Pew-Pew Zoom: SHMUPdate

It's been just over two years since I first talked about SHUMPs as part of "Pew-Pew Zoom," a series of posts on the history of narrative in video games set in space. (At some point I'll have enough experience to cover 4X and other strategic space game genres as well.) Since then, I've found myself bit by the SHMUP bug and put a lot more time not only into playing these games, but learning more about their history and the culture surrounding them. So this week, I thought we'd do a quick update on the fastest growing genre in my game collection and the discoveries I've made along the way.

To start with, while my first SHMUP post was almost endearingly retro-brained (the most recent game I mentioned will turn 30 this year) and that, even though I've acquired many newer games, most of my actual play falls in the era I originally covered: the late 80s and early 90s. My genre associations were largely with the 16-bit era of consoles, so most of my forays have been via the Sega Genesis (which, thanks to the Mega Everdrive Pro, also makes Sega Master System games available). Taking my suggestions from the much-lauded Racketboy list I had already completed (with the judicious use of save states) the Master System version of the original Aleste, Gley Lancer, M.U.S.H.A., and Zero Wing before I discovered this exhaustive video by genre scholar SHMUP Junkie. Getting to see and hear these games in action, even for a handful of seconds, peaked my interest in a way that a static list never could. (I appreciate the obvious irony of mentioning while writing about games.) But the retro-exclusivity was finally broken by a thread on Something Awful dedicated to getting newcomers into the SHMUP genre. The initial post broke down some specifics about these games' appeal (they're short, they're pretty, and they're accessible), and directed me towards a few newer titles I was unfamiliar with. From here, I began exploring SHMUP culture in-depth... and boy, there's a lot more of it than I expected when I wrote that first post.

One of the obvious appeals with these games is its distillation of the arcade experience - possibly one of the last places where it can be found in post-arcade games. Even today, many of the most beloved titles are arcade ports or games that follow the tradition of specific arcade games and their creators' respective styles. While there are more games with narrative cutscenes and setups than ever before, we're still generally dropped straight into the action just as the best arcade games launched the player from the attract screen into the heat of battle. And, unlike fighting games, one of the other remaining genres based around arcade sensibilities, there remains, to one degree or another, an emphasis on score. For many players, enjoying these games is really about being the best at them, with online leaderboards and international competitions taking the place of an arcade machine's list of three-lettered legends. (Funny how "ASS" and "SEX" showed up on every machine... whoever they were, they sure played a lot of video games.) One of the seminal texts for scorechasing SHMUPers is a short book called Full Extent of the Jam, available for free on archive.org. Joke illustrations aside, it reads remarkably like the pre-crash arcade guides I would find in thrift stores or yard sales as a kid. (Actually, those could be pretty jokey, too...) Both have an emphasis on scoring matched only by Beavis and Butt-Head, which... is good for them, but not a path I can see myself taking with any of these games. It requires an approach that seems almost anti-narrative, even with the loose definition I prefer that considers character/ship design, music, and even cabinet art as storytelling devices. But the Quest for Score implores players to ignore all of this in the pursuit of mechanic mastery, considering the game a base puzzle for them to solve. Which is something all of us who play games do to some degree, I admit, but it's rarely the central focus the way it is for the scorechaser.

There's also, although this seems to be less of a factor today than it was fifteen years ago, an intense fetishization of difficulty- which, to be sure, is a topic that interests me enough to write about, but not as something I particularly seek out as part of my gaming experiences. While some of this is attachment to old-school arcade "quarter munchers," a lot of it is associated with the "bullet hell" sub-genre... which itself can be tricky to define. For my own purposes, I'd single out games where the pattern of enemy shots is preset, taking up a large portion of the screen, and the player has to navigate them rather than engage with the enemies themselves (or the shots those enemies take in response to the player). There are number of people who will point out that bullet hells are not as difficult as they appear (the player's ship has a much smaller hitbox than old-school shooters, a game's creators will hint at the path you should take, etc.), but I think that's exactly the point: they look incredibly difficult. Which, again, isn't my particular 1-UP of tea. I tend to find these games visually unappealing, where a focus on visibility means that enemy shots tend to bright purple or pink, regardless of the game's setting. For bullet hell-focused companies like CAVE (largely credited with inventing the subgenre), this affects the entire color palate of the game, resulting in smooth pale pastels far removed from the inky black space setting that got me here in the first place. But, given the popularity of bullet hells (for many modern players, the term is synonymous with SHMUPS in general), I'll keep looking into them and, who knows... in a year, I, too, may be singing their praises.

But for now, I'm enjoying other things. As I've mentioned before, the pick-up-and-go quality of SHMUPs is welcome for busy gamers with limited time and a hunger for the sensory blast arcade games operated on. But their similarity also opens up another factor: collectibility. There's a impulse to group games that share features together as if they were part of the same series... and, if they're from the same developers, they might as well be. Combined with the small size and (relatively) low price, a "gotta collect them all" mentality is easy to pick up. On the subject of developers, SHMUP fans tend to have a greater awareness of the people who make their games than players in general - likely a result of small production teams made up of "lifers" with recognizable styles. As an incurable researcher, it's fun to trace the "family history" of these games and see the development of certain approaches. I particularly like the late 90s/early 2000s era where there were a lot of new (and frequently crazy) ideas with the budgets to back them up. Many games from this period are being released in the west for the first time, including a number that were exclusive to the XBox 360, which had a surprising secret identity as a SHMUP unit in Japan. The game I've been playing recently, Ginga Force originated in that space, and it's evident that this was a game designed for home play with dialogue throughout the levels and intro/outro cutscenes... not to mention customization options for your ship paid for with money accrued during various runs - something generally associated with the "Euro-SHMUP" sub-genre that proliferated on home computers in the 80s and 90s. I have a few of those, too, but the vibe is somewhat different and something I'll need to which I'll need to acclimate. But having more games to look forward to is never a bad thing, especially when they're easy to pick up (or put down).

I'm sure I have plenty more to discover in this space.. whether or not the games are actually set there. To paraphrase the pre-boss audio clip from the game at the heart of Full Extent of the Jam: my real mission starts now... and I'm ready!

- B

Send questions, comments, and essays defining "bullet hells" to neversaydice20@gmail.com or Tweet us @nevesaydice2