and guns. What I noticed about these "high density gameplay" games is, when I start to invest more time into a specific game and try to get better through repetition and structured practice, it doesn't feel like a video game anymore but more like a hobby on it's own. I guess that's what makes these games so great, that they're made for dedication instead of just pure entertainment.
The whole "gameplay density" thing is more or less the merit of 2D games over 3D games in general, even if only because of how much harder it is to artificially pad out a 2D game without the average gamer noticing.
Nah, a lot of Metroidvanias are padded with pointless backtracking
@@mrpissedmetroidvenias have backtracking as a core feature to the point where you can criticize one for not offering enough backtracking
@@mrpissed Metroidvanias (and roguelites) are an exception among 2D games.
@@dj_koen1265 backtracking is used in that genre in such a way that allows new ways to traverse and approach things, though. There's no shortage of indie metroidvanias that seem to have backtracking for one or two dead ends for minor upgrades, all while the path to them remains largely unchanged from the first time you went through. It very much can be done poorly, even in those contexts.
MASSIVE COPE
2D has much more than 3D game
Just look at what 2D gaming genre are and compare to 3D ones like ope world ect they dont compare to 2D gaming genre thats facts
Some of my friends get confused why I like shmups and other games in "arcade" genres that are designed to be beaten in a single sitting and this "gameplay density" concept is what I use to explain the appeal as well. I would much rather spend my free time playing an entire short game where every second of gameplay counts than a "100 hour" long open world RPG but about 80 hours of that is made up of cutscenes, navigating menus and walking around aimlessly.
yeah exactly, it s all empty filler
@@TheElectricUnderground That's your opinion. Different people like different things. Luckily there's something for everyone.
What if 'navigating menus' IS the gameplay though? Like with traditional turn based combat or inventory management.
@@thorham1346that is not an opinion bruh
Movie walking simulator by sony are not 95% cutscene and wallking segment get tf outt here this shit is trash get that in your skull
@@quadpad_musicmenu are not gameplay only combat is
Turn based system yes there has to be a menu but with less cutscene
Bad turn based system are ones with no depth or barely any option like that awful chinese mobile overrated crap honkai
This concept is truly fantastic. I would redefine it a bit as “amount of interesting choices (or risk vs reward calculations) per amount of time”, which seems to fit your description from a more standard game design nomenclature. I’d love to explore this concept more!
Gameplay per minute
You hit every nail on the head my dude. Got a new reference for when the homies is confused. Keep preachin' the good word.
That s great! Yeah I made the vid to help explain this concept to people who might just write off the genre cause it s not a 12 hour cinematic experience ha
i think shmups are very much like pinball. On the surface it looks like alot of action and alot of reflexes and not alot of substance. The more time you spend with both genres the more the strategy and nuance starts to become apparent, because it isn't at first. In shmups and pinball you start to think about 'routes'. You start to realize that being on certain parts on the playfield is either advantageous or disadvantageous and you start to tailor you runs to what you have learned. You start to realize that if you approach certain 'features' in varying ways you can maximize your score and look like you truely have a 'skill' at what you are doing. You can play them over and over again and FEEL your progress. I remember years ago I was into LoL and mobas. I remember this pro threw out a 'you should go play pinball' at another pro like it was some sort of insult. The more I thought of it he couldnt have used a worse example to show 'player lack of skill'
There's an interview included with the Contra collection on Switch, where one of the developers says he was inspired by horror movies that boasted of have "a scare a minute". He wanted to create a game like that, so he came up with a philosophy that something unique should happen every 3 screens you scroll through.
The game he was talking about is Contra 3. Lots of developers of that game left Konami to form Treasure, and that same philosophy is alive and well in their games too. Between Contra and Treasure games there are a lot of great examples of high gameplay density.
Oh that's a really cool insight! Yes contra def has dense gameplay :-) a lot of arcade era games do
I’ve always called this concept Fun Per Second (FPS for short of course). Maybe this can be the new unit to measure gameplay density.
Ha nice I dig it!
This is the same exact conclusion I came to when I was thinking about why I loved this genre so much. "Normal" games have too much bloat. The industry needs to return to arcade design mentality: keep the game short (to get the next person on the cab ASAP), BUT make the game so engaging that win or lose, you want to come back to play. It is through balancing these constraints that make arcade game developers figure out what really compels people to play, so they focus on maximising these elements and cutting out all the unnecessary fluff.
But now, the money is paid upfront or used for gambling (microtransactions), so modern developers don't have these constraints to work with. There is less "quality control" now in terms of gameplay density (but also bugs, since more bloat means more opportunities for bugs). Instead of refining the core gameplay loop to its maximum potential, we have a bunch of different unrefined gameplay loops scattered throughout the game, making the game more disjointed compared to shmups which are more focused. That's where you get all the down time, random garbage mini games, repetitive fetch quests, and unnecessary crafting from.
For instance, in Zelda games, there are a bunch of mini games that are just completely disjointed from the core gameplay loop (killing enemies, exploring dungeons, solving puzzles). You have RNG garbage like the digging and chest mini games from ALttP. Or worse, mini games that have its own mechanics that aren't used anywhere else in the game (and thus a waste of development resources that could've went into refining the other 99% of the game), like the baseball game in ALBW. And because they're just kinda tacked on, the mini games themselves aren't even fun, which makes completionism more of a chore than it should be (compared to getting 100% in a more focused game like Hollow Knight).
Speaking of Hollow Knight, there's been kind of a trend with games that let you recover your money after death, which is just unnecessary. You'll either backtrack and get your stuff back (so like nothing really changed due to your death), or you lose your money permanently and have to grind it all back. Neither scenario is particularly value-adding to the core gameplay loop. In fact, penalising the player on death has never really worked out, even in shmups, which is why CAVE moved away from even powering down your ship when you miss since Mushihimesama.
Back to the topic, for another example, take Bloodstained, which has a crafting system. Isn't this supposed to be a spiritual successor to Castlevania? Why do you need to waste time gathering a bunch of things to craft a healing item instead of just being able to grab a roasted chicken from the wall like in the original Castlevania games? Or Danganronpa's School Mode, which is a combination of the above issues (i.e. it's a tacked on mini game where you just craft stuff which is meant to let you know the characters better, but the characters aren't very interesting whether you play this mode or not).
Developers also don't really take into account replayability, so that's where you get nonsense like unskippable cutscenes, slow text, or extremely tedious tutorial sections like Majora's Mask first cycle or like every main series Pokemon game.
Oh you are 100% right about this. This whole mentality of injecting bloated rpg mechanics into what would be more arcade style games or genres is so annoying. I ran into this with the messenger, where the first half of the game was a solid follow up to ninja gaiden game design. But then the 2nd half of the game is this garbage metroid wanna be section that got very boring very fast. Yeah why the hell would you put a crafting system into an action platformer other than to try and be cute. You're right that a lot of devs don't consider about the main gameplay mechanics and instead want to just load in a bunch of bloat for the sake of "content"
@@TheElectricUnderground It's hard to blame them when playtime is widely considered THE metric to judge whether a game was worthwhile or not.
The industry only ever approached the arcade design mentality (density and refinement) because it was _forced_ to by a perfect storm of outside factors.
It started straying away the moment it was realistically possible, and will unfortunately never return to it willingly, as the path of least resistance is bloat and fluff. Quantity over quality.
It will never go back to the arcade era
Modern gaming is the opposite its just made for normies and cater to fake gamer
@@TheElectricUndergroundits even worse when they add gambling with micro transaction
The industry is so far gone that i would not be surprised if 100% cutscene and p2w is everywhere
3:25 Holy sh*t, you accurately described my routine with games lately, right down to "maybe I need to buy a new game."
Ha yeah no doubt!
