I streamed it recently but didn’t save the stream unfortunately. Battle Garegga Rev.2016 is awesome. I highly recommend it.
It still burns me that the first person shooter has co-opted the “shooter” designation and that dumb ass eurotrash name “Shmup” has taken hold. 😝
Call them STG instead.
STG isn’t even a proper initialism, though. What do they call them in Japan.
Just spent about 20 minutes in Crimzon Clover. It’s crazy how much visual noise can occupy the screen while the game remains pretty much legible. Gonna have fun with this one.
Shoo Ting Game. Nothing wrong there.
Wait… is that really what STG stands for? Shmup is horrible but STG sounds terrible as well!
In (Edit: Japanese) magazines, very few genres were used to classify games.
From what I recall, there were
STG : ShooTinG or ShooTing Games, what we call Shoot’em Ups. Anything where the main action is to make other things explode;
ADV : ADVenture games, which actually embodies a lot of Western games that wouldn’t fit precisely in other genres. Tomb Raider games were ADV games in Japan;
ACT : ACTion games. A category quite large, as you can guess;
RPG : Role Playing Games, no comment there;
SLG : SimuLation Games. That one is a trickster, as it encompasses any game with a vaguely strategic layer. Tactical RPG, city builders, sports management, wargames — all may fit in there;
TBL : TaBLe Games, aka Board games. Mostly Mahjong games if you want to mock it, but quite a lot of very innovative games fitted the genre, such as Momotetsus, Dokapons and other Culdcepts;
PZL : PuZzLe games. Another wide category: Japan got as much as an issue as us to classify stuff in there;
ETC : Whatever didn’t fit in the others;
And I don’t recall what the Sport games one was. SPT probably?
I enjoyed Resogun on PS4 recently. It is an update to classic defender. It is a bullet hell shooter, really great highscore game.
Which “magazines” were these? I don’t think I’ve seen these abbreviations in all my years of being a gamer…
Playlist added to top post.
Well, about all of them, as I said?
I picked a couple at randoms. Here is an upcoming software list from a MyComp issue:
I made a mistake: it’s not ADV but AVG that is used for adventure games. Sports games were referred to by their specific genre too.
Here is the detail of the icon list of a Gekkan PC-Engine, which is a slight way around the acronyms:
Again, 8 genres to encompass all games.
Oh, my mistake. I missed the context that you were talking about Japanese magazines specifically.
Ha ha, yeah, it was in reply to Geggis doubting STG really standed for ShooTinG. I should have made it clearer.
I was a fan in Western magazine, and in my own writing, of defining ultra specific genres — it was kinda like those bullet points so popular nowadays, excepting it was funnier to read or make up.
Japanese shops and some magazines still use the old web of genres, but often times they have been listing, since around 2000, ultra specific genres, often produced by the companies’ marketing itself. Nowhere as much fun as the original game writing practice it probably is inspired by.
I haven’t had a good amount of time to reply to this thread, but I’ll just leave this here: REVOLVER360 RE:ACTOR is on sale for $2 right now, and well worth it.
Bought and added to my “to play” list. I’d seen this one before but forgotten about it. Thanks for the reminder!
I guess I’m in the minority here, but I like “shmup.” It’s fun to say.
I thought ‘shmup’ was the most ‘official’ name for the genre that there was, ever since the FPS took over ‘shooter.’
Also, as a former Amiga gamer and reader of Zzap! magazine, I resemble the ‘eurotrash’ remark!
For some reason this thread title puts me in mind of Gilbert and Sullivan.
I am the very model of a modern major general
My spaceship shoots in all directions, side to side and vertical
I like “shmup” too. It’s short, it’s unambiguous, and it doesn’t make me think there’s a problem with the Staging environment at work.
Yeah! Shmup! It’s meaningful and charming!
Plus it’s short for “shmut up”!
I don’t agree with Dave Long about much, but the word “shmup” is like nails on a chalkboard to me. Though, as a fan of the genre, I’ve had to come to terms with the utiquity of the phrasing, kind of like ‘Metroidvania’.
