My console experience ends with the Sega Megadrive (Oh, all right, Genesis) but I remember that seemingly every other game was a side-scrolling or top-down scrolling shooter and I was wondering what everyone thinks was the best of that genre.
Although R-Type (+ points for coolest name ever) was generally considered the epitome of the genre and I really liked it I personally always preferred Gradius. I felt that the latter had better weapons, a better power-up system, better level design and was more reliant on skill than luck.
And there are few feelings more satisfying in gaming than vapourising an enemy with concentrated five-option laser firepower.
If you don’t just mean the “in a spaceship with wave after wave of enemies coming after you” variation on the theme, then the NES Contra game (presumably the arcade version, too) had a few scrolling levels that really made the game that much more amazing. “Waterfall” is a classic in level design, having a forced vertical scroll that requires your fighter to keep pushing up, shooting all along the way.
My favorite vertical-scrolling shmups are the Raiden Fighters series and Radiant Silvergun, and my favorite side-scrolling run & gun platformer is Gunstar Heroes. For a more free-roaming, move & shoot in separate directions type game (think Robotron or Smash TV), I really like Bangai-O. Really, it’s hard to go wrong with anything made by Treasure.
Blood Money from Psygnosis was pretty good, but I preferred Team 17’s Project X - that was a great shoot-em-up. Earlier there was 1942 and the sequels.
Contra III: The Alien Wars is the hands down correct answer. Nothing else comes close.
Gradius and its sequels were probably the best horizontally scrolling shooters. Ikaruga is probably my favorite vertically scrolling shooter. Although 1942/1943 were also great fun.
If you’re looking for a more modern scrolling shooter, I’d recommend Heavy Weapon for the Xbox Live Arcade. It’s fantastic.
2.5-D count? If so then I nominate Einhanderfor the PS1. The action and music were intense and the graphics, especially at that time, were just superb. One of my favorite games for the PS1.
The Raiden games were awesome.
What was the game from the Arcade and 16-bit generation that took place in the Wild West? You could pick from, I think 4 different cowboys as a character. The first level was walking(side-scrolling) through a town and the boss would bounce back and forth from the first and second floors of the saloon. There were then first-person shooting levels; sort of like Shinobi. Vague enough? It was a pretty fun game though.
I am very fond of the old Flashback game. I only played it on the Amiga, and never got very far, but I could toy with the animations for hours. Very cool game.
In a similar vein was Prince of Persia.
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Thanks, that’s the one I was thinking of. It was a fun one.
Though as it turns out, it was only one of the one’s I was thinking of. I didn’t see anything about the first person shooting levels I was of so I did a little bit of looking and found that it was actually third person, and not just one level but the entire game. Blood Bros. Dropped a lot of quarters into that one too.
Do light gun games count in here?
The Point Blankseries were good times. Sometimes terribly frustrating, and utter madness others, but always really fun.
Well it probably would count as a 3D shooter, any arcade that had Area 51 in it was always guaranteed to get a buck or two out of me. I put in here only because I just realized it is almost 15 years old! :eek:
My favorite was the arcade game “Heavy Barrel” where you picked up pieces of the super gun as you went along. When you picked up the final piece, you would hear the game announce in a giant booming voice, “HEAVY BARREL!” Then you were holding the assembled mega weapon which would devastate an entire screenful of baddies with a single shot. It was so fun to just go nuts laying waste to everything as soon as you heard “HEAVY BARREL!”
If you’re looking for the “Contra Style” sidescroll “guy with a gun” shooter, then I’ve yet to play a better one than Metal Slug 3. (There are lots of games in the series, but I found 3 to be the high point.)
Top down “flying ship” scroller, yeah, Ikaruga. (Or if you can find it, Radiant Silvergun.)
Sidescrolling “flying ship”? Dunno. For whatever reason, that particular variant never hooked me in.
Ooh yeah, I played that one to death. That twisty stick seemed designed to create painful bleeding blisters after 5 minutes. I also have to brag that I was eventually able to beat the game on a single quarter
