Hori shooters with an angled/"Belt-Scroller" perspective

[mamboFoxtrot]

Horizontally-scrolling shooters that look and function somewhat similarly to typical vertical shooters, with a distinction between air and ground enemies.
These seem to be pretty rare. The only ones I know of are:

Progear
Akai Katana
Ironclad (though sometimes it uses a flat horizontal perspective)
Prehistoric Isle 2
Battle Traverse

I guess Break Thru counts as well, though it's a car-shmup so there's no air/ground enemy thing.

Not counting isometric games like Viewpoint or Zaxxon, though.

[BIL]

I'm a fan of this perspective... it's a nice balance between movement-obstructing terrain ala Konami/Irem, and no terrain whatsoever ala Psikyo. It makes air-to-ground combat feel particularly smooth, since you can engage with land enemies without relying on Gradius-styled bombs or dangerously near-to-ground positioning.

Thunder Force IV does this for one stage (Dazer, the desert), and it's rad. Leads to one of my favourite tiny artistic/mechanical synergies: the little burrower tanks will dive below the surface if you try to "collide" with them, maintaining the illusion of perspective while preventing you from leisurely pointblanking them (or eating a pointblank shot yourself, I guess!).

Spoiler

[GSK]

The latter-day Jaleco STG Gratia uses this perspective but I don't remember if it makes any distinction between grounded and aerial zako.

[Perikles]

Don't quote me on that, but I want to say that several of the Capcom horizontals (i.e. Area 88, Ultimate Ecology and U.S. Navy) differentiate between smaller ground enemies that are harmless to the touch and larger tanks and such which are not.

[CBM]

If we count pre-release games (do we?) Rolling Gunner would be a prime candidate.

[Gespenst]

The latter-day Jaleco STG Gratia uses this perspective but I don't remember if it makes any distinction between grounded and aerial zako.

Air/ground units are placed in separate layer as in Xevious/Ray series. It has destructible scenery too.

[tizerist]

Horis are a superior breed to verts, therefore don’t need to borrow any aspects from them. That’s why you don’t see it.
*awaits avalanche*

[mamboFoxtrot]

Don't turn this into one of those threads I'm sure that discussion's played out enough times around here anyways...

If we count pre-release games (do we?) Rolling Gunner would be a prime candidate.

I don't see any reason not to count it. Kinda surprised I forgot about this game, given that I've played the demo!

Don't quote me on that, but I want to say that several of the Capcom horizontals (i.e. Area 88, Ultimate Ecology and U.S. Navy) differentiate between smaller ground enemies that are harmless to the touch and larger tanks and such which are not.

But from what I remember those games still worked on a flat side perspective, really only being tilted/angled in the sense of something like the Playstation Mega Man/X games, so this doesn't quite count.