Great analysis, although I wonder if these non-dense sections are designed to give the player a chance to process and reflect, which can be a good way of immersing the player in the story and the game world. I’ve often wondered why books often capture an epic feel than the films based on them. While some of this could be the detail involved and imagination required to process the written word, and that books make it easier to look into the mind of the story protagonist, it might also simply be an effect of time investment. Playing a good RPG, for example, may give the player a sense of loss upon completion, even grief, way more so then if you just watch all the cut scenes back-to-back on RUclips, skipping over all the tedious turn-based battles. They may be tedious, but spending that time helps you invest in a way books and TV series can but all but the best movies often cannot.
In the best of cases they are there for pacing, but more often it is for padding.
For me what makes shmups and fighting games so good is that when you do something cool, it's you manually doing it. Basically the opposite of superhero games where you press x 100 times to beat a hoard of enemies. Even compared to something like dark souls (which comes really close) in a shmup when you dodge you literally have to avoid a bullet, but in dark souls you just press dodge and your character does the dodge animation and you get s. It feels so much more real when your inputs are direct. You can decide that you want to graze every bullet, or frantically run around the screen bc why not, meanwhile AAA games really force you to play in a certain way.
I think this is also what makes good speed running games so good. In half life 2 for example, you are using the physics engine in an incredibly specific way to fly across the map at ludicrous speeds, and every little motion or movement is up to you. Playing the game normally is much more about holding forwards and shooting enemies.
I also think this adds to the density bc you need to continually control the character as opposed to pressing e to watch the character mount a horse or whatever. It's cool that many fighting games have super moves like x-ray in MK that burn your whole meter to get a long animation that does decent damage, but once you learn combos you can do way more damage by using the meter to enhance your moves instead. It's a nice stepping stone to graduate into manual combos.
I love some really good combo system! I think gg xrd really found the right balance between difficulty but not being automatic like in sf5
Absolutely. These days when people talk about how in new game [x] you [do this awesome thing] I always wonder to myself "is it gameplay or just a cutscene/QTE?" -- because most of the time it's the latter. What is the point of a video game if you're not actually controlling it? It often seems we've circled back to FMV/laserdisc gameplay design without even using pre-rendered video.
I think this holds true for a lot of early games in general too. The original Castlevania is so brutally challenging, and there is never a break, you just constantly have to be on your guard.
Interestingly a game like Darius Gaiden has breaks built into it sort of. Some of the later zones are easier, and feel like a bit of a breather before some of the really challenging levels, and I really like that idea.
Yeah I think the move to console did allow for more breathing room in the game design, you see this in stuff like thunder force or un squad as well. Early platformers are so cool, much better than when the rpg elements started taking over
I'm a huge Castlevania fan and I agree. Beating it originally took quite a bit of time, and it felt like a long game, but after beating it I could consistently do it in 20 ~ 30 minutes. I still play it occasionally from time to time, and beat it with no continues in one try at this point because I have done it so much. Good example of a game that has a lot of substance. Castlevania 3 is way harder (only the American version, mostly because Grant is so overpowered in the original, though Akumajou Densetsu does have much better music) and took much, much longer.
Both games are really special to me. I would even say that they are the games that made me good at platformers. Though Ninja Gaiden is the game that gave me the final kick in the ass that made me so good that I stopped playing platformers so frequently, because it made me feel satisfied with my skill (something that never happened to that extent to any other genre). That's another game that is very important to me. Also the best example of a game that forces you to get so insanely good to beat it that you get so consistent that you can do it multiple times in a row. You can't beat that game by playing it, you can only beat it by teaching your brain and hands to do everything automatically and almost perfectly. You basically have to be like a speedrunner just to finish the damn thing. That game wants to be hated, but I kept coming back because it feels so satisfying to play. Took me literal years of playing, giving up and trying again a few months later. Not even sure how long.
To name another example I always felt like the brain and cell stages near the end of the original Gradius were some of the easier ones so you can have a little break after the more difficult moai and reverse volcano stages. I wonder if it was intentional
More goodness I love this channel!
The content just keeps coming. It's always good!!!! Be sure to take a break every now and then bro!
Yeah ha!
This man goes HARD for shmups! I love it 👏
Yes I do!
Strategy game legend Sid Meier once defined a game something like a "succession of meaningful choices". In shoot 'em ups -- and to a slightly lesser extent other arcade-derived genres such as run'n'guns, beat 'em ups, etc -- you end up making those choices at a pace that barely any other genres come close to. How many times a minute are you actually engaging your brain? In a shmup or run'n'gun you'll have killed hundreds of enemies and dodged possibly _thousands_ of bullets before a "regular" game has gotten through its loading screens.
But there is more to it than just the pace. The way the arcade school of thought mandates _cutting_ rather than _padding_ content -- a lost art it seems -- also means that the, for lack of a better word, _quality_ of those choices is different.
However, if you're just brain-dead credit-feeding through on a 100 credits you're not really engaging with the game at all (it could be argued you'd be engaging more if you watched someone else play properly at that point). I've never been a fan of arcade ports/games having infinite continues for this reason -- it leads to newcomers fundamentally misunderstanding the game (and maybe even misunderstanding _what gameplay_ is).
(As a side-note: I find the tendency to view arcade games as "disposable" a bit ironic -- isn't it the game you push through once, maybe twice, and then never touch again that is disposable, rather than the one meant to be played over and over?)
Thanks for this video, Mark. It's a good discussion starter.
Let me respond with a controversial statement right away. You said that you had problems with reviewers unfamiliar with the genre giving Shmups bad scores for lack of content because they credit-fed though the whole game in 30 minutes. Here is the thing: What if those reviewers are actually right?
And with that I mean, what if those Shmups had good potential but ruined it for most players by allowing them to credit-feed through the entire content? Because some of the recently most successful and popular games can be beat in 30 minutes. One of the most-lauded games of 2020 was Hades. Can't get more mainstream than that. A typical run of Hades takes 30 minutes. But it takes around 20 hours to practice enough to beat it once. Hades provides a whole structure around it to ease people into that skill-based mindset and turn that practice of the game into the actual game experience. One can easily imagine a Bizarro-Hades where the devs included an option to credit-feed. The game would have been ruined and would have received similarly tepid reviews as those Shumps. That can also be the difference between GOTY and C-List fodder. If anything, this is something I want to see from future Shmups - more focus on Structures to ease players into the right mindset - to center-stage the practice of the game as the experience and not the individual run.
As for Gameplay Density - I see what you are getting at. As somebody who has been studying and teaching Game Design I can tell you that the term might not hold up well enough to be useful in the long run. The big problem with it is that "Gameplay" is a very nebulous, subjective term. You THINK you can tell exactly what it is. But many tried to nail to down before you and failed. It's a "I know it when I see it" kind of term.
For example, you criticized some sections as "holding down a button". Well, who's to say that this can't be gameplay? You don't even have to go into narrative games. Racing games can have stretches of time where all you do is hold down a button but it is an incredibly skilled-focused genre. Nobody would suggest we can "trim out the fat" out of the Nürburgring or Le Mans by removing the longs straights of those racing circuits. And what about somebody building an intricate replica of Winterfell from Game of Thrones in Minecraft? How do you even measure "Gameplay Density" if the game isn't timed and has no obvious fail or victory conditions.
That is not to say that what you are trying to describe doesn't exist. Of course Shmups offer a tight, condensed experience. They demand more immediate attention from players, they make them play according to an extremely high, rigid pace with almost no downtime. But let's be careful with value statements here. You said you've played Chess, right? Is Speed Chess really "better" than regular, untimed Chess? And if it was, would that mean that Bullet Chess was best? Obviously there is not really a "best" Chess. All of these are just different variants of Chess that appeal to different tastes and test different skills. To a Bullet Chess player untimed Chess might feel unbearably slow and tedious - they can play dozens thrilling bullet games in the time it takes to play one untimed game. To a player, who enjoys untimed Chess, Bullet Chess is boring because the games are sloppy, full with sub-optimal moves and are decided by obvious blunders in hindsight.
