Star Fox is a good Shmup, the face thing at the end was creepy and I couldn't read when I played it so the storyline was completely lost to me.

Also Cybernator may not fit the bill (wait a minute, your some pilot dude blowing shit up with a robot hows that not a shmup?), but i'd like to mention that it's ironic how Target Earth is ridiculously hard while Cybernator was easy.

Yo everybody chill. We've been writing up this thread and there are a lot of types of shmups to cover, it just so happens bullet hell games were the first touched on. Don't think we're  going to ignore your favorit gams because this thread is a work in. progress.

Cybernator is totally a shoot em up bro, so is contra. The latter however is too popular to cover right away. Maybe you guys should add your own contributions if you don't like waiting???

although i am just a middle of the road shmuppist i have been playing them since time immemorial. my first experience with shmups was in the 80s, in a filthy bus station somewhere in the north yukon. these two thugs were feeding an arcade machine sticky quarters from their pockets, no doubt the change from their recent purchase of common school glue. almost as soon as they would feed this monolithic beast the quarters an unsympathetic GAME OVER screen would be staring them straight in the retina. i watched them inch forward in the first level over many attempts, too high to realize they had spent over 50 canadian dollars on this fruitless endeavor.

i could bear it no longer. summoning my courage i approached them and asked if i might have a try. they put in another quarter and shuffled over to a nearby vending machine. taking hold of both controls i felt a power flowing through me as if the cosmos were guiding my hands. effortlessly i piloted both player 1 and 2 ships, decimating the game without losing a single life. i turned around with a smile to proclaim my victory to my shmup benefactors, but they were nowhere to be seen. i thought it strange because there was a bell on the only exit and i would have heard it had they left, yet there were no other possible exits. as i was leaving i looked back one last time and saw a single white feather resting delicately on the  player 1 control pad.

PS: #shmup is also good for throwing back and forth ideas for the creation of shmups. hima hangs out in there and some others have a shmup in development or are interested in making one so it is a good environment for that sort of discussion. it is a pretty chill crew so far.

welp, i must say ikaruga is probably my favorite shmup. a lot of people think the genre is just about holding down a button and moving around but shmups can be great tests of tactical thinking, reflex, timing, and precision. Ikaruga is a good example of that. i think there is a lot to be explored in the genre and am interested in hearing about new and innovative shmups. like i always thought it would be interesting to have a sort of nonlinear vertical shmup, where you are actually exploring and fighting your way though an area with obstacles and objectives instead of just going ahead in a straight line. does anyone know of any games like that? please tell me about all cool shmups.

Yes but over half the people that should've been interested are going to click this once and see it's ALL THE SAME GAME (see steel's post), and then not ever click this again. Would you borrow a book from the library if 90% of the pages were missing and they'd filled up the space by photocopying chapter 1 ten times? Perfect analogy, irrefutable I'd say. It'd be FAR better to do one from each sub-genre of game (to entice ALL shmup fans) instead of 'here's some bullet hell, for other stuff you have to read the entire topic for other people's passing mentions of games, without videos of screenshots'.

It depends on if chapter 1 were really, really good. Regardless this has been addressed, let's move on. I think Heath has given us a good direction to go off of.

My first real Shmup was a vertical shooter on windows 3.1. I really can't remember the name but it was space-themed (like most vertical shooting of the day). It was fun but drove me absolutely crazy, because half of the challenge was accidentally not crashing your ship while navigating small corridors on the enemy ship. I recall R-Type being similar, where if you barely tapped an edge you would explode in a fiery demise. This is very arcade-style, and I think that I'd like to see the genre move away from this. Perhaps every hit could degrade your ship and make the experience more difficult until an unsightly end?? Of course, a powerful attack or strong collision would still spell certain death, but this kind of thinking would make things more interesting and appeal to a wider audience.

like i always thought it would be interesting to have a sort of nonlinear vertical shmup, where you are actually exploring and fighting your way though an area with obstacles and objectives instead of just going ahead in a straight line. does anyone know of any games like that? please tell me about all cool shmups.

Starfox is something like this, it qualifies as a rail shooter however... The idea isn't explored as often in traditional shmups though.

I absolutely cannot stand these games, because the gameplay feels so repetitive to me.  Changing the types of bullets or the patterns they fly at me doesn't seem much more interesting than shooting and moving back and forth.

Speaking of Ether Vapor, if anyone wants a translation of the trail version I have it. Only partial though.

Yeah Arcade cabinets never hit it big with me for that exact reason. Unless you're some kind of megapro who has sacrificed countless fists full of quarters, you'd end up feeding the machine more than actually playing it.

Speaking of Ether Vapor, if anyone wants a translation of the trail version I have it. Only partial though.

Go ahead and post it up bro

Please do

http://www.sendspace.com/file/n68yx4

There it is... to apply it open winrar and extract those files to the folder where "Ether Vapor Trial" was extracted.

You can get the trial version from the official site...


http://edelweiss.skr.jp/works/ethervapor/download.html

It's translated by me, since I can somewhat translate Japanese. A lot of stuff is accurate, some isn't. Lots of menu stuff is translated, but only the dialogue on stage 1 is translated.

so does anyone know any shmups to play......... online?? i would like to do some social shmupping.