Games that Make You Want to Type "</genre>"

[Yoshi]

If we're gonna talk about sick-nasty stylish moves in a 2D action platformer that take skill to use, we better be talking Hard Corps: Uprising.

Run 'n' gun

[YellerDog]

Pooty Shoots

[Tain]

Uprising's got a very Strider-ish character in the DLC though.

the lines are melting all around us

[MechDeus]

Run n gun is up there with hack n slash as Genres Only Used By Awkward Newspaper Writers. I await the debate that tries to find a difference between beat em up and hack n slash. I imagine it will go about as well as trying to identify all games with combos as beat em ups.

[YellerDog]

"Do you drop the sword if you get punched or not"?

[MechDeus]

What about Magic Sword and Knights of the Round?

[A Robot Bit Me]

I was thinking about Pong and Spacewar today. They're better than damn near every single game that followed. So, </video games>, really.

[NeoZeedeater]

I never thought of hack 'n slash as a genre. Rastan 1 would get called hack 'n slash in regards to theme or gameplay back in the day but it's not the same genre as beat 'em ups with sword slashing.

[MechDeus]

I think it appeared sometime after polygonal games really took off, as though people wanted to describe predominantly action-y games but were young enough that they hadn't heard of beat em ups. It probably appeared before that but that's when I noticed it popping up.

[sleeve]

I guess I'm really not a fan of "hard" genre definitions. I think that strict adherence to genre conventions results in poorer games, and less innovation. Take for example Super Meat Boy. Now SMB is definitely a "platformer". It's very different in style than Super Mario Bros. But that's part of why it's so great. The developers decided to think outside the box and try some new things upon a very solid gameplay foundation. As a result they created the best "platformer" of the past generation.

On the opposite end of the scale you have Wayforward's Contra 4, which is scrupulously faithful to the Contra "run n' gun" concept. Despite that, it's actually quite dull and frustratingly erratic in terms of control and shot and enemy placement. Just looking at the box cover and the sprite work and the basic concept, you'd call it a great-looking action platformer. But it's actually a piece of shit partly because Wayforward spent way too much time trying to be faithful to the original Contra and not enough time on what makes Contra on the NES such an enjoyable game to play.

Another good example of a game that busts out of genre conventions is Valkyrie Profile. A lot of people criticized it at the time it came out because it bared little resemblance to a traditional JRPG. Valkyrie Profile is basically a collection of short stories connected by an overarching plot, with action-y 2D turn-based battles. A lot of JRPG's have since taken a lot of inspiration from it. But at the time people had a tough time characterizing it because it was so different from, say, Final Fantasy IX.

So I say "bah" to genre definitions (and sub-definitions).