Instead of value statements it may be more insightful to address WHY Arcade games are like this and why most modern games are different. You said it was "padding" - trying to make the game feel longer and bigger than it was. I'm not going to necessarily disagree here because that certainly exists. But they way you phrase it sounds nefarious - as if developers are trying to fool players, to cheat them out of something. To artificially inflate their games. Well, here is a second controversial statement - to some extent this is true of ALL games, including Arcade games. Arcade games just do it differently.
If you want to look at this cynically, the reason why Arcade games have so little downtime and why Shmups auto-scroll is to kill the player more quickly so they get their Quarters or kick them out so the next player can step up to the Machine. Just as modern games can use "downtime" to pad out the game, so can Arcade games by using difficulty. Making players play the same game levels over and over again by making the game hard is incredibly cost-effective in terms of production and allows the overall game to be short so more players can lose their quarters rapid succession. Over time this obvious ploy was internalized and idolized by some players as "the good old days". But really, it's just a different variant of Chess. Of course Game Developers are always trying to get the most out of their budgets. They are always trying to upsell their game. This is what being a good game developer means.
I think framing the player / dev relationship in an adversarial way is often a tautology. If you see no value in a game then obviously devs are ripping you off and wasting your time. If what the devs are dishing out is your Jam then you will pay any price and invest any amount of time and still thank them for it.
You have a very specific taste, Mark. Don't worry. Just play the games you like and keep the good content coming!
Oh I definitely agree that the open credit feeding without any punishment is an issue, this is actually a subject I discussed at length with the zeroranger devs in my interview with them :-) The ZR continue system is a much better alternative. While it would be nice to give these reviews credit, I doubt they would give a fair review even with a smart continue system in place.
As far as the concept of gameplay density not holding up in a scholarly setting, that's probably true ha. I do think it is a very quick and useful term to communicate the underlying idea though. So if I were to attempt at a scholarly definition, I would say gameplay density could be considered the rate at which the game presents the player with significant risk and win-loss situations. In a shmup, the player is always at a risk and loss is always a moment away. This could hold true for the racing game example you mentioned as well. In many open world games, however, you are just presented with empty space without any immediacy or risk. You could simply get up and leave the game running and nothing would happen. Whereas in a shmup or racing game if you dropped the controller your toast. Another good yard stick would be if you could fast forward the section without increased risk. In rpg for example, I tend to play them at 3x speed ha.
This is like a 15 min therapy session thar explains why I love what I love. Gameplay density is the term to describe what I'm looking for in a game and why I come back. Hopefully shmups and rail shooters will get more popular. 🙏
I m glad to hear it! Yes the term was a light bulb moment for me to describe the sense of game design that I like
Fantastic video. I sort of arrived at the same conclusion where I felt that, because my gaming time is limited, you start any AAA game, it often takes half an hour before you even get to do anything and this sort of thing starts to feel like a waste. You play an arcade shmup, BAM, you’re straight into the thick of it and in that same half hour you find all the thrills’n spills of a 20 hour cinematic epic purely concentrated down. It’s an especially great selling point for people that can’t spend hours a day on playing video games and are in it for the interactivity, not for the extraneous stuff.
the worst is when you start a AAA game and the first 3 hours are a grindy tutorial that barely picks up
I actually feel the same in this period of my life. That’s why i only play shmups and pinball videogames now.
Pinball is so good. Shmups and pinball both slap (and both can use TATE/flip grip!)
Me too. I sometimes feel that shmups and pinball have some very similar design philosophies, with very little downtime, and both genres being absolutely confusing at first, looking almost incomprehensible for beginners, seeming almost random, but with very distinctive mechanics and skills you can learn. Also, both genres can be visually very overwhelming :D shmups and pinball are also both very old types of arcade games that have been iterated a lot over the past decades, but always retained their core mechanics (dodge bullets, shoot stuff / flip a ball around with two flippers).
Also, in both types of games, it's 100% gameplay from beginning to end, being both fun for beginners, yet very high skill ceilings.
One quite obvious element of course it that both have very score - centric design. And, yeah, both having very vertical elements is an interesting parallel as well.
@@100hundert EXACTLY, they are both pure gameplay.
I've become very conscious of how precious my time is. I used to play rpg's etc when I was younger but now I won't get involved with a grindy game (no offense). I like to jump in, get started.
Show me what you got game.
I played Gunwange for the first time yesterday. It was an exhilarating white knuckle ride! Sure, it was short but it felt like it ended at the right time (ps: somehow managed to finish first on the local leaderboard which actually excited me since me and my kid are pretty new to the bullet hell sub genre).
in addition to gameplay density, shmups are excellent at what i've come to recognize as "input immediacy" (not to be confused to with input lag), th something that in general matters more to to me than most other factors.
what i mean by input immediacy could best described as "how soon after any given input, be it single input, set or series of inputs" player receive the potential 'reward' for said input". input immediacy is something that arcade games as a whole tend to get "right", pretty much as soon as something is done with the inputs, something will happen onscreen (this might be where the deserved obsession with input lag among comes in). the immediacy and quantity of input relative to the high gameplay density is probably what makes shmups one of the most fun and enthralling to me, despite my status as Poor Player.
real time strategy games have most egregious example of input immediacy, they're just something i've tried and don't think i'll ever be a fan. compare the inputs relative to what happens onscreen in a game of third strike, to the inputs relative to what happens onscreen in a 1v1 game of starcraft. i find that something like starcraft requires like 4x the amount of inputs [exaggeration probably] for around 1/5th of the gameplay. 300 inputs for what, a base and some units built? i feel like tim rogers made me aware of this, using this same example, in his review of third strike long ago. it's something i'll never be able to *not* think about when playing video games.
turn based games, especially dungeon crawlers like wizardry or shin megami tensei and tile-based, turn based roguelikes ala nethack or dungeon crawl stone soup, where the movement on the grid would also be a turn, also generally get input immediacy down well, despite their relative low gameplay density.
if we are talking about the original starcraft i consider that game to be top 3 games of all time, and its interesting to see your perspective on it.
its a very different gameplay loop compared to arcade games but it has the exact same intensity imo, everything you do amounts to an action that combines into a rhythm of all your other actions, you arent really supposed to think about all the small actions you take, its more a rythm game in that way where all the inputs create some kind of flow that do not obstruct the thinking space
RTS arcades are just greatness
Something modern fake gamer could never understand as they only play the same garbage 24 7 fortnite league fifa cod
You just made me realize the reason why I like arcade games in general, isuat very fast paced games. I also think there's one actual AAA game that does this very well, Doom Eternal is action, action, action some rest here and there but it feels like is non stop action.
Yes I m gonna play and review doom eternal soon!
These are my favorite bits of content: just you thinking about the genre then unloading those thoughts into a mic. Spot on though! This idea is certainly the same thing that’s happened to me, especially as of late.
I love making these types of vids as well! :-D the follow up to this vid will also be fun
Yes please. I like videos that validate my feelings.
This is a great video, might be why I got out of my gaming rut that started in 2020, where I played nothing, but pick up and play kind of games, until Final Fantasy VII Remake released, finished it, then read only Manga for the majority of the year. Then, I went back to the pick up and play games by the end of 2020 and all I've been playing mostly this year are those same pick up and play games.
I crave these "gameplay density" games the majority of the time, while trying out the longer or dialogue heavy ones when I feel the need, never for the majority of the time though. Stardew Valley is the only game I've played consistently, that has that RPG-like dialogue, but it's all too easy to pick up and play for a few hours. Shoot 'em ups are the games I've been playing more than anything nowadays, since getting back into them in 2017 (or 2016) I think, when Japan had their gaming resurgence and I was buying and playing a lot of their new games that came out.
Yes I went through a similar rut for many years until I picked up fighting games and then shmups, I d probably not game all that much otherwise
Nice video that also reflects the way I see video games nowadays.
Just a suggestion for a future video series I would love to see from you : a comparison (and explanation) between master/black label/arrange versions in shmups that have those different versions and how it changes the way you play the game (and also why you may think one version is better).
