7th Day Electric Ep 11: DID RPG MURDER STG?
Added 2020-12-01 22:03:20 +0000 UTCENJOY!
Comments
That's really interesting! Yeah I think europe has a very different gaming culture from that time from what I hear, where PC and non-nintendo stuff was much more prevalent. I've even heard that sega was much more popular in these regions. Remind me a bit of how in south America SNK ruled the arcades whereas in North America Capcom had a much larger presence. Yeah my knowledge of text adventure games is basically non-existent ha.
The Electric Underground
2020-12-09 22:14:45 +0000 UTCOne more thing, but maybe that's just a German thing: Video arcades were never big in Germany, at least to my knowlegde. Back in the early 80s, arcade machines like Dig Dug or Galaga were all over super markets and shopping malls. They all vanished when the government decided some time around the mid 80s that all gambling machines including video games were only for 18+ and had to be placed where minors can not access them. Or maybe video games were 16+ and could by placed in a special room, I don't recall exactly, but anyways they were packed together with gambling machines in "Spielotheken" which had low social prestige and were not a happy hang out place for kids. So I think most Germans my age were introduced to gaming on something like the C64 or the Amiga (the NES was never a big thing in Germany either), and save states were a bigger thing on computers than on early consoles due to the availability of floppy disks and the like.
Martin Wöhrle
2020-12-08 20:46:48 +0000 UTCJust watched your reveal video, really enjoyed it!! Gotta smirk about that Zork reference, though. Is the intersection of shmups and text adventures really that small? Maybe not, they are both tough as nails and really old school, I'd say 😀. My big games this year were Blue Revolver and Hadean Lands, so go figure. Keep it up, you're doing great!!
Martin Wöhrle
2020-12-08 19:30:04 +0000 UTCIt's really ironic. One of the coolest things about getting into hardcore shmups is getting IRL xp rather than pretendo experience points. Like when you find yourself ducking through tight bullet spreads you would have run screaming from before, or the gaps start looking way bigger than they used to, or you're point-blanking bosses you used to cower in terror from while hugging the bottom of the screen. RPGs (which I still love btw) give you a phoney sense of progression that's very well marked out, while shmup progress is ill-defined and hard to measure, yet way more real.
Philip Mason
2020-12-07 07:11:15 +0000 UTCDespite being incorrect I’ll take being the closest yet. Cheers Mark!
Dominic Ng
2020-12-05 01:35:11 +0000 UTCHi my dude excellent comment!! You are very very close! It's not grinding, but it's very closely related and grinding is the exact bi product of the factor, so yes grinding is the closest guess so far :-)
The Electric Underground
2020-12-04 17:12:32 +0000 UTCI am glad to hear that!! worked on the merch last night, my first design is being approved now.
The Electric Underground
2020-12-04 17:10:56 +0000 UTCYes that's exactly right, we need to figure another system of score battling that's like skill based matchmaking or something. There has to be a system of doing that somehow I think.
The Electric Underground
2020-12-04 17:10:22 +0000 UTCGiven the nature of the title and what you discussed, it seems to me like you already revealed what the issue is (and how RPGs are related, despite not being solely responsible) – can't remember at the moment if you said this explicitly in the episode, but the issue has got to be GRINDING. With the old school RPGs, grinding was the means to overcome insurmountable challenges (e.g. - bosses) by plowing through weaker enemies to increase stats and abilities. Often it's hard to determine whether or not such challenges can be overcome with just skill alone, so the safer route is to grind whenever one starts to sweat in battle. Grinding and the accumulation of stats and abilities, as you mentioned, has spread into other game genres and non-games alike (e.g. - gamification as a means of fortifying good habits via apps). With gamification, there's a lot of overlap with achievements (social badges) but at least with the latter the most prestigious achievements can be dependent on high skill. It reminds me of your Twitter episode and how a sense of success correlates more with time spent in the app (or in this topic's case, games) to have a misleading sense of success and progress. This mode of instilling a sense of accomplishment in the player has lowered the bar of challenge for what general players will put up with, and how they relate to gaming as a hobby (e.g. - relaxing versus demanding). Obviously, shmups are the diametric opposite of that mentality, which speaks significantly to their decline. What's interesting though is how well received the Souls games were, and it speaks to how a non-trivial number of people don't want to be spoon fed when playing games. For that reason, I believe there is still potential for a resurgence of shmups, which is not the same as saying they'll be massively popular, at some point down the road. However, as Philip mentioned, the shmup genre is very much responsible for its downfall. We can't fault Squaresoft for not making another Einhander (or maybe we can) if during that era it was much more lucrative to produce many Final Fantasy games (which it obviously was). But considering that among the most popular shmup developers, which is obviously CAVE, it is utterly stupid that most of their games have not been localized for non-Japanese audiences (aside from the iOS ports, Xbox 360, and thankfully now with M2 ST). If someone is interested in these games, the emulation route is a significant barrier to entry (for me, I'm not very skilled technically with roms and how to troubleshoot errors. I simply don't have the patience for it, nor do I have a PC). Anyway, if what I wrote is not what you have in mind I'm looking forward to the great reveal. : )
Dominic Ng
2020-12-03 17:49:51 +0000 UTCI like the idea of a more muted line of merch. Something that's not too obnoxious. One of my favorite gamer Tshirts I've had was a simple Aperture Laboratories one. Nonfans of Portal probably thought it was just a lab I worked for. Fans of the game loved it and would comment on it.
