Entries Categorized as 'Games: Shmup'
June 25, 2009
It’s been a while since I’ve had a good solid shmup to review, so I was glad when Sumiguchi gave me a ping to review this; I needed some cathartic blow-the-hell-out-of-everything action.
Anomaly follows in the ass-kicking footsteps of greats like Robotron 2084, Smash TV, Gauntlet, and in particular, Alien Syndrome. It takes the form of an overhead shooter and places you in the hot seat of a fighter craft sent to investigate and clear out spatial anomalies through which nasty aliens are pouring. Said anomalies seem to take the form of maze-like structures that are full of a variety of alien ships, traps, obstacles, generators, and score-boosting cargo pods and powerups. …
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April 30, 2009
You ready for some retro? I’m talking really retro — Sinclair ZX-81 calibre retro, yet with some modern flavouring? It almost doesn’t get any more classic this.
Galaktagon is a retro-styled shooter in the tradition of many single-screen shooters from the late 70s and early 80s like Astrosmash, Galaxian, Space Invaders, Moon Cresta, and so on. But this one sheds any pretense of flashy graphics and animation in favour of chunky hardcore black & white love, where explosions were represented by a single monochrome sprite, alien ships looked like bugs, and the people of Earth lived in constant fear of annihilation from the stars.
At its core it’s a simple shooter with simple…
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February 25, 2009
Until they released a lite version of one of their games, I’d never heard of MythPeople. Having checked them out, it looks like they do some rather quality work, and Belowscape is no exception.
Taking inspiration from classic mob/survival shooters like Robotron 2084 and Smash TV, Belowscape pits you against never-ending waves of enemies in an ultimately futile bid for your survival. The game uses the Robotron style of control, adjusted for the iPhone. Here, the accelerometer is used for movement, while shooting uses taps on the screen. MythPeople have given the option of two different firing schemes here: Full screen, which has you tapping on the areas you want to shoot…
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February 9, 2009
Holy crap.
That’s pretty much my reaction here. Ketara have created a hardcore shmup that made me say “holy crap,” because this right here is a damn good classic 2D-style vertical shooter that brings to mind such frenetic shmups from days gone by as Raiden and Xenon 2: Megablast. Those two weren’t picked at random, either: This combines the fast and furious weapon spitting action of Raiden with the upgrade purchase system of Xenon 2 — but to a greater degree. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. First things first.
So the story goes, Earth has been invaded by some sort of Coalition of the Willing Aliens (must be scientologists), and…
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January 15, 2009
Not to be outdone by that pancake-headed upstart Kim Jong Il, evil dictator Yussuf al Fatal is oppressing and starving his people, feeding other nations disinformation, and capturing and torturing his enemies, and you have been tapped to ride shotgun in a lone but heavily fortified tank against his vast array of defenses.
Toy Tanks 3D is a rather entertaining game set in the animated world of a fictitious despot who will try his best to separate you from your innards using tanks, gun emplacements, battleships, and anything else with firepower as you tread all over his countryside blasting the meaty center out of everything you come across. You are…
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January 12, 2009
Looking for a bit of retro-styled shmup?
Powerhouse’s latest offering, Choppy, is a horizontal side-scrolling shoot-em-up that takes its cues from more vintage airborne shooters on the order of R-Type or Side Arms, only a little more sedate. You are Choppy, a pink little spheroid thing with a propeller on its head, and you are required to defeat various forms of enemies armed at the outset with a particularly lethal form of halitosis which I shall call “Bullet Breath.” This can be upgraded to various other forms of regurgitory ordnance through powerups, including
missiles and a little orbiting satellite that destroys enemies that run into it. Perhaps it could be said…
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January 12, 2009
It figures that shortly after I reviewed and fairly panned Particles, a lite version of its progenitor, Engio War, would turn up, so I guess in the interest of fairness I should give this a good rundown as well.
Engio War is an abstract shooter where the object is to shoot any enemies that appear on the screen. This is accomplished entirely with the accelerometer, which serves as both aim and thrust; your ship is constantly firing. This takes some getting used to and frankly isn’t the control scheme I would have chosen for a game like this, but I suppose it was designed this way as a means to artificially…
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December 10, 2008
No, that isn’t a typo or a misspelling. This really is quite possibly one of the weirdest game names*, like, ever. I’m pretty sure English is a second language for I.D.P. so I don’t know if something got lost in translation and maybe he/they intended for it to read like “Dead Space Meat” or something. Either way, the name makes chuckle in a way that is not entirely unlike reading Engrish.com.
The game, however, doesn’t. This is a total shmup of the sort shmup fans live for: A side scrolling, enemy swarming, ordnance showering, hardcore shooter in the spirit of classics like R-Type and Side Arms. As with any such shooter the objective…
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November 27, 2008
Duuu-hu-huud. Now this here is some absolutely fine shmup action. Eric Tong has taken the classic Robotron style of gameplay and made a most excellent omnidirectional OpenGL-ES-based futuristic shooter that must be played to be truly appreciated.
As with any proper shmup, the object is to shoot anything that moves. Or doesn’t move, for that matter. Enemies will materialize out of the grid in batches so you’ve gotta shoot ‘em right quick — or evade. Powerups and bonuses will appear on the grid with fair frequency too, and you must shoot their boxes to release the bonus within.
Movement is controled with the accelerometer, while shooting is handed with an 8-way soft D-Pad…
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November 16, 2008
App Name: CometBuster
Version: 1.0
Developer: Great Apps
Category: Shmup
Take the vintage Intellivision game AstroSmash. Make your ship as wide as the screen. Now add multitouch support and make the comets strong enough to withstand multiple shots. Voila! You have the recipe for CometBuster, a finger-cramping shmup sure to give any shoot ‘em up addict carpal tunnel within a week.
Frankly, that first paragraph pretty much sums it all up: You command a ship that’s as wide as the screen and seems to bob and sway as it moves, defending the Earth from a giant global-killer swarm of comets that are hurtling straight toward the Earth. The only thing keeping you, your ship, and the entire planet alive are your quick-moving digits as you blast the…
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November 2, 2008
App Name: PlasmaLite
Developer: GClue, Inc.
Category: Shmup Games
GClue describes this as “a new type of shooting game using a touch panel.” Dude, when even Jirbo begs to differ, you FAIL at research.
This is basically the same idea as Jirbo’s Bounce: Thumb Workout (and about a dozen others on the iPhone alone): Plasma balls fly around the screen and you have to tap on them. Only tap on the blue ones; the red ones will cause you to lose some life. Extra points are given for combos — contiguous chains of direct hits on blue plasma balls. Miss one and the combo counter resets.
The graphics are passable — neither good nor bad — and the music is at least energetic. It’s just not much fun. The…
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October 25, 2008
App Name: Venger Lite
Developer: Wretched Games
Category: Shmups
Hey, remember Touch Fighter, that space shooter demo Apple showed off at the SDK Roadmap town hall early this past March? (Here’s a video to refresh your memory, right around the middle of the video.) Well, Wretched Games seemed to have liked it, and have made their own game in a similar style.
Actually, if I had to compare this to something, It’d say it owes far more to Zaxxon 3D, one of the few games that came out for the 3D glasses peripheral on the Sega MasterSystem back in 1987 (which itself is of course an update to the original 1982 Zaxxon), and perhaps a little bit of Buck Rogers: Panet of Zoom.
It it perhaps partly because of these…
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