Oh yeah great idea! Doj white versus black label would be perfect!
This is a fascinating and I think correct analysis. You should check out games like Into the Breach, Invisible Inc, Frozen Synapse and Fights in Tight Spaces, which take the turn based strategy genre and basically boil it down into this gameplay density you talk about. These are my go to games when I'm not playing shooting games.
Yes I do actually want to start digging into the hardcore aspects of tactical rpg!
Great explanation, man. Really hit the nail on the head with this one - and gameplay density is a perfect phrase to sum the idea up.
By the way, I'm actually impressed you managed to *play* so many games for ten minutes. All too often I find ten minutes after starting a lot of "AAA" titles, you haven't even been allowed to do anything at all.
That is both sad and true ha. Gotta have that 30 min tutorial or whatever bleh.
Great points, I always said exploration usually means hiding the next gameplay moment lol but on metal gear 5, what you want are the vr missions. I don’t know if 5 had them but I think it was 1 where they released a stand alone where it was all vr missions and it was exactly what you want.
Great video! I actually had a similar mindset in regards to Sonic games which is why I'm still rocking a Sonic and the Black Knight avatar.
I may need to give more time to the better Boost games like Unleashed and Generations, but Forces is an extreme which carries the concept of your fastest movement option also being an attack which doesn't care about the environment.
Sonic and the Black Knight at its best has parries, enemies which don't have hitboxes on their whole body and allows for more interesting interactions not that it and Secret Rings aren't flawed games with the latter being bloated as heck.
A cheat code to have more speedrunner friendly version for all of these games would be nice. On that note, The Wonderful 101 has similar issues to Bayonetta but is expected to get a speedrunning mode for the remaster.
I really hope it isn't just a timer.
Oh I need to check this game out. I'm a sonic fan as well. My fav sonic game is sonic adventure 2 for the chao garden ha, but that's a whole separate story because even in that mode I tend to play in fast forward and try to up the pace ha, which is probably not the point ha.
Ever since I played Raiden at my local bowling alley growing up, I've come back to these games. They ARE the pure, unfiltered, crack cocaine of gaming experience
Exactly!!!
I don't agree with the statement that shmups are the best genre, but I agree with how you described them, and I completely understand how one can come to that conclusion. That was a very mind-opening video. Very well done.
Maybe I suck too much at memorization and have too slow of a reaction time to really have a good chance to enjoy more games in the genre. But there is one game that really stood out to me and I have the hardest time explaining to someone else why I enjoyed it so much. And that is a short, very casual shmup-like on the 3DS called Liberation Maiden, made by Suda51. You can finish the game in under a hour if I remember correctly, and it's a constant flow of non-stop shooting and dodging combined with exotic visuals and sound effects, and J-Pop blasting through the headphones. It's not on-rails, so the pacing is more up to the player, but you're sorta incentivized to play efficiently.
It's one of my favorite experiences on the 3DS, and I would hold it amongst my favorite games in the system, even tho amongst my favorites this is by far the one I have less hours spent playing. And it's all because of that short, but extremely fulfilling burst of non-stop dopamine condensed into a neat little package.
Oh yeah, I also played a ton of Star Fox 64 as a kid, then later when I got my 3DS. It's also one of my favorite games. And one that also requires little to no memorization.
Yes this is quality unlike the trash fifa EA madden 2k COD fortnite garbage and ubisoft recycled crap
Battle royales also trash
We need more people that play quality instead of trash
Great video. I think what you are saying is 100% right and also it's a legacy from the days of the arcade. Arcade games can't have players wandering around for 20 minutes doing nothing otherwise they wouldn't earn enough money. I think 2 minutes was the aim at Williams when they made Defender. Straight into the action.
Yes exactly! The arcade forced game design to push the player on this tight rope of rapid but fairish danger
Completely agree. Since I play shmups I no longer play any other genre. It's a feature that arcade games have in general, but shmups show the maximun instant gamefeel. I think that the continuous and automatic scrolling has a lot to do with it.
I like the term and agree. I think that - as you say - the conversation of 'value' needs to shift away from the hours it takes to beat a game. This view is dominant in game journalism, and it unquestionably hurts the medium. One hesitation I have, though, is the idea that 'game density' represents good game design in itself. I think it's possible you've gone too far in the 'game density' direction and might be losing sight of the virtues of moderate or slow paced game design. There's a reason people are drawn to games with lots of downtime, or games with hardly any uptime at all (ex. Animal Crossing). I don't think that a Zelda or a Metal Gear would be better if you cut out all the slow moments, they'd be entirely different games appealing to a different market. There's a lot of room for different approaches to game design, though I - like you - am not happy with the dismissiveness with which contemporary reviewers treat 'dense' well-designed STGs.
This video puts a lot of things in perspective for me. For the past 10 years I've felt left behind by most AAA devs (with a few exceptions like FromSoft and some of Nintendo's works). I have gravitated towards these "gameplay dense" genres you've mentioned, shmups, fighting games, and indie platformers. On top of that, ever since Slay the Spire started the indie Roguelike/lite boom I've mostly been playing those as well. I love just booting up a game, and immediately getting into the core gameplay, sprinkled with a bit of RNG to keep runs fresh. I have more hours in Monolith (great shmup roguelike!) and Slay the Spire than I have in any AAA release at this point, despite these games being really small/short by the "hours to complete" metric. As long as every second is filled with me making meaningful decisions, I'm having fun.
This is a good take, It did help me to understand why I started to grow a distaste to most traditional turn base rpgs and favor action rpgs and games that dont quite feel as turn base.
As for shumps, I agree, I often do a credit feed lp but found myself up for hours doing loops of Deathsmiles for Steam achievements and was never bored.
This dose help to fill in those blanks
Great video! Just found you today. I recently started going down the rabbit hole of input lag in shmups. From what research I've done, I found out about a fork of MAME called GroovyMAME. Seems the main focus is running MAME on a CRT, but GroovyMAME also mentions reduced input lag compared to the main MAME branch. Would love to see a lag comparison of how it fares. Sorry if you already covered this!
Groovy mame typically saves 1 frame of lag over regular mame, so yeah it s a good way to go :-)
I love plenty of more bloated games but I really agree with your conclusions especially about open world games. I can fire up Recca or ESP Ra De and have way more fun in like 25 minutes and feel more fulfilled then getting lost for 2 hours in elden ring. And I like Elden Ring! It’s just so time consuming and often feels like that time isn’t used well.
Exactly!! You get it! :-)
i was going to beat final fantasy 9 but then i got bored and went back to lotus land story
Dammit this is what’s happening to me, I love RPGs but ever since I got that pc engine mini and gone down the shmup rabbit hole, I can’t play rpgs without thinking “why is this here?” I’d have to be really tired from physical work or something to enjoy more laid back games, this genre is something else lol
yes once you get that taste for the relentless action of the genre, it gets really difficult to go back to other games that just plod along like a soap opera.
@@TheElectricUnderground Fortunately I don't have that problem. As a gamer I would absolutely hate loosing interest in other genres.
Some random thoughts that came to mind while watching:
1. Board games might be cognitively dense in the way shmups and other arcade genres are mechanically dense. Video games can feel like an on rails experience when BGs literally force you to understand and engage with the rules/logic of the game in a way video games can't.
And unrelated,
2. Tearing myself away from competitive FPS games has proven difficult despite the gameplay in arcade genres being just as dense if not denser. I wonder why this is, it's like a sunk cost or something. I think achieving small incremental refinements as an advanced player is a different experience from learning a new genre as a beginner, where improvement is more rapid but somehow less engaging and less provocative of flow state (although worth the switch if it means abandoning the dumpster fire that is AAA gaming).
