Hallucinations

No, not the boardgame.

I was playing Ketsui on my DS the other day. It's a Shmup, an arcade styled bullet hell/curtain shmup. As training for my debut with DeathSmiles. Utterly sucking at Ketsui's Very Hard course, I started thinking about what drives me and other people who are into shmups. I can't speak for the veterans, who are absolutely crazy and deserves lots of hentai art for their surprising amount of finger finesse, but I can speak for myself.

I think risk plays a significant major factor here. From the original Space Invaders, we are encouraged to rush the game, since the last few aliens would tentatively move faster as time passes, as well as speeding up significantly the closer it reaches you until the point where they can't be shot, and you die. There's just that much more sastifaction from squeezing that last shot off before they or their shots, or their kamikaze nosedive, reaches you.

This evolved. Free movement was invented. Instead of just sitting there waiting for your death ala Asteroid, you've been granted control over the ships movement, ensuring that you play a much larger part in ensuring your own survival. It fed our desire to be in control and played to our fears of losing. In the end it's a seamless combination of both, with the sastifaction of just plain surviving and sustaining yourself, that drives people to continue playing shmups.

Shmups, after the point of Gradius. was even more gratifying, not only do you get to have control, fear as well as adrenaline to survive, you also get great gratification from bosses. The large nemesis that you are forced to take down after every hair chewing, nail biting stage. The resultant is 2 minutes of even more hair chewing and nail biting, because the bosses are so huge, and obviously overpowering, it feels like you're trying to topple an empire (Built with guns, all firing bullets at you, alone). This serves to positively reinforce the player to continue rather than slump over exhausted. Almost in a self contradicting way. Imagine fighting a leopard in a coliseum and then asking for a tiger. It doesn't make sense, but it sure feels good if you manage to kill it.

Then the extreme forms, almost like cocaine, popped out. Bullet Hells, the arcade variation of Danmaku. Involved raining projectiles on you, challenging you to weave yourself in and out of the trouble, navigating a maze of several pixels thick, of abnormal dimensions and shape, just purely out of the will to survive a session of the game. This proved to be an extreme concept that completes the whole package, I don't think the games' design gets more primal than that. The games gets more advanced in terms of graphics, mechanics, complexity, but the most basic of our mindset, survival, makes it all the more gratifying the harder it is. As long as it doesn't border on unfairness.

However, the more advanced our shmups have become, the more estranged are the laymen who doesn't know how to play, because if they lack the ability to survive for a decent amount of time, before the gratification arrives, they basically can't see the point of continuing, therefore abandoning all efforts to continue playing.

Perhaps then, in the future, there will be more games that emulate Geometry Wars' success, combining frantic pace, advanced features, as well as letting the players gain gratification, just enough to continue to play; just enough to convince themselves that they can survive. Maybe, the shmup genre will receive new blood in their userbase as well as game variety. To continue the chain of evolution in this particular strain of games.