The Type of Shmup I Hate

 

Shmups, or “shoot ‘em ups” are a genre of video game I have loved since I was a young boy. The earliest one I have any real memories of really diving deep on and getting good at is Thunder Force 4 on the Mega Drive, an intensely difficult title that ate up a staggering amount of my time with that system. I probably played one or two previous titles before that but my memory is hazy. However the one thing that is undeniable is that even to this day, despite the genre becoming as niche as it’s become, it’s a type of game that I have loved dearly the whole time.

Like most genre of game, shmups come with their own series of sub-genres. The big over arching ones being horizontal and vertical. This is self explanatory as it’s simply referring to the direction in which the screen does its scrolling. There’s also a 3rd type that I’m unsure what the internet at large likes to call which is an over the shoulder type game. You know, something like a Starfox. Not a fan of this style personally but I wouldn’t say I hate it. A game like Iridion 3D on the GBA might piss me off but you can give me a Lylat Wars or a Panzer Dragoon and I’ll have a grand old time.

Then there's the other big distinction of your regular vanilla shmup and bullet hell. The first kind being something like Darius or R-Type where the enemies shoot directly at you in easy patterns but some kind of other factor may make things more complicated. The second being something like Touhou or Mushihime-sama where the stage itself doesn’t really factor in at all but the enemies and bosses shoot at you in extremely dense patterns that require some of the prior types skills but mainly boils down to memorization and the ability to adapt to the odd curveball. I have no qualms with either type. I prefer bullet hell but I do love a bit of Raiden, Darius and Thunder Force too.

The type of shmup I absolutely can’t fucking stand doesn’t even really come down to a sub-genre really, at least not one acknowledged by online communities as such. The type of shmup I absolute cannot fucking handle is the type that I’m going to name “checkpoint shmups”. Let’s say, for example, you’re enjoying a bit of DoDonPachi in the arcade. You misjudge the space between some bullets or a stray shot escapes your focus and you eat shit and explode. A couple of power-ups fly out of your ship, it disintegrates and a new one flies up the screen for you to power on and keep fighting. When you eat shit too much, a full power appears, you pop in another coin and keep going. This is the kind of shmup I like, when I die the instant chance to re-power a little and the constant forward momentum feels good. But then there’s a game like Gradius and good lord does Gradius fucking piss me off. You’re flying around, having a good time and then a stray bullet blows you up or you run into a wall trying to avoid enemy fire. The ship explodes, the game stops dead in its tracks, the screen cuts to black and then knocks you back to a checkpoint in the level with no powerups. Sometimes it may give you one notch on the upgrade meter but most of the time it doesn’t. You lost a bunch of progress and now you’re weak as shit so even returning to that point feels like an impossible chore. MAYBE if you’re lucky and the checkpoint was by some enemies that drop upgrades, you can claw it back but upon that first death, your run is basically over unless you’re some kind of shmup demi-god.

THIS is the kind of shmup I can’t stand. Nothing kills my motivation to keep playing more than the game stopping me dead in my tracks to knock me back a few meters through the level. Gradius is a particularly bad example of this too because in that game, ship speed is tied to your power up meter and you need about 2 points in it for the game to feel even remotely playable. You die once, lose all your speed and weapon power and now segments that were at first easy suddenly become impassible without a great deal of practice and the only way to get that practice is to die and restart over and over. The very epitome of unfun dogshit in a genre of game where short, quick play sessions are one of the main draws. It’s mainly found in early entries in the genre and isn’t used as much today but that just means that going back to experience “the classics” is an exercise in frustration rather than fun nostalgia.

Shmups are great, even the ones that piss me off like Gradius I still enjoying playing up until the moment I suffer my first death. Bottom line though, in a genre like this, don’t kill the momentum because of a single mistake and if there’s any developer out there who has made a shmup like this within the last 10 years, sincerely, fuck you. Patch your game and take that shit out. Now excuse me I’m going to go play some Deathsmiles

I Think We’re Doing Remakes Wrong

 

I recently happened across a teaser for a remaster of legendary PC game Deus Ex.  A game so revered by gaming culture that there’s a joke that says every time you mention, someone will reinstall it.  The remaster, based on the teaser, basically looks to be the same as the original but with a bit of a face lift but it suffers from the problem of looking like complete and utter shit. 