Yeah board games are really fun. I'm very competitive when I play them ha. In my family gatherings, we all sit down and play to win, which is enjoyably intense (some in laws have cried though). My favs are the ones with timers and high intensity, like catch phrase. My brothers and I literally had to write down a ruleset for how passing the word finder works because we started throwing it like a frisbee ha.
Competitive fps can be really cool, depending on the game. I'm not a fan of team stuff like overwatch or battle royal though, I like good old deathmatch!
Is it possible for you to make a list of the top 5 or top 10 shmups you think everyone should play? Not year or decade restricted, just in general. Not the *best* ones, just the ones that YOU think everyone should play.
Top 30 greatest shmups of all time next week, it s gonna be a BIG vid :-)
I liked very much your point of view, thanks a lot! I like to compare the shmups genre to classical music, they both resist through time and every time you play, you discover sometime more, becuase of their depth and density, so much is concentrate in them
I need to listen to more classical music! It's been a while
Man, we are peas of the same pod. I feel the same way. I used to say I liked shmups the because I could enjoy the gameplay right away. I just miss the days of playing something and not watching a movie.
Casual listener of your videos, and I enjoy em. Great stuff man!
I m glad you are enjoying the vids! Yes might as well just pull up a RUclips vid of all the cutscenes these days, that what I did with ff7 remake ha
@@TheElectricUnderground Not trying to start an unwanted convo but god that game was so boring. All my peers loved it and the combat had its good moments but jesus were we playing the same thing? Why am I finding cats? Why am i going back to the same slums for the third time. Why is this here? What's the point of this? No density.
Ironically enough, I feel like I get bored of these types of games very quickly. I think that the pacing of it becomes base level and I can’t feel like I can get more out of it. I like the pacing to be a lot more ebb and flow instead of at the same level all of the time. Which is why I prefer platformers and RPGs more than Fighting games and Shoot ‘em ups.
I'm not super familiar with shmups (beside playing a bit of ikaruga and dodonpachi), but i really enjoy when you talk about game design. That one bit about exploration and open world games got me thinking a bit, because i find exploration to be an interesting concept in video games, but unfortunately a lot of it boil down to just holding down a direction for a set amount of time, which does not mesh well with gameplay density, and I always wondered if there was a way to "solve" that. Obviously I think not every game is made with arcade game design in mind, and i don't think it's necesssarly a bad thing, especially for genres who never were made for arcades, but i'd like to see what kind of solutions people could find for this "problem".
Very well articulated!
Thank you my dude!
You are right. I can't get myself to play most modern games any more. I didn't even get 1 hour into God of War Rag. I think it's only a matter of time before more people feel the same way. It's so frustrating to see how niche the genre is. Growth is inevitable. Also thanks to you . Hopefully we can get a renaissance of direct, dense arcade style gameplay. If the games sell a bit better, maybe we can get more ports of classic games and even new ones. Imagine if Capcom made a new 19XX game. How nice could some high budget shmups be?!
I'm excited for the future. I don't play much these days besides shmups and beat em ups.
Just playing the shmups I already have satisfies me. It's so hard to get bored with many shmups. Even after a long play time, I feel I'm just scratching the surface. The only modern triple A game I will probably spend bit of time with is Diablo 4. Elden Ring was alright too.
Great vid agree 100%
Very good concept! You got me at inflation. Totally agree on MG5, for one, but many other games do this, and reviewers totally fall for it, or try to sell us that as "quality". Great video as always. Saludos desde Uruguay!
I know it's pretty frustrating to deal with. MGS5 has some great core gameplay underneath the wasted time and boring traversing. Greetings!
8:11 it's that shooter crackpipe
Which dodonpachi is in the background? Great topic!
This is DDP :-) it's actually an old pb run of mine ha.
@@TheElectricUnderground ok thanks!
Too much is never enough!
8:59 were i can see these leaderboards?
Exactly, I feel like the people who complain about shmups being too short don't really appreciate how much attention to detail goes into those sorts of games. It isn't just that the time from "press start" to "final boss is dead" is 30 minutes, each second of those 30 minutes is carefully designed to ensure a good mix of challenge and enjoyment for the player.
With long-form games, there isn't a need to meticulously craft every minute of the player's experience, since much of that time could be spent fighting copies of the same enemy, traveling between towns, navigating menus, watching cutscenes that are necessary to absorb the lore and story etc. This doesn't make those games better or worse, objectively, just that every genre of games has different priorities in terms of game design.
If people still wanna argue that shmups need to be 10, 20, 30-hour adventures, then they need to consider that such a game would either be diluted in gameplay density, or be extremely expensive and time-consuming for developers, especially indie/doujin devs (the original version of Crimzon Clover apparently took three years to complete).
Yes for sure!! I have a follow up vid on the topic soon that will also talk about some of these points :-)
@@TheElectricUnderground Following up on this comment, I was reviewing a video capture of myself fighting the Ketsui stage 3 midboss.
The fight feels like it takes 2-3 minutes, but then I saw that the whole section was only _one minute_ .
Density indeed, shmups really do be doing some time compression magic!
Better 30 quality minutes than 3000 bland ones.
Yessssssss u nailed it!!! I felt the same way!!!!!! Its almost like a overhead classic doom or twitch shooter without the level design! Its strange doom exhaust me sometimes, shootinfups dont for some reason. Other games pickup too slow. Or have too many slow movements. Plus shmups have all kinds of colors etc. Its the same reason I'm liking tetris and puyo puyo now etc
Yeah ironically enough the games that tend to exhaust me the most are the ones with low pace. Like I've tried to push through some of the early final fantasy games because i know they are well made, but the pace is so brutal slow it's hard to keep going
In an old video you said something about shmups having great music that makes you excited about the gameplay (or something along those lines) and other games like dark souls not having it. I commented that Dark Souls had great music but only during boss fights and if dark souls was only boss fights the experience would be much closer to shmups i think you were already cooking this idea even back then.
Oh I remember this! Yes dark souls boss fights only would be a perfect example of honing in on the meat of the game design! Yes this concept has been in the oven for a long time!
Great take! I felt the same exact way about MGS V
Yeah I 100% cleared it once but the padding at this point makes me never want to play it for more than an hour now
Thank you! THANK YOU for teaching the unwashed masses what we've known- its not that we got to the end, but *how* we get there!!
And HEY! Shouldn't some game designer make us a Shump-maker game (like mario maker)?? Its long overdue.
Yes for sure! I think there was one in the works for a long time, not sure if it's still being finished though.
this is very interesting to me, but i still don't think i understand very well. Quiet time, aka, time where you are just not in the action, but rather wandering around from point to point, seems to be very important. too much action all at once obviously has problems, but i find that this kind of "cut the fat" design where the pacing is a well made rollercoaster of pressure, compressed down as much as it can, would not work so well in the more popular game types out there, like FPS, third person shooters (tripple A chosen method of making games nowdays), and strategy games, and so forth. doom eternal per instance is filled with fat, and i think there is too much (cutscenes), but i think it would be perfect with just the walking sections kept in. horror games are probably your least favorite genre too lol, considering they need Fat to build atmosphere (the ones that manage to do it). still very interesting topic!
look at skyrim though, i have over 300 hour in skyrim and also in oblivion. i have just as much togheter in fallout 3 and fallout new vegas. most of the fun of these games is walking aimlessly, stumpling upon oportunities to level up, get cool gear, and test said gear and levels on challenges. sure i don't play these anymore, but i don't really replay games anyway, but i don't think its due to the huge amount of supposed Fat that exists there. cutting the fat out of these hugely popular games would reveal very mediocre combat encounter and rpg mechanics, so assuming thats where the density lies would be a foolish: you can't compress this game very well. nobody plays these games for the combat or the RPG, they play to fuck around, and thus the FAT is the game. in Dark souls i think, similarly, you are constantly walking around aimlessly, there is no compression at all, there is a decompression if anything, and maybe that makes the game a bit better paced, because it plays like a strategy game. the game itself isn't dark soul's combat (which is very simplistic) it really is the resource management that needs this padding out to have an effect.
