The Thread In Which We (Attempt To?) Give A Name To The "One Of Those" Genres

andrewelmore

I was talking with a friend of mine earlier, and we both share a love of a very specific type of game that doesn’t really exist anymore, and we realized that we don’t actually have a name for that type of game, even though there are enough of them that it’s definitely at least like, a sub-genre.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had a conversation like this, so I thought it might be fun to come up with shorthand names for types of games that get grouped into relative “one of those” corrals in conversation. I don’t care about discerning between genres or sub-genres or whatever, but I feel like this is fertile ground for some insert credit-ass puns.

In this case, the type of game we were talking about are those mid-90s first-person mech-shooter dungeon-crawler hallway-labyrinth-'em-ups that were so prevalent on the 3DO and the early days of the Saturn and PlayStation, before more or less blinking out of existence. They’re kind of like much more rigid and simplified versions of King’s Field in a weird way. Genki (famous for the Shutokou battle series) made a bunch of ’em and they all more or less follow the same formula with a few twists between entries. Also almost all of them have comically long names that are different in every territory. Games like:

Tetsujin/Iron Angel of the Apocalypse
Tetsujin Returns/Iron Angel of the Apocalypse Returns
Kileak: The Blood/Kileak: The DNA Imperative
Kileak: The Blood 2: Reason In Madness/Epidemic
Beltlogger 9/Brahma Force: Assault on Beltlogger 9
Deadalus/Robotica/Cybernation Revolt
Space Hulk: Vengeance of the Blood Angels
Ghen War

etc. etc.

Cause if you just say “first-person mech game” that brings to mind, for me anyway, Iron Soldier, a bunch of budget 32 bit Gundam games, Gungriffon, Starsiege, Extreme Power, Metal Jacket, etc.

We both drew a blank. Any ideas?

LeFish

andrewelmore I would probably refer to those as dungeon-crawlers with a fairly broad brush but in the interests of having a more fun, on-topic answer I’d suggest Dungeon-Mecha.

That might conjure up some religious connotations when said out loud but it sounds better than Mech-Dungeoner.

andrewelmore

ooh, Dungeon-Mecha feels pretty good. then we can shorten it to dung-mech. wait. no yeah that works.

tomjonjon

Having played Kileak quite a bit, I think dung-mech is a fitting designation.

yeso

I haven’t played these games but this dev is on the same wavelength it seems

andrewelmore

yeso that’s actually the friend i was talking to lol. he’s made a few of these and they’re kind of the only modern versions of that genre I’m aware of. the games themselves are very good but the soundtracks in particular are ascendant imo.

TracyDMcGrath

I’ve been trying to think of something better but the goofy Robo Retimobbers has lodged itself in my brain.

Robot Real Time Blobbers

JoJoestar

Does Rengoku: The Tower of Purgatory count as a dungmech?

andrewelmore

JoJoestar wow this looks sick! the only thing separating it from the other games i mentioned is that it’s third person and actually looks pretty fast paced and kinetic haha.

Coded Arms almost fits the bill, excepting the mech part.

kory

Plod-em-up???

I’ve never actually played any of these, though I do own a sealed copy of Robotica for a reason I can neither recall nor deduce.

The underground labyrinth levels of Jumping Flash actually remind me of a more light-hearted take on the Plmup genre.

KennyL

Mechatacomber

Robolunker

MechaniMaze

kory

KennyL Robolunker

Ooh I like where you are going with this…makes me think of clunky mechs spelunking through dungeons…how about “speclunkers”

andrewelmore

I was inspired by this little thread to make a video about these games!

sdate

andrewelmore this got me to actually play beltlogger 9 and i am having a Great Time. didn’t even sleep last night! oops. at least that means the game’s cool. still, i’ve spent years beating the “doom is a dungeon crawler” drum (and, less seriously, “king’s field is a mech game”) so this is the biggest bag of hot fries in the world to me.

there are a couple amiga games in this vein, too, though not exactly on purpose; even the fake wolfenstein-type 3d was very difficult for 90% of amigas, so the “doom clones” were always clunky in the way one might intend a mech game to be. plus every 90s Amiga devotee had Dungeon Master brain the way the Genki crew had Wizardry+King’s Field brain, so the levels are hella DRPG and there’s weird “simulation” leftovers like taking damage when you bump into walls in Citadel.
for ex, behind the iron gate from 1995, which is sorta half wolf3d, half dungeon master, with mechs in space:

it’s not beautiful, but thats what you had to do to make One Of These run on A500. and it’s got armor and money and Hand Mechanics and stuff so they were clearly thinking “fps-rpg.” funnily it has the same publisher as Citadel and came out the same year, but was done by a totally different team. shout out to poland, i guess
there is also the trapped series, the third game in which has the “mech on space station” theme… though it never came out, and the only thing that exists in public is a coverdisk tech demo. it would have been One Of These if they’d finished it, though!

personally i am going to be boring and call these “station crawlers.” very dry, deemphasizes the mech part, but i think it gets at the meat of it (realtime dcrawl with space theme) - plus funny double entendre wot with half of them being on psx. “speclunker” will stay in rotation, though.

andrewelmore

sdate This was extremely encouraging to read, thank you!! I’m so glad to find other folks that are into these weird little games and their fascinating history. I hadn’t even considered the Amigar!

“Station Crawlers” is excellent, btw. That’s canon now imo.

bnn

In my mind I used the (admittedly boring) name of “industrial shooters” given the mostly inorganic environments. Perhaps Baroque can be considered an offshoot of this ‘genre’? Plus I always wondered if Descent was somehow inspired by those too…

sdate

bnn I always wondered if Descent was somehow inspired by those too…

I can definitively say No to this. The directors of Descent (Michael Kulas and Matthew Toschlog) were both flight simulator programmers who did consultant work on Ultima Underworld and then immediately started work on Descent. There’s a Game Developer Magazine article from 1995 about the development if you want to read it.

andrewelmore

bnn I think of Baroque as something of a blend between normal 3D first person dungeon crawlers like King’s Field, and the floor-by-floor tower climbers like Rengoku.