Games - Shoot 'em up

Home > Listing Index > Games > Shoot 'em up

	Games - Shoot 'em up

A shoot-em-up (shmup for short in some areas, and also known as arcade shooter, twitch shooter, space shooter, or sometimes simply just shooter, with shoot 'em ups being the most popular subgenre of shooter), is a computer and video game genre where the player has limited control of their character or machine and the focus is almost entirely on annihilation of their enemies. Almost all shoot 'em ups keep track of the player's score, a feature not found in many modern game genres. While the genre can have 3D graphics, the gameplay is almost exclusively in a linear, 2D style. The genre started in the arcades arguably with Space Invaders, and has experienced numerous different games on many formats. Popularity expanded with the addition of two-player simultaneous cooperative modes starting the mid-1980s. There are now several sub-genres that have their own particular gameplay characteristics. Shooters have a large following today, most notably in Japan, and many titles utilize the Internet through online ranking systems.

Sometimes non-shoot 'em ups are described as "shooters", particularly because of the extensive amount of gunplay involved in the game. light gun shooters are commonly referred to as shooters, because it is the primary action involved. Similarly, first-person shooters are also referred to similarly for the same reasons. While some shoot'em ups can be referred to as rail shooters, this term is an over-arching concept that can apply to interactive movies, light gun games, and action games.

Fixed shooter

Fixed shooters represent the bulk of the earliest shoot 'em up games. They have the most simplistic premises and the most simplistic controls, especially in terms of aiming. They are characterized by a static environment and a static number of enemies per level, although this stipulation does not precluded that each level can have a different number or enemies or a different setting, as is the case with Midway's Gorf.

Single screen shooters

A single screen shooter, also known as its generic fixed shooter or gallery shooter typically only allows players their one or two-dimensional position on the screen. Single screen shooters are basically the oldest popular type of shooters, and represent the bulk of shoot 'em ups from 1977 through 1983. One of the most popular games of all time, Space Invaders, falls into this sub-genre. Early single screen shooters allowed only one-dimensional movement, while later titles such as Galaga allowed two-dimensional movement, but without rotation. Enemies usually form in a gallery, and the game setup is most often in a vertical orientation. Unlike other types of shooters, the gameplay involves eliminating every enemy on the screen in order to complete the current round or level. Typically, the number of enemies remains constant through each level, only the speed and number of projectiles fired increase in each level.

Example single screen shooters — Space Invaders, Galaxian, Phoenix, Galaga

Tube shooter

Tube shooters comprises of games where players move forward through a "tube", essentially a 2D scrolling shooter plane rolled into a cylinder or extended to a three dimensional volume. Movement is usually restricted to the ring formed by the edge of the curved plane. This is considered more of a niche variety of shooter, appearing mostly in the early 1980s. The reason for this is because, this type of shooter came at a time when arcade hardware had not progressed enough to allow full three-dimensional movement. This type of game is a pseduo-simulation of that. Recent games to utilize this type of gameplay are Tempest 2000, its sequel Tempest 3000 and the freeware from ABA Games Torus Trooper
.

Example tube shooters — Tempest, Gyruss, Tube Panic

Multi-directional shooter

Multi-directional shooters, also called area shooters, allow freedom of movement and orientation in a 2D environment. The first game of this type was Asteroids, in 1979.

Most multi-directional shooters can be further put into two classes based on their control system. Some allow the player to move up, down, left, right, or diagonally only. Others use a more realistic, physics-based system of rotating and thrusting. Another alternative is mouse control.

Some multidirectional shooters use two joysticks as the input; one for movement, and the other for firing. This style was popularized by Eugene Jarvis in the several titles he created for Midway/Williams and is an effective means of allowing independent moving and firing. This unique input configuration often left console ports with only a crude approximation of the arcade controls, resulting in the use of four buttons as directional firing, or the use of both the first and second player controllers to achieve the desired effect. Some modern console systems may be able to avoid this problem, as some have two analog joysticks on the controllers.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Shoot 'em up ]

Searches on eBay

shoot 'em up