My new love of Shoot'em ups

When I rediscovered shmups (shoot 'em ups) I was totally amazed by how playable they are, I downloaded the freeware Blue Wish Resurrection by X.X Games (I have it linked on this site). BWR is a bullet hell shmup that is inspired by the professional shmup developer Cave who are considered the best makers of shooters along with the famous Treasure who have created many well known games through the years including Gunstar Heroes and Dynamite Heady for the Mega Drive. Playing shmups I rediscovered something that I had lost when I was a kid was that I really revelled in the difficulty of these Japanese shooters. Having to work hard to slightly improve my gameplay and feeling very rewarded when I reached a goal. Many of these self imposed goals are totally exclusive to the shooters and partly the arcade genre. That is that to be consider to of beated (clocked) a game you must of used only 1 credit. Known as the 1CC (1 credit clear) and to proper 1CC a shmup it must be done using the default settings, so no going into the options menu and selecting 8 lives per credit and easy unless that is the default setting. What default setting a game is can be sometimes confusing due to many shmups arcade and console shmups made in Japan (where all the best shooters are made) are then localised for USA and Europe have the difficulty turned down from normal in Japan to easy settings for us in the west.

Other goals to try for is to no miss a whole stage which means not to lose a life during a stage and usually you’ll be awarded with extra points by the game as well. This is usually the easiest and first goal a player will aim for. No miss is not to be confused with finishing the game without losing a life, this is known as 1LC or 1 life clear in shmup circles. The difficulty can be raised even high by getting a 1CC etc in harder difficulty settings but not many ppl will ever achieve a 1LC on hardest with a challenging Jap shmup. The best of the best can even play a 2 player game alone like this guy who has released a vid on You Tube playing Ikaruga widely thought of as one of the most complex and challenging shmups to play perfectly. Ikaruga superplay

As you might of guessed the whole ethos is to challenge yourself no mater how good you are just set those goals in whatever difficulty level you can play at and as time goes by your skills will improve and hopefully you will be able to complete this Cave game Mushihimesama Futai Black Label in god mode, here is a vid of someone up against the last true boss The hardest boss ever And no he isn't cheating bullet hell games have very small hit boxes on the players ships and bullets. My current favourite freeware game Blue Wish Resurrection is a bullet hell game as well, just nowhere as hard, in fact it's very noob friendly especially the plus version remake. Once you have hit some of those goals (most ppl just aim for 1CC) allot of ppl will then start to play for score. This is where a good Japanese shmup really shines over many shmups made in the west which are usually given the term euro shmup, usually thought of as having a really poor scoring system or design. Many Jap shmups will have intricate scoring systems with many routes through a level without dieing. The goal then is to try out different routes and ways of playing to try and get the best score possible. You can watch vids on the net called super plays and get tips from them if you can’t be bothered working out a system yourself.

Before I go I’ll leave you with a link for the Shmups.com forums where there is a glossary detailing the multitude of shmup speak you'll notice ill start to use in my blogs (at least the more common terms). Shmups.system11.org Glossary This is the main forum for the English speaking shmup community and well worth joining if you intend to play shmups especially games from Japan doujin or commercial. There is also a highscore section if you fancy going up against other ppl or atleast get a idea of how much of a high score is achievable in a game, you’ll probably be shocked.