The crack analogy is so on the nose, I imagine a shmup veteran either on the border of falling asleep or twitching restlessly in their seat after full 5 seconds of the screen not being filled with flashing lights. Sounds not at all obnoxious or bad for CNS
Ha glad you enjoy the comparison, i thought it would be an interesting way to think about it
I remember wanting to replay dmc 4 mission only ended up playing the bloody palace instead
Yes exactly!!!
I love the concept here but even if I never finish an rpg anymore, some of my favorite moments are roaming around and exploring. It is relaxing. I do not get that from any shmup I have played yet...not do I want that from a shmup.
I m not totally against the idea of games having relaxing vibes or exploring, as I can enjoy that as well. The main issue though is that a lot of reviewers and such equate the game design of wondering around in a low stakes field as the same 30 minutes of dense shmup level design where every second has compounding consequences. As long as reviewers are more fair at recognizing the difference I m fine with both styles of game design :-)
@@TheElectricUnderground I have to watch the video. That may have flew over my head. I did watch this first thing in the morning after having a rough start to the weekend.
Paradoxically I can relate to what you say but not so much with the shmup (and I agree anyway) but with the 3d platform. I played Super Mario Odyssey for 120 hours but for 3/4 of the game I wasn't able to enjoy it as much as I wanted due to its sandbox nature. 3/4 of the game was about exploration and I only had some real level design, that served platforming itself, only in small portions and they very diluted in the whole work. While I enjoyed those "only" 25/30 hours of Super Mario 3d world because the level design was very dense and entirely available to pure platforming without having to dilute it with large settings and they weren't just simple fillers
I'm definitely on board with this evaluation of Super Mario Odyssey. I'm a mega fan of super mario 64 and I think we should all thank the video game gods that the n64 was so constrained hardware wise because yeah this giant empty sandbox game design is incredibly boring and yet critics eat it up like it's the best thing ever.
@@TheElectricUnderground I also agree on this. I notice that we have basically had the same thought for a long time even if on different genres the thought remains the same. Give us more dense gameplay like shmup or 3dworld rather than unnecessarily diluted stuff. I do not know why the critics absolutely want the sanboxes filled with nothing just to lengthen the broth. I never understood and never will understand. Yooka Laylee is just the umpteenth example of how vastness doesn't equate to quality and we could give other hundreds of examples but... apparently appearance matters. Sm64 is also one of my favorites precisely because the game / level design has not been forgotten as the main focus which is why I was also able to appreciate the new "dlc" Bowser's fury which, despite being sandboxed, it is not excessively so and remembers being first of all a platform as it was for mario 64 (unlike SMOdyssey). I have never made this connection with shmups genre and only now, thanks to your video, I know exactly why I like them and liked them so much because basically they were always what I wanted to see from a game
PS: the ugliest section of the first Bayonetta was the level on the motorcycle
As games became longer, they lost a lot of substance and a lot of the challenge, and overall became less satisfying. I like more intense experiences, and that's just not as common now. Old games (or at least more classic in style, like shmups, or even more arcade style games like F-Zero GX or Super Monkey Ball, that are from the PS2/GC era, that I think was really the transitional period between the old days and what we have today) tend to be technically short, but you can still take months to beat them, and that's a lot more satisfying than playing through 40 hours of nothing.
They have more replay value too, because I get to enjoy being bad at the game for a long time, and then enjoy playing it again multiple times after getting good. Even when they don't last that long because you're too good at the genre (there are a lot of games that originally took me weeks or months to beat that I can beat in 20 minutes now), they are still more satisfying because there is still challenge and they don't overstay their welcome, and you can play a bunch of them in a row. There are many more ways of enjoying games like that.
In my case, I played a lot of NES and some Game Boy games, that are pretty short, to the point that I beat like, over 200 games in a year once (though there were a lot of PlayStation and SNES games as well, and admittedly I had played some of them before, since I was marathoning entire franchises like Castlevania and Mega Man and Mario) and I think that was way more satisfying than what most people are doing. I even beat multiple games in one sitting, and played through the same game multiple times (because there was another difficulty or another character or even just because I wanted to see how well I would do) in some cases for one reason or another.
Some games can also be short if you play just to beat it, but long if you try to get 100%, so that's more replay value because you play through it once, and then have more things to do if you play it again. That can take a game to a whole new level of enjoyment because it adds more ways of enjoying it. All of that is really fun. People are missing out and don't know it. Gaming can be so much more fun than they think.
That s really cool to hear you were marathon clearing a bunch of different games. A new clear is always a great feeling! Sometime soon I need to make a little log of my clears or something!
@@TheElectricUnderground I made a list of that. In fact, that was the beginning of my list. Unfortunately I only had it in one hard drive, and it was destroyed by a storm while I wasn't around, so I lost it, but I have a new list now. I write down the details too (like if I got 100%, which characters I beat it with or whether or not I got a 1cc).
Still haven't added all those games to it, though, because I'm lazy. I did count all the clears when that year ended, and it was actually over two hundred, which is insane but sounds a lot crazier than it actually is because of how quickly I was beating a lot of the games.
The way that it happened is that I finally gave up on college at that point and I was really depressed, and my way of dealing with that was to stop caring about everything and just have fun all the time, and to me that means games and anime, and that's how the game marathons happened. I also watched Game Center CX a lot during that time and that made me want to play a lot of games, and even gave me more ideas for things to play.
Some games took longer to beat (like playing all the Metroidvania games again and getting every skill and all the best items (I enjoy collecting things too), and playing with the other characters, and playing on hard), but many were short enough for me that I would beat two in one day very frequently.
One example being when I played all the classic Mega Man games for NES and Game Boy in one week. 1 on GB, then 1 on NES, 2 on GB, 2 on NES. and so on. There are 6 on NES and 5 on GB, so that was already 10 games in 5 days. And I kept going until X8. I beat X7 for the first time too. That game is ass. I didn't play the RPGs (that are really good, the Battle Network games are fantastic) that time, but I played most of the franchise, mostly again because I had already played the majority of those games before.
6:11 I would argue the original Super Mario Bros has a lot gameplay density if you are trying to go for a high score playthrough. Going for the best score in that game involves strategies for chaining the best point combos as well as time management. Getting the best score isn't just about getting to the goal as fast as possible, but it's what you decide to do within the level that adds to your point total. Getting to the end of the level quickly just gives you a point bonus for how much time is left on the timer.
What game was playing in the background? I love shoot em ups with big lazers.
Dont know the name but it is retro old school stuff you can find that easy
Man you must HATE Euro Truck Simulator 2, haha!
You're speaking my language all through this video. While I didn't call this concept "game density", I did really notice that I would often bounce off of certain games quickly just because they take so long to get started. For a while I could only get in to arcade games and maybe some platformers because I didn't feel like they wasted my time with fluff.
Though I still appreciate some slow paced, calming games and sims. Knytt Stories is one of my favorite games period, and you can easily go through that game without any sort of conflict. I can also enjoy some Space games, which are mostly made of downtime.
Yes I enjoy some slow paced games as well, but only specific ones. It would be interesting to examine the ones I enjoy and analyze what elements work for me
For many years now, I've asked myself, 'If I pick a random moment in this game, what am I doing? Am I having fun or walking/driving slowly towards a waypoint, or tediously grinding xp?'
Many highly regarded games don't do well from this perspective, and I don't think it is fair by it self for a complete analysis, but in recent years this approach has greatly coloured what games I choose to spend time with. That lead me more towards retro and arcade games which then lead me to get into shmups a few years ago. A genre I'd never previously given any time or attention to.
Oh that's a great litmus test for gameplay density! Yes exactly, what percentage of the game is meaningful gameplay and what percentage is filler or padding, yes mainstream games get an F- in this test ha.
for me the best things on earth are shmups and smw kaizo hacks. You should try them out ;) Regrabs are the best mechanic I've ever seen in a game. And they are fast paced as well.
