About TwinBee - Yes, different colors of bells are different powerups. In addition to the text when you pick up the bells, the attract sequence in TwinBee Yahho! also demonstrates all the bells (leave the game running at the title screen and it'll appear). The most important ones to know are yellow = score, blue = speed, green = options (the helpers that follow you and clone your shots), red = shield. Some of the entries in the series have bells exclusive to them (e.g. black bell in Detana! that slows you down, pink bell in Yahho! that gives you back your arms if you lost them). Green and red are incompatible with each other in most of the games (but not Detana!). TwinBee Yahho! in practice mode and Pop'n TwinBee are more forgiving with their color cycling than the other arcade entries because the colored (non-yellow) bells don't go away from a single hit (it takes a couple hits to cycle them back to yellow). Also Pop'n TwinBee has a lifebar system that doesn't reset your powerups to zero when you take a hit (though if you ask me, scrambling to power up is part of the fun

). I do find Pop'n TwinBee a bit long and drawn out compared to the arcade games - it's probably better on higher difficulty levels, but it's been a while since I've bothered setting up an SNES emulator to try.
On a side note, the Parodius series features a similar bell system, except instead of powerups like speed up they grant temporary superpowers like a giant screen-clearing bomb or turning giant and invulnerable.
About Mystic Riders - There are a couple offensive and defensive options available to you that may not be immediately obvious. In addition to the charge-shot and regular shot (setting up autofire may be helpful...), pressing button 2 will throw your broom in the direction opposite your movement, useful for attacking in different angles, and pressing down then up will perform a twirl on your broom that makes you invulnerable for a short period. Try balancing the use of these different abilities and figure out what works best for each situation.
komatik wrote:
I guess..... my problem with most shmups is that they all seem ultimately based around the spray-and-pray design where the tactic for basically everything is to hold/mash the shoot button. It's like before when I mentioned Mario. What do you do in Mario when you come to a new area? "Jump over the pits and jump on the bad guys' heads." It's always the same answer no matter what, there's nothing to figure out. I'm looking for a game that mixes it up a little or has some kind of nominal puzzle to it.
Not too much I can think of, honestly. Ikaruga maybe, but you've already expressed your distaste for bullet hell. Plenty of games have multiple attack options (especially in the form of different powerups, or in the form of a rapid shot + charge shot), but fewer of them enforce efficient use of them in a puzzle-like manner (i.e. certain weapons may happen to work better in certain situations, but that alone doesn't really sound like what you're looking for). Irem's games and Radiant Silvergun are the best I can think of in this regard.
Efficient use of your tools beyond "spray and pray" becomes more important when shooting for optimal scores, though. For example, in a game like Battle Garegga, bombs may be used as a panic button to clear bullets, but if you're trying to score well you'll want to use them in places where they can get you a lot of points, for example by bombing certain structures to uncover a cache of score medals (and since scoring gives you more lives, it may be worth it even if you're only trying to survive...). Many shmups have scoring systems, some more esoteric than others, that distinguish them from each other in ways that their "base" mechanics don't. This becomes increasingly common from the 90s onwards, though it's not entirely devoid from earlier games either.