My Little Shop of Shoot-them-ups

Although I don't play video games much anymore, I have to admit to one addiction: I love shoot-them-ups. I loved playing them in the 80's when I was a kid. I retired for more than 15 years as I went to university, got married and so on. Then suddenly in 2010, I heard of Hydorah, and found myself trying to kill sandworms during meetings.

Hydorah is beautiful, addictive, and turns out not to be too hard. And after finishing that one, I had a strong urge to kill more enemies, and went on the search for more games. At that point I realised that since the 80's, people started to refer to shoot-them-ups as shmups, but that term sounds too much like a C function to increase the size of a shared memory — plus it's a stupid term. I think people who use the word shmup must themselves be shmups.

Anyhoo, I found the quest for good shooters to be less trivial than I hoped, so this page documents the games I tried, and what I thought about them.

Criteria

I grade the games on the following criteria:

Hydorah

Hydorah is recent, sports great graphics, beautiful music that follows the action. I wrote a strategy guide about it. This game is now my yardstick, it's just the best shoot-them-ups I have seen around on PC.

It's a simple Windows game, you just need to unzip it somewhere and run it. No need for admin rights.

Being my yardstick, I'll grade it all at 5, just in case some other game is better.

Nemesis (Gameboy)

This is one of the first shoot-them-ups I ever played. It's quite pretty considering the technology that's behind it. I must have suffered a lot on it: after downloading it now, I beat it on the first try, 10 years after my last game.

I later discovered that Nemesis is acutally just another name for Gradius. I am not sure what's up with the different names.

I used the Visual Boy Advance emulator, which is a simple Windows executable. Under Linux gngb works very well. The ROM file is easy to find (e.g. from here).

Noiz2sa

No idea what the title means. Noiz2sa is a weird abstract game, where you control a square, and are attacked by square that shoot circles. Pretty much. It's visually quite pretty, very hard, but it fails being addictive for me as it's not obvious that you're progressing in the game: levels all look pretty much the same, and enemy patterns are mostly unrecognisable (actually I think they are more or less randomly generated).

The game simply unzips and works without installation. Apparently there is a Linux version available from Sourceforge, but I haven't tried it. It's also available as a Debian package.

Tumiki Fighters

From the same author as Noiz2sa, a funny little game. It retains the abstract look of Noiz2sa as all enemies are built with blocks, but it's a lot less abstract: you can recognise helicopters, flying saucers and so on. The novelty of Tumiki Fighters is that when you kill an enemy, its wreck falls off the screen and will stick to you if you come close to it. Once stuck to you, it will shoot with you and also act as a shield. Button B lets you hide all your stuck parts, which makes you smaller and preserve them from enemy shots. This creates an interesting gameplay, where you gain in power but also become an easier target as you grow in size.

Contrary to Noiz2sa, Tumiki Fighter has pre-defined levels, and you can recognise and learn enemy patterns. It remains very hard.

The Windows version unzips and just runs, and there is alsoa Linux version which I haven't tried (it is also available as a package in Debian, and probably in most other distributions).

Gradius

Gradius is strangely mythical. Hydorah was widely compared, and even criticised, for being a copy of Gradius. Thing is, Gradius might have been good by 1985 standards, but it just does not compare to Hydorah.

I tried playing it on MAME, but the shooting speed is just too slow. I found a Win95 "Gradius Ultimate" pack, which can be found fairly easily on the Internet. It'll be a .bin image which is actually the same as an ISO, you will need to burn it on CD, then run the installer as Administrator, and have the CD present when playing. Convenient.

Let's face it, graphics are atrocious, and on top of that the speed of the game isn't constant: sometime it speeds up, sometimes it slows down, for no apparent reason.

In terms of gameplay, Gradius is actually more cruel than Hydorah: dying means losing all your ship's improvment, meaning you start in the middle of the level with a slow, under-powered ship. That shouldn't scare real men though.

Gradius 2

That one's part of the same Ultimate pack as Gradius. It's a lot better gaming experience. I haven't played enough yet, more on it later.

Comments (0)

Home

Notepad

Gaming

Technical stuff

Projects

Tournoi permanent

General stuff

Edited with Vim

.