Aegis Wing - Free download created by interns. Decent game, a little sparse in relation to the weapons and enemies. Graphics are decent, music is a bit ostentatious(a big word!).
Assault Heroes - not a shmup in the classic sense, this one plays like Ikari Warriors or Commando, but it the scrolling can stop if your player stops on the screen. Most shmups will keep it scrolling, aka Lifeforce, Gradius/Salamandar. A fun game, obviously one of those games made more for an HD set-up, but it is still very playable in SDTV.
Galaga - the Stationary Shmup.. Plays like Space Invaders, but ads dropping attack enemies, a more colorful palette, and the olde-tymee game noises consisting of bips, boops, and bleeps.. peppered with explosions. Your ship can upgrade to get your ships linked together, allowing you to fire multiple shots at the enemies, and losing your turn after 2 hits instead of 1. Definitely a classic!
Gyruss - or Galaga Tubes. Similar enemies attack you in waves as you circle the radius of the screen with your ship. You get 1 gun upgrade in the game, from 1 shot to 2, just like Galaga. The music is hauntingly cool for a videogame, J.S. Bach's "Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor". Play the demo, stay for the game!
Ikaruga - difficulty epitomized. Awesome game! Traditional scrolling shmup, your ship can change polarity (at your call) to absorb shots from defeated enemies and matching-polarity firing enemies. I haven't seen beyond level 3's mid-section, but this one is a must, DRM problems be damned! Nice variety of enemies adds to the insanity of it all. The big downer for many gamers will be the difficulty level. Adjustable, but adjusting settings will not save your high scores. Scores. Yep. The goal is high scores!
Omega Five - flying people shmup? I haven't unlocked any other characters other than the defaults, but this game looks absolutely awesome for an XBLA title. The characters are a bit too big, but you get over it after awhile (see: get used to it, bitches!) The music is awesome, the graphics are aces, the gameplay is tight. The game is, a little short. Give me more. Omega Six, anyone?
Scramble - the Godfather? This along with Super Cobra gave way to Gradius/Salamandar, bringing in what we know are shumps (classic). This one has a steady speed to your ship, flowing through 5 stages of mostly missiles fired vertically and flying horizontal enemies. Pretty dull, but challenging at the same time. You have standard gunfire for downing airborne enemies and some ground-based enemies, and bombs, for getting rid of ground based enemies. The bombs also are needed to bomb fuel towers to refuel your ship (if you blow up the fuel, how does it get in your tank?) Great classic, for the hard-core and collectors only, though, I'm afraid.
Triggerheart Exelica - what? The name brings panic. What does it mean? Decent shmup, with the ability to snag enemies and fling them around as a mace-like weapon. The story is goofy, the characters are anime-attractive (the type that anime geeks could be caught draw naked), the sounds are ok. The gameplay is really fun, which is what trumps anything else..
For now, that's what it is. Sometime I'll dig into the MAME shmups (my God.. it's full of shmups.) Now it's time for something completely different.
0 comments:
Post a Comment