Where are all the shmups on XBLA?

[RobotPants]

There have only been a few and they're either remakes of classic arcade games or Aegis Wing. I'd like to see some Raidens, R-Types, Gradiuses, Dariuses, and whatnot. I'd love to see some of the late 90s Taito, Atlus/Cave, and Psikyo games but I suppose scrolling shooters are more of a niche genre than I choose to acknowledge.

[Jim Preston]

Well, on partnernet Ikaruga has been available in Japanese for some time. I've got to imagine if that comes out for XBLA that's pretty much the only shmup anyone would ever need.

[André Costa]

Well, there a lot of other good/awesome shmups from the Dreamcast that could be ported to XBLA.

RobotPants: get an arcade emulator like MAME and enjoy the shmups there :]

[forgeforsaken]

There's that really awesome looking one from Nippon Ichi(?) coming too.
Also Raiden IV supposedly. We should get some news this week on some of them at least.

[Angrycoder]

There is a fanbase for ports of the classic/modern shmups. The problem is they would never buy them on the 360 because they would look awful scaled/filtered and wouldn't be playable in their proper aspect ratio.

Normal people stopped caring about these types of games ages ago, except for the odd aberration like Ikaruga or maybe Gradius V.

[Stroker Ace]

Watching the recorded demos of ikaruga kinda killed it for me. That, and the game takes like 20 minutes if you win.

[Angrycoder]

Watching the recorded demos of ikaruga kinda killed it for me. That, and the game takes like 20 minutes if you win.

You are looking a few solid months of playtime for you to 'win' in 'like 20 minutes' using a single credit. And to do what you see in those videos? A year or two.

[Stroker Ace]

Yeah. A year of work to replicate the 20 minute video that comes with the game. I guess when I saw it and realized that the whole thing was about memorizing pre-set spawns instead of developing razor-sharp reflexes I tuned out.

[Angrycoder]

Yeah. A year of work to replicate the 20 minute video that comes with the game. I guess when I saw it and realized that the whole thing was about memorizing pre-set spawns instead of developing razor-sharp reflexes I tuned out.

Any high level shmups players will tell you that playing well as it least 60-80% memorization. When you see any kind of super play video from a shmup, you can safely assume that the person playing has invested hundreds of hours of time. Its not like they have some kind of super intuition and hyper reflexes.

If you are interested in playing for score, Ikaruga is definately more of a puzzle than a shmup. However, to Treasure's credit at least they made it possible to just play for survival unlike Radiant Silvergun.

[Stroker Ace]

I just don't see why Ikaruga can't be more like WoW.

[bigdruid]

Any high level shmups players will tell you that playing well as it least 60-80% memorization. When you see any kind of super play video from a shmup, you can safely assume that the person playing has invested hundreds of hours of time. Its not like they have some kind of super intuition and hyper reflexes.

If you are interested in playing for score, Ikaruga is definately more of a puzzle than a shmup. However, to Treasure's credit at least they made it possible to just play for survival unlike Radiant Silvergun.

Yeah, Radiant Silvergun seemed to be *entirely* built around memorizing the secret ways to get score multipliers, which kind of killed it for me. That, and the fact that it was fucking *hard*.

My SHMUP claim to fame is that I can play through Sky Shark in a single credit, and I agree that it's 80% memorization, with the 20% reflexes thrown in to allow you to recover if you screw up your pattern.

[RobotPants]

There is a fanbase for ports of the classic/modern shmups. The problem is they would never buy them on the 360 because they would look awful scaled/filtered and wouldn't be playable in their proper aspect ratio.

Normal people stopped caring about these types of games ages ago, except for the odd aberration like Ikaruga or maybe Gradius V.

I don't see why they'd look bad scaled up. I run a few (lots) on MAME scaled to a higher resolution than the 360 outputs and they look fine. I need to get a cantilever mount for my widescreen monitor so I can spin it for the vertical shooters.

Speaking of MAME, it's just one of those gray areas for me. I've downloaded every shmup I can find, many of which still aren't emulated properly. I've convinced myself that it's OK since the only alternative for playing these games is to buy the arcade boards themselves, which is just not going to happen.

[Angrycoder]

The problem with Radiant Silvergun is that your ability to chain color combos is directly contributes to your weapon levels. If you can't chain properly, your ship is horribly underpowered for the later levels and the game is pretty much unbeatable unless you are credit feeding or using a saved set of weapon levels from a previous playthrough.

[Munin]

Problem with all those more obscure titles like from Cave etc. is, they're really only aimed at a certain small hardcore audience, which mostly originates from Japan. It's just not financially feasible.

And even if you were to make those titles available for that "hardcore audience" on XBLA they wouldn't touch them with a 10-feet pole because 90% them are elitists that either want pixel-perfect ports or no port at all.

[mouselock]

Is that really true? I'd happily blow some money on ports of any number of shmups, and I'm certainly not a hardcore shmup afficionado. I just happen to be old enough that I remember when shmups where a staple game type and miss that game type. (Thunderforce III on Genesis, anyone?)

Aegis Wing was okay, but ultimately is a pretty bland shmup. (At least single player.. multiplayer looks like it could be cool, but I'm not paying for Live just for Aegis Wing multiplayer and pinata mailing.)

[RobotPants]

Yeah, I don't expect any of the more "hardcore" shmups to be released. It's just wishful thinking on my part. But I don't think, in general, the standard shmup is really all that alien to anyone who used to frequent arcades back in the day.

[Linnaeus]

Well, if you like death-match games the next "Wing Commander" is coming to XBLA as a death-match-based Shmup.

[Angrycoder]

Cave hasn't even ported, or had anyone else port, their last 3 shmups to the PS2 in Japan. There just isn't enough of a market for it.

[Uncle Larry]

There's always Wing Commander: Arena...

[RobotPants]

That's not exactly what I'm talking about. :) But yeah, that does look cool.