Games - Shooter game

Home > Listing Index > Games > Shooter game

	Games - Shooter game

Shooter games cover a fairly broad spectrum of sub-genres that have the commonality of controlling a character who is usually armed with a firearm that can be freely aimed.

There are many criteria to determine the type of shooter, listed below are some of the major divisions. Using the following, it is possible to categorize almost all shooters developed.

Perspective

The player usually views the events from behind the eyes of the character (a first-person shooter) or from a camera that follows the character, usually a few feet behind (a third-person shooter). It is also possible, though infrequently used in this genre, for a game to have a fixed camera.

Realism

Games that attempt to emulate life-like ballistics and character damage are called tactical shooters. Those that use a more lenient model of physics are generally referred to as arcade shooters. This is a continuous division as most games simply tend to lean one way or another.

Number of characters

While most shooters are played as Solo ventures, several offer the players the opportunity to control a Squad of characters, usually directly controlling one and giving orders to computer controlled allies. Games which feature Non-player characters that fight on your characters side but aren't directly controllable or appear infrequently are not considered Squad games.

Focus

This is often an optional way to categorize a shooter, but in some cases it's needed to help distinguish it. A game may quite often heavily rely on stealth as opposed to direct action. Others might have large horror elements to them.

Shoot 'em up

Shoot 'em ups are a very specific sub-genre of shooters, wherein the player has limited control over their movement; if done with 2D gameplay, an example being Ikaruga, this means that a moving background continually pushes the player forward, though they may move up and down and left and right around the screen, typically firing straight forward. Types include fixed shooters, scrolling shooters, tube shooters, and multidirectional shooters.

Rail Shooter

The term rail shooter traditionally describes games where the player cannot control their own movement, as if their path travels along a fixed 'rail'. The gameplay is limited to aiming from a third or first-person perspective. Many light gun games fall into the rail shooter genre, where a player is taken along a set path as targets appear. On occasion, a game mode similar to a rail shooter may appear in a game of a different genre.

In some 3D shooters, such as Star Fox and Omega Boost, the player travels forward within a square "tube", and may move throughout the 2D plane perpendicular to the player's movement. Although often called rail shooters, these games have more in common with scrolling shooters. Players face given less enemies than in their 2D counterparts, as the added dimension complicates aiming and dodging.

Run-and-Gun Shooter

A run-and-gun shooter is a combination platform game and scrolling shooter, this type of game involves a character running along a plane while shooting enemies in multiple directions, as in games like Contra and Metal Slug.

Light-gun games

Light gun games use a pointing device for computers and a control device for arcade and video games. The first light guns appeared in the 1930s, following the development of light-sensing vacuum tubes. It wasn't long before the technology began appearing in arcade shooting games, beginning with the Seeburg Ray-O-Lite in 1936. These early light gun games used small targets (usually moving) onto which a light-sensing tube was mounted; the player used a gun (usually a rifle) that emitted a beam of light when the trigger was pulled. If the beam struck the target, a "hit" was scored. Modern screen-based light guns work on the opposite principle -- the sensor is built into the gun itself, and the on-screen target(s) emit light rather than the gun. The first light gun of this type was used on the MIT Whirlwind computer. Like rail shooters, movement is typically limited in light-gun games.

Notable games of this category include the Virtua Cop, the Time Crisis series and House of the Dead series, along with Duck Hunt for the NES.

Hybrid

Additionally, shooters can quite easily be combined with other major game genres, most often role-playing or strategy.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Shooter game ]

Searches on eBay

shooter game