Inside the Bullet Hurricane: Classic Shooters

Whenever I'm asked about my favourite video game genre, I always quickly answer "It's Shooters!" Most people think I'm talking 'bout the latest first person shooter (FPS). But I'm not! What I'm talking about are classic arcade-style shooters (or shoot 'em ups).

Freaky Psychosis Inducing Shooters (FPIS).

The premise behind shooters is simple: survive onslaughts of enemy fighters and random bullets coming at your ship from every angle. The tricky part, you often needed to do this while powering-up your aircraft, and progressing through swirling levels flooded with screen-filling sprites and bullet-spewing end-level bosses.

Beside the rush of constant bullet dodging action, most shooters offer a lot of original ideas, unique gameplay mechanics, and carry an undercurrent of some of the coolest head-banging, appendage-flailing, technotastic, outlandish and creative game music you'll ever hear.

I'll start this Grind Odyssey by introducing the first shooter; or the first game you shot things.

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The first shooter was a 1978 arcade game called Space Invaders: a game where the player controlled a horizontal moving laser canon capable of shooting down descending foes. The game was addictive and simple; it did however, require the designer Tomohiro Nishikado to create custom hardware to bring his vision to life.

Riding on the popularity of SI, came Galaxian, and its sequel Galaga. These two games expended on the SI theme, by adding multicoloured sprites, explosions and even stage music. Galaxian and Galaga were first to offer elements of strategy, by limiting your ship's rate of fire and having enemy units dive onto your ship. This was the beginning of shooters that created more suspenseful moments for the player.

Atari released Tempest In the early 80s: the very first 3D'ish on-rails shooter; Konami put out Scramble: a horizontal scrolling shooter packed with distinctive level design; and Capcom introduced Xevious: their very first game, which was also the first vertically scrolling shooter.

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The mid-1980s was the age of refinement, and a time when a lot of the memorable/classic shooters were created. This decade has a lot of legendary shooters in its stock. Shooters such as Gradius: the first game where the player was given the option to choose his/hers ship armaments; and Space Harrier: a game that's still cited as one of the most unique and influential on-rail shooters.

Trailing behind Space Harrier was the mother of all side-scrolling, slow-paced, methodical and strategic shooters, the brilliant R-type.

During the nineties arcade shooters tormented gamers with bullet-hurricane styled gameplay (whole screen riddled with projectiles). The home consoles, however, hummed along with a lot of well refined offerings: Axelay, G-darius, Lords of Thunder, Starfox and Thunder Force. These console exclusives became instant classics, because of focus on storytelling, presentation, flexible power-up options and adjustable difficulty settings.

Through the next two decades shooters evolved into a fusion of genres that required strategic thinking, quick reflexes, pattern recognition and memorization – with a major dose of dedication and focus. And just like in the early days, modern shooters constantly pushed the boundaries of design, originality and unique game mechanics.

In the cooperative bullet-hurricane game Ikaruga, players need to flip their ship's forcefields from black to white to absorb projectiles of the according colour. What makes the game tricky is that opposite coloured projectiles do more damage to enemy ships and bosses, and the ships forcefields could either obstruct bullets, or cause players to bump and push into their respected ships. 

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The strategic shooter Einhander allowed players to steal enemy weapons on the fly. Players could select various ship configurations that could either carry one stolen weapon, two at once (for maximum firepower), or three interchangeable ones. Stolen weapons could shield your ship from incoming projectiles, but they also had limited bullets. The game was propelled by some of the best techno-rap beats I ever heard (no lie).

When it comes to shooters there are plenty of choices for all ye faithful scrollheads out there. Truthfully, all it takes these days to get your hands on some wickedly awesome nerve incinerating shooters is pressing the download button on your console. (There are always emulators too!) I hope you'll seek out/check out some of the great shooters I mentioned here. It's definitely worth your time. 

 

My parting shot is this: By the Deities of encompassing bullet hurricanes, all shooters need to be impossibly hard! 

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