Damn right! Yes I think I will actually play some of them. Some of the level design looks a little silly, so what would you recommend as the best overall designed hack? I do really dig the idea though
@@TheElectricUnderground Thx for your response! I started few months ago and before that i had a completely wrong idea about kaizo. Since 2017 they're really well designed and don't have these bad troll levels like in the beginning. It's like a different genre now.
The best hack so far for me was Invictus. Snoman Gaming has a well made video about that game. But i wouldn't recommend that as a starting point. The best way to get into it is Learn 2 Kaizo (a tutorial hack) and simultaniously Baby Kaizo World. You don't even need to finish Learn 2 kaizo completely at first. 2 Chapters are enough and Baby Kaizo teaches the basics really good. After that it's mostly Quickie World 1> Quickie World 2 > Akogare > Invictus. And especially Akogare is incredible. That's the hack, which teaches you to use regrabs. Like every jump here needs this technique.
I try to explain it shortly, cause that's basically the main reason why i love it so much and like no other jump n run has this kind of depth. in SMW you have the traditional "hold jump to get higher", but what it makes so special, you are able to repress/hold the jump button midair, to reduce the falling speed. So if you release the button, you fall faster. Regrabs mean,that you press the jump button a bit for a short jump,release it in midair,and press the button again and hold it to expand the range. So you have this full air control,which most new hacks requiere. So sry for to much text, but it's just so good with such talented level designer there, It's too addictive :)
But beside that Kaizo stuff, i found you're channel few weeks ago and really love your content. It opened my mind about shmups in the same way i had with kaizo :) Keep up the good work !!!!
this is why i love NG2 so much. it’s shmuplike in its gameplay density
love the commentary long live electric underground
Glad you enjoyed it!
Whattup Preem?
i can never tell if its because im getting older or if video games now days are just not as good at holding my attention as they used to. I find my life condensing into basically 4 games now over the past couple years, Shmups, DDR/Stepmania, Brood War (because no one will play chess with me lol) and Destiny (for some sort of MMO gameplay). I just don't have the attention or time for anything else these days and between work, school, working music or other personal projects, i really want to optimize my time if i am going to sit and enjoy a video game and shmups truly fill that time perfectly. Don't get me wrong, every once in awhile a game will come out and i will set time aside for it and sometimes be pleasantly surprised, like with Doom Eternal or The Last of Us 2. But more often than not i find myself still putting those credits in instead
Yes exactly I m the same way now :-) you can t go wrong with some broodwar > chess in my opinion :-)
Honestly for me, the art style of shmups is like half the appeal. Blessed Japanese bros and their love for giant robots...
Rising to the challenge of Ikaruga is harder than a dark souls no death run. Even on easy mode.
I'm in love with shmups as of a month ago now that I'm older. Esp ra. De. Is my first imported title in like 15 plus years because I wanted more to play.
They are so relaxing and addicting after a long day of work without frustrating me. I always feel like I accomplished something when I play a shmup for a hour.
Yes exactly! It truly is more meaningful then other genres in that way
Well said. I feel the same way about classic roguelikes, but instead of gameplay density (basic gameplay being very simple/minimalistic), it's mechanics density that makes them great. One of the best examples being Caves of Qud, where the amount of gamebreaking (in a positive sense) stuff you can do is mindboggling. Game is hard as fuck at times, so it kind of expects you to do so, which rewards player creativity and knowlodge of game systems in a way that AAA just dont do most of the time.
Yes at some point I actually do want to start digging more into the hardcore side of rpg, which I think is criminally under explored. Like fire emblem max difficulty stuff
I like this concept a lot... I'm not as hardcore of a player of these games... yet anyway... but I've felt this way about arcade games and fighters for a long time.
I'm glad to hear that, I do think it's really important because there is a tangible difference in gameplay density between well made shmups and just your average mainstream game, but the current reviewing metrics have no way to measure this at all.
The idea of not having redundant content is true with everything. TV series, movies, books, games are all better when they don't have redundant filler. Wasting the audience's time is not good. You as a SHMUP fan are trying to claim that this is something unique to SHMUPs when it's definitely not. Also, something might feel just like filler to you when in actuality it serves a real purpose. Your view of what games are sounds kind of narrow to me. But I definitely agree that many games inflate their playtime arbitrarily which makes them worse. If you don't like AAA games (like me) you have to look for interesting indie games. There are amazing games out there like The Witness
, Return of the Obra Dinn, Invisible Inc, Pathologic 2, Legend of Grimrock 2, Rain World...
I have been on the SHMUP "grind" before trying to get a good score with 1CC but I have had enough of that. I feel like I have now gotten what SHMUPs have to offer and there's no need to play them anymore. To a large degree, SHMUPs and speedrunning are both about mastery through rote memorization which is not very interesting to me in the long run. I prefer fighting games and strategy board games when I want to strive for "mastery".
I don't think gameplay density is unique to shmups, in fact it s going to be one of my main gameplay review criteria for other genres moving forward. It s just by their nature shmup tend to be much more rich with gameplay then other genres on a per second basis. I am very open to other styles of gaming, but I felt it s important to push back on the narrow perception of what makes a game excellent (long drawn out experience) vs what I find excellent (high density real challenge)
@@TheElectricUnderground I agree that an arbitrarily inflated playtime is not something we should value. Skinner box gameplay without real challenge or content is bad. Instead of gameplay density I like to think of it as the density of ideas. Even if you're constantly shooting or fighting enemies, the density of ideas can be very low, and in a calm, slow puzzle game the density of ideas can be very high.
@@lastburning I Think this part comes down to the game design and mechanics for sure. Some shmups have absolutely meaningful intense gameplay every second (cave for example) while others involve floating around aimlessly (euroshmup). Puzzle games are the same way, tetrisphere is one of my favs for this reason
I hear you man. I own about everything that I consider a good game on modern consoles. But still, all I do is play arcade games, and more and more shmups.
I just can't stand anymore doing nothing in a game for minutes and minutes, waiting for some actual gameplay to happen. My PS4/5 and Xbox series X are just taking dust, I don't even open them anymore. I just rather sit in front of my CRT and have instantaneous fun.
I don't know if it is because I am getting older and expect more of my time, or if it is because of modern days social networks that might have changed my brain and wanting instant dopamine in front of a screen and reduced my attention span.
I truly think its because most modern games have greatly reduced in quality and focus, its like eating fast food but it takes forever to get.
Gameplay density...that s a good concept . I m with you on that .
I'm glad you like it! It's something that I am going to comment on a lot in my game reviews moving forward.
can you explain why strict bullet hell shmups where you have to follow specific patterns are better to more reactive shmups?
IIDX says hi
I've been thinking about something similar lately in regard to fighting games. I am basically the only fighting game player out of every one I know. I have friends that I see playing RTS and even though I used to play it with them, I can't anymore. Last time we played I started day dreaming in the middle of the game because of how boring it was.
With fighting games you're in the middle of the shit immediately. As soon as you hear "fight" there's something interesting going on until you hear "ko". In RTS there are moments that are a tsunami of stimuli and those are interesting but the build up to them is so long and so mundane that it isn't worth it. I sometimes look at the clock and am surprised with how many best of 3s I can get in within 20 minutes, which is the average length of a decent RTS match. A constant barrage action vs maybe 2 crescendos in 20 minutes, if that.
Yes but RTS require more thinking skills
Both genre are very high skilled wich is something mindless casual cant fathom with their gambling infested/movie suimulators
Well said. So many RPGs fall under that I think more than any other genre. That's the reason I still cant get through FF7 after 4 tries!!
I love shmups it’s you versus the game to get better and better with stages pattern recognition it’s brain food. Great frustrating fun
This is exactly why replayability factor is important to mention in reviews. How do you value a game or genre that is infinitely replayable? Not just arcade genres that are inherently distilled down to be lean-mean intense rides (and quarter-robbers), but even sandboxes offer infinite replayability despite being mostly the polar opposite - consisting mainly just of this filler goo of menial tasks.
