weird thing about watching stuff like roguelites and ff14 raids is realizing people like bullet hell, they just don't like arcade games
:/
i suppose "won't play" might be a more accurate phrasing than "don't like"
i just think it's sad. people say games are too long now. that they just want to see the good stuff, not have a game waste their time. and yet it's as if they've never heard of
i had this realization long ago and it still deals damage to my brain every time i think about it. every time a Platinum game includes a beefy shmup segment and people love it but then won't play Crimzon Clover..... pain.........................
yeah i've noticed this for a while as well but i also see increasing amounts of people talking about how much they want games to stop "wasting their time" and show them "the good stuff" and things like that. which just continues to get more painful, because...that's what arcade and doujin games are for the most part, and people just have absolutely no idea what they've been missing
People are ever unwilling to interrogate the consequences and contradictions of their desires.
Related to this, but a thing I think about a lot is that ages ago I had the patience to full clear The Guardian Legend on console, whereas no other 8-bit Compile shmup (and barely any 8/16-bit shmup in general) has ever been able to hold my attention for more than 15 minutes, even if they are ostensibly tighter and more polished experiences. Never been quite sure what to make of this tbqh.
it bums me out too! recently i've been having to research all the ways in which i can add time-wasting padding to my games, for the huge audience of people who just want to sit down and play a game for 4 hours straight but wouldn't have the energy to concentrate on a dense arcade game for a session that long. things like giving you pointless unlocks to buy between runs, or sending you back to a hub world where you can wander around aimlessly and play some low-intensity minigames for a bit before you decide to start playing the actual game again.
i'll always make sure all of my games have an arcade mode that disables all of these features, but i wish there were enough arcade game fans that i didn't even have to consider adding this stuff to my games in the first place.
i do think it's really hard to sit down and grind sessions on a relentless game for hours! especially as i've gotten older...i think i've gotten better at practicing in return, though, so even though i tend to make my priority just doing like 20-30 minutes each day and more at least a couple times a week if i'm trying to learn more and improve in an arcade game or something similar i feel like i see more consistent and rewarding progress than back when i just used to kind of mindlessly mash shmups for hours and hours.
and i think the other side of that is, when i a game like that for an hour or more, even if i was getting blown up pretty hard, i generally feel really good at the end of it! (i'm still trying to get that more often out of fighting games though...) i spent a while time absorbed in a cool game and i learned a lot! there are plenty of games i bought and didn't play for very long in the grand scheme of things, just saw them through and tried to learn a few things about, that i still think pretty highly of and don't at all regret spending the money on them.
but to be honest i'm being more than a bit sardonic at the same time because i do notice that what people mean by "wasting their time" is feeling like they spent time playing that didn't get them closer to "done" or "seeing everything", not..."spending time doing things that have no meaning." i find a lot of character building mechanics in rpgs really tedious and there's cases where i know people who LOVE stuff like the ffx sphere grid that to me feels like it should've basically been automated, and i often feel stuff in newer games manages to be worse than that...
but at the same time i love doing nothing at all. being lost and wandering to see what might happen, or spending time in a virtual space with or without other people, while not engaging with the primary mechanics of a game. and i think there's a mindset of consuming games as content that leads people to reject those kinds of experiences. and it's not that i don't understand the kinds of motivations that people have in playing games like that since i've had them too; wanting to see "the best" the medium has to offer, talking to people about things while everyone's excited about them, wanting to prove yourself and your skills, etc. i've spent lots of time doing all of those things, and i feel like it's left me only more excited about things that aren't the newest, most crowdpleasing or best-crafted. games where i can find emotions and experiences i haven't had before and don't get from other things, or where i might discover something i didn't expect about myself or the world from the way i've gotten to interact with it. for me a lot of what people view as "tightly" designed or highly replayable games are like the antithesis of that, and at the same time they're all too often really padded out compared to arcade games, so i end up not too warm on them a lot of the time. so i try to share those feelings in the hope it'll open people's minds a bit, or even if i play something that is really popular but i feel like the part that really caught my attention was something weird or awkward, that's the kind of thing i like to point other people towards as well...
absolutely! that makes sense, and i enjoy playing those kinds of games too. it just bums me out as a developer that there isn't a big audience for padding-free arcade-style games on PC/console these days, but i'll keep trying to find ways of sneaking that kind of gameplay into whatever i release (probably by letting people choose between a story mode and an arcade mode).
