What is your favorite Shoot-em-up?

grant2258

the might flying shark!

mediamogul

@thelostsoul said in What is your favorite Shoot-em-up?:

Do you know Solarstriker? Its made by Nintendo, Gumpei Yokoi involved! It plays pretty well, but its very simplistic. But for what it is, its a cool game with good soundtrack. I don't know why, but I like it a lot.

It's a good game in it's own right, but it's also fairly unique in that it stands as one of the few times Nintendo ever ventured into the popular space shooter genre. It's also a great example of how Nintendo would add specific color palettes into the GameBoy Color BIOS for certain R&D1 games. Brilliantly, they included a photo negative palette for 'Solar Striker' that makes all the empty space black and the ship, enemies and stars lighter colors. The result is a very nice effect that makes the game feel almost as if it was colorized all along. Of course, as an added bonus, this palette can be applied to any similar-type shooter to get the same effect.

thelostsoul

@mediamogul I was wondering about the palette. I thought this would be an emumator specific feature.

mediamogul

@thelostsoul said in What is your favorite Shoot-em-up?:

I thought this would be an emumator specific feature.

lr-gambatte emulates the palette assignments very well, which is somewhat of a feat considering it doesn't make use of the BIOS. However, it all stems from Gunpei Yokoi and his team creating the palettes for most of their previously released games. Some really nice color choices were made given the limited possibilities. Another great example is Samus appearing yellow and red, set against blue surroundings in 'Metroid II'. Even though I owned the original brick as early as 1989, I'm not particularly sentimental about the green monochrome palette. Between the colorization options made possible by emulating a GameBoy Color and Super GameBoy, I really enjoy playing original GameBoy games with the added color.

reeebs

Project-X

grant2258

would cannon fodder count as a shmup :D

SutterKane

Would like to throw "Silkworm" on Amiga into the ring....

I still like it just because of the cool soundeffects....

rgds,

SK

thelostsoul

@sutterkane I loved this game so much. The arcade version is not good as this one. The sound effects rocks on Amiga!
Btw Swiv is related to Silkworm, but I don't know in which way. Its a over the top view shooter with jeep and helicopter too. And the sound effects are fantastic. I found it on the Snes, in the US known as Firepower 2000.

Ecks

Striker 1945 III

FlyingTomahawk

Espgaluda

Mushihimesama

Samurai Aces

There are so many more, it is really hard to say 1 only is the favorite.
Few others to mention

Apidya - Amiga
Project X - Amiga
Wings of Fury - Amiga
Tengai
Sengoku Blade
Gunbird 1 & 2
Strikers 1945 1-3
Zero Gunner 2

MadRikXIV

@grant2258 said in What is your favorite Shoot-em-up?:

the might flying shark!

I loved the C64 conversion of this, back when you got stuff like 'Taito Coin Op Hits', tried the Mame version once, and it seemed stupidly hard.

My fave would probably go to SlapFight, so many hours spent on the C64 conversion.
That or the Amiga Xenon 2, how could anything with Bomb The Base not be a classic?

Clyde

@thelostsoul said in What is your favorite Shoot-em-up?:

Btw Swiv is related to Silkworm, but I don't know in which way.

Wikipedia is your friend:

The game was considered a spiritual successor to Tecmo arcade game Silkworm, which The Sales Curve had previously converted to home computer formats in 1989. The game's heritage is evident from the game design whereby one player pilots a helicopter, and the other an armoured Jeep. SWIV is not an official sequel, as noted by ex-Sales Curve producer Dan Marchant: "SWIV wasn't really a sequel to Silkworm, but it was certainly inspired by it and several other shoot-'em-ups that we had played and loved."

thelostsoul

@clyde Haha yes, I should have searched myself. ;-)
That explains why its similar in some ways (like shield x 2 makes big explosion), but still different games.

Clyde

@thelostsoul I'm in the habit to look up things I don't know (and share them if others might be interested). In this case, you piqued my curiosity because I loved Silkworm and SWIV back then. :)

UDb23

@thelostsoul said in What is your favorite Shoot-em-up?:

The arcade version is not good as this one

I loved the arcade version (but have to admit I never played the amiga one)

thelostsoul

@udb23 Its maybe part of nostalgia, because I played Silkworm on Amiga as a young one and so its the definitive edition to me. I was pretty disappointed about the sound effects on the Arcade. Thought it could be the emulator.

UDb23

@thelostsoul Interesting comparison. The real arcade had better sound than that in the video.

pjft

@udb23 @thelostsoul The only version I played of Silkworm was the ZX Spectrum one, and I loved it quite a bit. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I set up P2 as the helicopter, playing with the joystick, and just left it on autofire. Then I played the jeep myself, and if I had it shooting aiming forward, but still pressed the button to aim further down I believe it shot at a higher speed rate (certainly a glitch, but who am I to complain?).

My memory may be tricking me, but I think I made it fairly far in the game playing it that way - of course it was kind of cheating, and perhaps the conversion was a bit on the easy side, but yeah. That was fun.

Never played SWIV but it was certainly marketed as related to Silkworm in the magazines at the time, which I found weird with it being top-down. :)

Clyde

@thelostsoul It's interesting that the only home version with in-game music like the arcade is the NES version. That said, the sound effects on Amiga were the best in that video. I can't judge the better arcade sound @UDb23 mentioned since I've never seen the arcade version myself, I played the game on Amiga back then.

ultrakev9

@sp I second this. Raiden DX is perfect in nearly every way.
No other game in this genre has ever allowed the player to do such catastrophic damage to the environment and no other schmup that I've ever played has allowed you to shoot down flying enemies and have them crash in to the ground and land on and destroy ground-based enemies. The attention to detail, design, sound, everything has never been matched, even by Raiden 3, 4 or 5.