Deus Ex was released in the year 2000 and it wasn’t the prettiest thing to ever hit our PC screens but being one of the first “immersive sims” it was an intensely interesting experience.  This new version looks less like a loving graphical rebuilding of that kinda fugly game and more like an amateur student project that you’d download for free off a modding site.  Some crap thrown together by a guy who’s been learning blender for about a year titled something like “Deus Ex HD Mod” or some shit.  Something you might download out of curiosity and then remove from your system after about 30 minutes into a new game. 

But does Deus Ex really need a remaster or a remake? Personally I don’t think so.  It was a great game when it dropped in 2000 and you can easily grab a copy, install it and still have a great time with it to this very day.  You could have just left it as is and everything would have been just fine.  Let’s face reality for a second here, though.  If you’re the kind of person who looks at something like Deus Ex (or any other deeply respected game for that matter; RE4, Crash, Dragon Quest etc etc) and then start posting online about how these things “need/deserve” remakes, then my bet is that you don’t actually like the game all that much in the first place. 

I caught whiffs of this the hardest when the RE4 remake came out.  Suddenly people in comment sections saying that they were so happy RE4R came out because the original version was “clunky”, “stiff” and even “unplayable in the modern day”.  If you GENUINELY believe any of this stuff about an old game then the reality of the matter is that you just don’t like RE4 that much.  That’s fine by itself but because RE4 is such a respected title and you’re too much of a quivering pussy to hold your own opinions on media, you start pining for remakes.  Even if your pines for modern releases are purely based in aesthetics then you’re still a bitch.  If you claim to be a fan of something or you see something that looks interesting and you’re put off even trying simply because it looks “old” then why are you even here? If you have that much open disrespect for gaming history like that, maybe you should fuck off to another hobby.

But this leads me to the title of this post, I can’t help but feel that we’re doing remakes wrong.  There’s no need to remake Deus Ex because we already know it’s good.  The only purpose this remake serves is so a sales team can utilize the power of nostalgia to make a line go up.  I think we should be using remakes and remaster to have a second go at games that were bad at the toke but that made of had value were they executed better.  One example I can think of for a game I played this year is The Bouncer on PS2.  A lackluster beat em up with extremely basic gameplay that demands that you spend about 60% of its 4 hour run time watching cutscenes.  Some levels in that game are single rooms with 3 dudes that you spam a single button to kill before the movies start playing again.  But the aesthetics were great, the world seemed interesting, if you remade The Bouncer in 2025 and fleshed out the combat, maybe made it a little Yakuza-esque you might have something special on your hands.  A more personal example for me would be a remake of the horror game Outlast.  Let someone who doesn’t have severe brain injury rewrite the plot and bring it more in line with the horror themed Mirrors Edge that I thought it was going to be instead of the painfully boring non-game it ended up being. 

Not that I’m ENTIRELY against remaking good stuff though.  I had no problems with the Crisis Core remake, for example because that was locked to the PSP, a system famous for having the battery swell and maybe explode.  Putting it on my PC was welcome.  SMT3: Nocturne was also OK in my book because original PS2 versions of Maniax were stupidly expensive and giving me a version that cost 30 bucks instead of 200 was nice.  If your remake serves as a middle finger to the retro game market then I salute you.  Finally I was completely OK with the remake of moon: Remix RPG Adventure because it never got a real English release until that came out.  I personally might be fine playing Japanese only games but when I find a good one I want to be able to suggest it without having to point to a shitty fan translation made by a guy that couldn’t order a beer in an izakaya without having a breakdown however the absolute state of that side of gaming is another post for another day

What I’m saying with all this is that we should be using remakes and remasters to have a second shake at stuff that didn’t quite make it in the execution.  Buying remakes so that you can pathetically wallow in nostalgia while giving money to suits who don’t care about the medium even a little bit needs to stop.  Next time you see a remake of a game you already know is good, just ignore it and instead go find something new and interesting and put your money there instead.  Doing a little digging will enrich your life much more than doing a 15th play though of Deus Ex but with shittier graphics this time

Edit: Please forgive the weird highlighting, the Blogger post editor is actually one of the worst things to ever exist, Ill try to ensure it doesnt happen again, maybe this post needs a fuckin remake