So, Jets and Guns 2 has come out in early access -
https://store.steampowered.com/app/830820/JetsnGuns_2/
I always avoided the first in sales as it looked a bit too euroshmupy and unreadable.
Should I be skipping it?
Anyone here rate the first one?
The first entry is one of the worst games ever made in the genre, a game that every aspiring designer should study to see the things than you can never do in a shmup.
All of that said, Europe has an amazing tradition of shmups, with some of the best designers to grace the genre.
The great problem is that the Amiga 500 scene was plagued with these type of bad shooting games whose only value was the impressive use of the pixel art, specially in Germany.
But to reduce the European scene to this, is to forget the amazing Commodore 64 scene, or the works of creators such as Jeff Minter, who were designing some of the best shooting games in the 80s. Continuing a tradition of TRUE score attack shmups, in an age in which in Japan, these shmups focused in complex scoring systems with infinite layouts were supplanted by games based in memorization and with a fixed length.
I think that one of the pending things of the shmup internet communities, is to put value on a western tradition starting with the seminal 'Robotron 2084'.
And the toxic label that we have created with euroshmup, don't help to mitigate this.
For example, my favorite shmup in this 2018 has been created in Europe, 'Debris Infinity' for Nintendo Switch.
And I haven't seen any shmup community talking about this game, the same can be said of the rest of shooting games coming from this western tradition in the last years, with some rare exceptions such as 'Nex Machina'.
And don't get me wrong, it's also cool to have western developers in the last years, imitating in a perfect way these Japanese games of the late 80s and early 90s, with landmarks as the recent 'ZeroRanger'.
But sometimes I miss more diversity in these communities, and less assumptions and cliches.
There are a lot of examples of these assumptions and cliches. Like for example, that arcade games are about doing 1CC runs. And this was truth starting in the second half of the 80s. But in my opinion, this is not what defines an arcade game, but it's the scoring mechanics.
And we have with 'Donkey Kong' a brilliant example of a pure arcade game and one of the most influential titles in video game history, still played to this day in a competitive way. And that it's a game that can't be completed, none a 1CC run is the main objective. It's a game about pushing your limits to increase your score, without an ending.
It's only an example.
To talk of how wonderful were the Capcom shmups designed by Yoshiki Okamoto, such as 'SonSon' and 'Gunsmoke' is other example. Games that were heavily influenced by a western tradition.
None other Japanese designer was able to understand so well the basis of an arcade game.
But we can still read a lot of commentaries underplaying Capcom early shmups, even among shmup fans.
