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Eventually, things take a turn for the worse. The Saturn and PSX appear on the scene, and suddenly everybody's infected with polygon fever. Any game that dares to remain sprite-based and plays out on a 2D plane is met with derision. A collection of two of the Parodius games comes out on the 32bit consoles and, at best, is damned with faint praise - "good for a quick blast if you get tired of your snazzy new games, but doesn't last very long". That sort of thing.
It's not just about how the new tech's used, though.
Everybody forgets how shmups are supposed to be played, where the thrill lies. Every time a new one comes out, it's slated as being too easy by reviewers who've clearly kept on pressing Start every time they've run out of lives. They've forgotten the joy of playing for score, of *mastering* a game. I think the increase in popularity of beat 'em ups is partly to blame for this - that's a genre where the single player experience is of little importance, so the player uses it as nothing more than a training ground for the multiplayer and keeps on pressing Continue every time ze gets whupped. Tekken, Toshinden and Virtua Fighter are the games that are receiving all the press, and people start playing every game like it's a beat 'em up.
So shmups get a kicking because you can finish them in forty minutes by spamming your way through with infinite continues or cheats.
But then, two or three years later, something funny starts to happen. A scene starts to build up, playing and enthusing about shmups. Small Japanese companies - and it is only small Japanese companies, unfortunately - begin to spring up, often made up of disillusioned developers who've jumped ship from the big boys, and begin creating shmups again. Only, this time, horis are largely ignored and verts take centre stage. And they reinvent the form.
It begins with two games in particular. The first, Batsugun, introduces the elements that make up the main features of the genre to this day. It's the first bullet hell / 'manic' shooter - a game where you spend as much time avoiding enemy shots, threading your way through an oncoming wall of neon, as you do firing your own guns. It also introduces the concepts of experience and levelling up - more traditionally associated with RPGs - to the genre.
I've still not played Batsugun, so I'll have to shut up there :<
The other game is more famous - Cave's masterful Donpachi.
It's really quite difficult to find fault with Donpachi. Its chunky looks are always appealing and easy to work with - no cheap deaths from being hit by a shot you can't see here. It sounds great - meaty explosions, fun music. It's pacy and highly controllable and works on a deep, instinctive level.
Other now-familar elements are introduced or cemented with this game - the concept of chaining (you get a split second after destroying one enemy in which to destroy another and keep your combo chain up, which increases the points value of every enemy destroyed), the tiny hit box (only a minute section of your craft has collision detection, meaning you can jink yr way through tiny gaps in enemy bullet patterns) and the two different types of shot (tap the fire button to keep your movement speed up and fire off weak individual shots, hold it down to fire a more powerful and constant stream, but take a massive hit to your maneuverability).
Both of these come out on Sega's Saturn in Japan, leading to the hardware gaining a cult following that remains strong to this day. Many other verts also make the transition from arcade to Saturn - Dodonpachi, the criminally ignored Soukyugurentai, Battle Garegga - and while some also make it across to the PSX (in superior translations, in some cases), the dearth of other games on Sega's machine at this point in time mean that it becomes their natural home.
The big one is obviously Radiant Silvergun.
It's impossible to write anything new about RS. Widely claimed to be the greatest vert shooter ever made, although I do sometimes suspect that the people making that claim haven't played a huge number of others. Others claim it to be the most over-rated piece of shit ever - in that case, I suspcet that the people making those claims haven't acutally played it for more than five minutes (if at all) and are simply being contrary for the sake of it. Certainly, the inflated eBay prices that you have to pay if you want to get hold of a copy now don't help when it comes to trying to find somebody who's prepared to look at the game objectively.
it gets the Saturn doing things that it has no right to be able to pull off without its insides melting. Transparencies, huge polygon monstrosities, hundreds of bullets on screen at a time.
It again introduces or polishes concepts that have become core parts of modern shooters - experience gain, bullet scraping (like Donpachi, your ship has a tiny hit box, but here you can gain extra points through the technique that's become known as 'bullet scraping' - that is, rubbing the invincible parts of your craft along enemy bullets), score maximisation by milking bosses (painstakingly taking them apart section by section instead of aiming for their weak point and finishing them off in one go).
It has the greatest shmup storyline around - R-Type Final comes fairly close, but in all honesty this is on an entirely different level.
Finally, it possesses one of the most awe-inspiring bosses to grace any game - say hello to XIGA and start re-evaluating your opinion of what the Saturn was capable of. The WARNING message that provides you with three hints on how to take the boss down here limits itself to:
1. BE PRAYING
2. BE PRAYING
3. BE PRAYING |
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