True story: Yesterday evening my friend bought Million Arthur on Steam because it has some crossover character from his fave anime or smth, he rushed through the story mode with said character and refunded it well within those 2h of playtime saying that the game doesn't have enough content to be worth the asking price (even at the current 70% off) ... Stating some meme-like ratio of $1:1h as a reason, I felt depressed and cried myself to sleep afterwards! Unlike my buddy, I imagine there are people who do this regularly though - mainly with fighting games, shmups, arcade ports, or anything they perceive as a novelty.
P.S. From the dev/design standpoint, those scenes like the helicopter ride in MGS are there to break the pace after action/climax, offer players reprieve and time for thought to process the events/story and let the experience sink in. I know it's a stark contrast to what you experience in bullet-hell games etc, esp. after you have built quite some resistance to all this visual stimuli, pace and action over the years.
P.P.S. The staring for hours at one's steam library and choosing what to play is real. I can fully relate - nothing seems to satisfy nor last!
Yeah this whole $1 per hour of "unique" gameplay is the dumbest notion I have ever heard. By that logic all shmups are precisely worth a $ and MMO are the apex of the medium ha. In actual gametime though, it's kinda interesting to turn this on it's head because I generally do believe most have shmups have at least 500 hours of gameplay at the bare minimum, whereas story games tend to be maxed out after a playthrough or two. I've put around 1500 hours into ddp at this point for example.
Yea i have noticed the same thing i had the exact same experience turn on a game play 10 mins but another genre i wanna add something like diablo 2 i was addicted to hardcore runs back in the day or path of exile has that kind of density depending on how you play it
Oh yeah diablo 2 is a ton of fun! Perhaps one of the last good blizzard games
I am great and awful at shmups! I beat Super R type on the Snes with no continues on my first attempt but must have fluked it as now I can't get past the first level lol.
I definitely know the appeal of a shmup, I used to play one back in my childhood.
However, unlike other comments (that I read), I would like to give a different perspective.
I'm a person who values playtime. Gameplay density is alright, but the final verdict depends on the playtime. As in, until I get bored of it. If a game claims that the playtime is over 30+ hours, but I got bored at 6 hours mark, then it is 6 hours mark. If the game is only 6 hours but I replayed it over and over until I reached 100 hours, then it is 100 hours.
By that logic, your point on the playtime is that if you play a 30 minutes shmup but you have been playing it all over again, it means the actual playtime is not 30 minutes, but very much longer.
Now to the point about shmup.
At the present day, and as I grow older, a quick action game started to lose appeal for me.
Take an example of a shmup, if I already clear the game, I have no reason to retry. I have beaten the game. Sure, I can try to get a higher score, but for me, that is a void achievement. I already experienced the game. I prefer to discover new stuff. When there is nothing to discover anymore, I lose interest in the game (aside from when the game is just simply boring or frustrating, of course). So I buy other games. I often do not replay a game once I'm done with it. Except when I'm going to have a new experience, like playing together with my friends.
Not to mention, a fast-paced action sometimes wears me off quickly.
I played Doom 2016, it was a very good game. Although I only managed to play it in 1 hour. I don't mind action, but I want an occasional break and discover the scenery (and cutscene). Or when I can play at my own pace and thinking about the strategy to approach (yes, I play strategy games).
Don't get me wrong. Again, I know the appeal of shmup. I played Tyrian 2000 back during my childhood many times over that I lost count of it. but that day is long over.
Thanks for tuning in and commenting! So the idea of the video is that what constitutes meaningful playtime is much more than just how long the game runs. For example with Ketsui, even of you were going for just a survival clear, you d easily be investing 100+ in making that goal happen. 300+ for an ura clear, for most experienced players. Whereas you could play a game like splinter cell or something and get about a 20 hour experience, but that game time so to say is just more drawn out. I do understand that the intensity of a shmup might be exhausting but that s also why they are able to deliver such a powerful rush!
Amen! Couldnt have been said better man,ty
Thanks for tuning in and awesome profile pic!! Musha :-D
@@TheElectricUnderground oh yeah,ill be tuning in alot,great stuff✌
Hi there,
Have you ever played Dodonpachi Maximum (2012)?? It's Cave's first original bullet-hell shooter for iOS. Pretty good game.
What's great now is that if you have an M1 Mac, the game runs on that too so you can play on a much bigger screen. Check it out on the iOS App Store.
I have a little, my phone is really bad though ha
i played thunderforce 4 endlessly as a kid for tha graphics and music hit
thunderforce 4 is one of the best console shmups ever made! It is very good at taking the arcade formula and putting it into a console setting that makes sense while not ruining the pacing and intensity. In the wrong hands that game could have easily slid into euroshmup territory.
@@TheElectricUnderground i play guitar and make games because of it
Before I started shmuping it was getting to the point that I had to make a list of games in my backlog and force myself to sit down and play them. Granted once I got invested I usually enjoyed them to a degree, but when I got to Touhou to knock off a shmup from my bucket list...well there was no going back. The only thing I play otherwise nowadays is Monster Hunter and it definitely has bloat to it, but it works when I'm not mentally for physically up to playing a shmup.
yeah nothing wrong with a game with a little bit of downtime, but even then I've found that I tend to do things like turn up the frame rate or add a fast forward button if I can ha
I will say tho one issue with shmups is that it's just quite hard to get into em because its just tough to get to the point where you can 1cc sure 20 or 30 minutes is short but 20 or 30 minutes of perfect gameplay and you have to back to the beginning when you mess up is quite a tough hurdle and its even tougher to get higher scores in games like these i dont want the games overhauled i just feel more arcadey type games should ease the player into performing better neon white does this great with its medal system and how it pushes you to want to shave off nanoseconds despite that games like lovely planet and speedrunners from hell did the same thing but were forgotten about because the lack of incentive and you dont need to have such a crazy deep incentive to get the stuff i think you really just need a ranking system walter maccado does this great in fact i think his games are possibly the most dense arcade games ive ever played and despite the minimalism he still includes a ranking system to push you to get better at them so basically shmups are neat but they aint perfect and maybe they shouldnt start with just the arcade mode maybe it could start level based without infinite continues but checkpoints after each level and then you unlock a full arcade mode after getting a good rank on every level by itself that seems like a great way to ease players in without compromising the game overall and if you dont understand what im saying too bad this is a youtube comment i wrote in 5 minutes im not adding punctuation
Excellent! Now I get why other than shmups, mech games, & Wipeout style sci -fi racers, everything else bores me to tears. Boring gameplay AND boring visuals! Sooo glad I watched this.
Glad this vid was helpful :-)
Exceptional analogy, and personally i think the ps3/x360 generation definitely killed a part of gaming for me, as it was then where publishers began to market their miles of square feet virtual land mass as something that was inherently positive , publishers began cater to the lowest common denominator (where every game must be created with the idea of "a person who has never held a controller") and the poisonous idea of 1$=1 hour was born.
Hence normie games like TLoU were born, recieved and viewed as gaming masterpieces, even though the game play itself is mediocre with brain dead AI.
Exactly! I remember clearly when last of us came out I had a lot of people telling me it was a timeless Masterpiece and when I started playing I couldn't understand since the gameplay was so meh. Why not just make it a movie ha
A little off topic but have you played ghost and goblins resurrection? Shit is hard as fuck lol
I 've played a little, I prefer the original since I m not a fan of the new graphics, but yeah that game is no joke!
I cannot express in words how much I agree with all the things you comment in this video!
Gameplay density... love this definition! 👏👏👏
This is the worst feature that abounds so much in many of today's games.
I m glad you like the video! It s one of my favs on the channel :-)
An excellent idea and well explained - makes a lot of sense now that you mention it. If shmups are crack cocaine, then maybe the VNs I've started getting into are going to be the heroin XD. Great video as always.
Ha be careful with your dosage!