Coreo
2020-12-03 17:10:05 +0000 UTCYeah totally agree, it often comes across as juvenile a lot of the time, or way too garish. Looking forward to some tasteful designs!
Dominic Ng
2020-12-03 16:31:21 +0000 UTCThe thing with scores and leaderboards as your prime motivation is that this doesn't scale very well. By definition, most people are mediocre in any given thing. It might still be meaningful for someone who is number 150 in a list of 300 to try and climb up a couple of places, maybe with the goal to some time get into the top 100. That incentive probably is much smaller if you are number 150000 in 300000.
Martin Wöhrle
2020-12-03 08:05:03 +0000 UTCMaybe something like the platform that Osu! offers. A kind of place where you can play maps created and shared by the community, check replays and share scores online. That could be interesting.
Ram Q
2020-12-03 01:38:09 +0000 UTCYeah ,it's got me excited. I have very few things that have have anything to do with games , mostly because of design really .I personally don't like stuff that's too "loud" stuff that you would see ebgames / gamestop stuff .
Regal Unlimited
2020-12-03 00:32:49 +0000 UTCI was just thinking of how awesome it would be to have EU merch and wanted to reach out to you about it...but lo and behold, I just had to join Patreon to be privy to this exchange. :)
Dominic Ng
2020-12-03 00:27:35 +0000 UTCYes getting the merch right is deeply important to me (maybe more than it should be ha). I think the items that are definitely a must are hoodie, long-sleeved shirt, short sleeve shirt, hat, and necklace. That's what I am going to be focusing on. I definitely want to avoid any cheesy looking merch and want designs you can wear to work without drawing too much attention or skepticism. Or could wear on a date!
The Electric Underground
2020-12-02 19:53:21 +0000 UTC100% agree here! Yes, there is no doubt that we need to somehow figure a way to tap into the direct competition aspect of other genres for shmups. I think some creative solutions could really help here. I do know that dent has been doing really well with the calice cup shmup series, but maybe some creative formatting with streaming or something could bring a ton of fun and interest. Maybe merge a shmup slam style event with a competition somehow, where people have to achieve scores live or something. That would be really cool.
The Electric Underground
2020-12-02 19:50:04 +0000 UTCFor sure!! I'm going to talk about this in the upcoming video!
The Electric Underground
2020-12-02 19:43:39 +0000 UTChere's the link :-) https://youtu.be/IGuIBMY3AzQ
The Electric Underground
2020-12-02 19:42:44 +0000 UTCFor sure, this is an area shmups still could really benefit from. In a way though, shmups do have extremely good online play via online leaderboards and replay sharing. I think this is an aspect of the genre I need to really highlight more moving forward actually, because it can actually be extremely fun and competative and you don't ever have any online lag issues like with fgc, fps, or strategy games. There's no denying that the direct competition aspect of other genres is extremely compelling (I'm a massive fighting game guy myself and have longed something like 5k online melee matches ha) but that is also something to consider. Icon and I have a great talk about this in the deathtiny episode of the podcast :-)
The Electric Underground
2020-12-02 19:42:20 +0000 UTCI still think the social aspect of it is a huge part. We can talk all day about how competitions and help bring exposure and it's true, but at the end of the day we're still just comparing scores. With fighting games and RTS and other competitive genres it's about pitting the personalities and teams against each other as much as the games. Maybe even something as simple as daily/weekly challenges with caveats to give people a way to compete on a smaller scale could help. It's a tough problem as the core appeal of shmups are really counter to the instant gratification jump in and out nature of things now.
