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Under Defeat wich was recently released for the Dreamcast

Nothin' like naming all sorts of shmups..here I go.

Zaxxon - Sega-induced 80's magic.

Viewpoint - Another isometric wonder with insane visuals.

Mars Matrix - I still have yet to see more onscreen bullets than those that fill the screen in this title.

Cannon Spike/Gun Spike - Shmup or Action game, this one was pure. You'd think that with between two great developers (Capcom and Psikyo) they'd be able to collectively come up with better boss names ("Bio Gorilla Bloody"? "Crazy Machine Jet Tiger"?), but I find them to add to the game in some strange, hardcore way.

Silpheed - An obvious (though I believe unmentioned) choice.

Einhander - A glorious looking and passionately playing shooter from Square, of all people.

Ray Crisis - Another visually appealing, tour de force of light beams and squint-causing flashes.

Sky Kid - Wait!!, it scrolls...right to left? It does indeed. It also has a Pac Man billboard in I believe the fourth stage. Red Baron is too frequently seen these days.

Phalanx - There's actually a cheat code for the Playstation launch title Zero Divide that opens up an alternate Phalanx game called "Tiny Phalanx". Be sure to look up the original box art for some laughs...

Legendary Wings - Say what you will, this horizontal and vertical shmup was awesome. Certainly quite different at the time.

Armed Police Batrider - An impressive, if forgotten, little gem from Japan.

MagMax - Customizable shooter with a design similar to Legendary Wings.

1943: The Battle for Midway - Huge improvement on it's predecessor, and an excellent early showpiece for the future of Capcom action titles.

Strikers 1945 - By Psikyo, this and it's sequel were both the pinnacle of standard shooter design.

Nam 1975 - Love the numbered ones. The best reason outside of Magician Lord to pick up an AES on launch day.

Expendable - A unique and underrated 3D-rendered Dreamcast gem similar to Cannon Spike.

Mobile Light Force 2 and Castle of Shikigami 2 - Awesome look and hardcore scoring system that takes years to learn (for me it did).

Raiden Fighters Jet - The best of a great series.

Dimahoo - Absolutely insane. A somewhat twisted game visually, I've heard it called the Silent Hill of this genre. Maybe some of the art and a few scenes later on, but the core game is just a richly colored and beautifully crafted experience.

Espgaluda II- Some of the best hand drawn spites in the world, extremely striking. The original is amazing too.

Progear No Arashi- Has anyone else played this? This one was yet another Capcom published Cave gem. It had a neat "newspaper" theme within it, but most notably, it looked and felt like an adventure game as it scrolled along, being that the art was so unique in each area and drawn as though it had to be specially designed to suit the gameplay, which wasn't the case.

Ibara- How could I have forgotten Ibara Notoriously difficult, requisite shooter.

Shienryu Double Shooting - A cool twist on the game released for the Playstation in the U.S. as Gekioh Shooter King.

Perfect Cherry Blossoms - I've yet to play this one, but it looks inspired and has gotten a good fan base in Japan.

Oh boy...look at the time. I'll lastly mention that full-scroll shooter segment at the end of Gustar Heroes, Trizeal, Border Down, Giga Wing 1+2, Android Assault, Fantasy Zone, Panorama Cotton, Magical Chase/Cotton Original, Phelios (pronounced Fill-ah-sh), Chaos Field (arguable), Metal Black (inarguable), and my least favorite but still essential Yar's Revenge.

I love shmups.

EDIT: After seeing full post, I can confirm the above statement. Oh, Radilgy.

EDIT2: For more awesome shmups, look up the rest of the Cave and Seibu Kaihatsu games; they rarely do a bad one. Nanostray and Iridion 1+2 are good handheld ones, though a Nomad or PC Engine LT will turn some good console shmups into portables as well. Wonderswan does some good too, and maybe the Treamcast if you don't mind it's faults. And of course, the classic essentials/variants of shmup-age: Centipede/Millipede, Space Invaders, Asteroids, Phoenix and Defender. Now I'm finally satisfied.

I still consider Einhander to be the best of the genre, by far. The weapon system was original and very fun. The graphics were fantastic and still are. Enemy designs, especially bosses, were extremely well put together, and most of them had parts you could break off of them. Many shmups did this before, but Einhander took the concept and ran with it. While other shmups would let you disable certain weapons or limbs of the enemy, just to decrease their overall firepower or aggresiveness, this game made it so that the enemy's entire strategy would change on the fly.

But the best part of the game is the soundtrack, and the ways that soundtrack was flawlessly blended in with the action. It gives you such a rush. Nearly every boss feels epic due to this.

Anyways, the game emulates very well in ePSXe with the OpenGL2 plugin, loaded with the Natural Vision filter:

Nice screenshot!

Einhander was pretty cool

Soukyugurentai is great, and I think the music is very good just not to everyone's taste.

Progear is one of the best horizontal shooters there is. Shame there are no ports so its CPS2 or Mame Fbaxxx etc. Has some classic Cave scoring, You build up your jewellery by killing with one shot, bullets surrounding the enemy turn to jewellery and are sucked in by the ship by holding down shot. Once you have built up the rank you switch to holding shot which makes gems appear when a ship is killed. Sounds a bit mental and I probably explained it badly. But its great fun in practice.

Mushihimisama another Cave shooter. Has a chaining system, very pretty game and one of my all time favourites.

Radiant silvergun is not what I had hoped for and a bit of a disappointment. Very expensive too.

Ibara of course.

Espgaluda is also superb.


Any cave shooter as far as Im concerned.

Where's the love for Gates of Thunder (TurboDuo)?

Awesome horizontal shooter, the "Spiritual Prequel" to Lords of Thunder (i.e. not much at all like Lords of Thunder)

This is the first game that truly blew me away as a kid. It had to take advantage of every button on that turbo controller, similar to street fighter 2. Some of the unique features were speed throttling and the ability to turn your "option" ships around to fire backwards.

I particularly enjoyed this one, because it was MANAGEABLE. I don't care if newer shooters give you unlimited continues, I still don't like "suffering through" a game.

I agree. Gates of Thunder kicked ass. Better balanced than LoT, IMO. I also liked the music better. Just a lovely game all around. Probably my favorite shooter on the PCE.

Don't forget Super Nova for SNES. Fun, yet incredibly hard.

-sean

Judgement Silversword rules on Wonderswan.

OK, well, there are lots of great titles in here, but if you're going to talk about the classic core...

Arcade:
Galaga
R-Type
Gradius
Raiden
Truxton
Twin Cobra
Darius

Console:
Gates and Lords of Thunder, for different reasons each
Radiant Silvergun and Ikaruga
Blazing Lazers/Space Megaforce
Thunderforce series, but particular focus on 4 and 5
Souky
Battle Garegga
Galactic Attack (Layer Section)

Well, dammit, once you're talking about console shooters there are too many good ones to mention. I just started but I realized I'd be going on forever.

Racketboy, I think you need to add a wiki to the site so when you ask these questions we can go mark up the wiki. For example, for this question I would have added platform sections: Arcade, NES, Genesis, SNES, PCE, Saturn, PSX, DC, etc... And then we could pare down the essentials from among the different categories.