Chinopolis
2020-12-02 18:36:51 +0000 UTCMerch would be cool and I think is a great idea . Would you consider doing a hoodie as well ? The other "gamer" stuff I think looks way too tacky and looks cheap . Maybe you heard of this guy VaatiVidya ,but I think he has a really nice twist on the whole soulsborne genre for his merch https://www.youtube.com/c/VaatiVidya/store
Regal Unlimited
2020-12-02 11:13:55 +0000 UTCPhilip made good point yes .I also think difficulty plays a big part. A lot of games these days hold your hand,especially the western RPGs . Every game has markers of where to go next ,you don't even have to read the quest logs or anything or put effort .
Regal Unlimited
2020-12-02 11:00:23 +0000 UTCI think Philip makes a lot of good points, specially mentioning net cafes. I remember a lot of my friends that were really into arcade games, specially fighting games, moved really quickly to play games like diablo, counter strike and Warcraft 3. People that were competitive found other genres to play, that were more welcoming and worked online. We still struggle to have proper online gaming for fighting games and there is no online games for shmups.
Ram Q
2020-12-02 10:04:12 +0000 UTCwhoops, posted the same message twice
The Electric Underground
2020-12-02 06:19:34 +0000 UTCsome excellent points for sure! Yeah I definitely don't think the genre is blameless in the struggles that caused it to fall behind. I think there are some definite points where shmups could have easily improved, like with graphical presentation like you mention. One point that I think is very hard to reconcile though is that what makes shmups so appealing and amazing are also what caused their own downfall, which is their ferocious quest forward to push the game design of the genre to the max. I don't think any other genre has seen a fraction of player skill push quite like the way shmups have. There are highly intensive games like multiplayer that require insane levels of skill to compete in (like broodwar), but nothing in the single player space comes close. Other genres, like you say, pulled back and stopped catering to the hardcore crowd (like the mario series for instance, which essentially stabilized or got easier over time). But shmups really struggle with a fundimental game design problem other genres simply do not, which is what makes them fun is their intensity. So there have actually been a good number of creative attempts by devs to make the games more accessible to the wider crowd, CAVE explicitly did this with Espgaluda, Deathsmiles, and Mushi (original), and it probably is not a coincidence that deathsmiles and mushi are among their most commercially successful. But yeah, I do think there is a true underlying shift that changed how game design worked forever and shmups specifically got hurt by it because their appeal doesn't carry the same way that other 2d genres have been able to. But there are other fantastic genres to meet this same end, so I don't think this is only a shmup problem. Beat em ups, run and guns, and single screen arcade all have basically met the same fate. But twin stick shooters seem to do fairly well. I think there is an underlying reason why this is which I will be interested to hear your thoughts on! I will probably release the video about it on Friday morning :-)
The Electric Underground
2020-12-02 06:07:44 +0000 UTCIn all honesty, I think the thing that killed the shmup is the shmup. We can talk about other genres or shifts in industry structure, but the fact is if people had wanted to be playing these things, they would have been. Plenty of other genres survived. Even the expansion of narrative elements in games is only a side issue; tons of popular games like Minecraft, Fortnight, PUBG, Madden, NBA 2K etc. got big without leaning on story (though later came to incorporate them when they didn't have any other meaningful changes to make). Shmups didn’t deal with the shift to 3D in any meaningful way. Their innovations were very inward-looking. They steadfastly refused to explain themselves or what a given game’s appeal was. They couldn’t make scoring seem cool. They lost the visual spectacle they'd had in the days when R-Type was the killer app launching the PC Engine, or Life Force was a staple of NES collections everywhere, And they all started to look very similar, especially once the hori shmup all but vanished from the face of the earth. Only the trainspotters could parse why they'd want to pick one over another. And of course they remained obstinately difficult and required doing the same thing over & over at a time when other games were all giving you Wolverine health & restarting you right where you died infinitely. If I had to pick one outside element that had the biggest impact, it was network gaming and the explosion of net cafes in the mid-90s. I saw my friends who’d play Alpha or KoF switch to Diablo & Warcraft II, because they could do it with several players, and get a guaranteed hour of play out of $5. Suddenly arcades just didn’t make much sense, and that only snowballed once Microsoft entered the console business and brought online gaming to the Madden-loving masses.
Philip Mason
2020-12-02 01:46:02 +0000 UTC
