OK now this is a pretty though question. Seriously I mean I have played a lot of Shmups in my time on a lot of differnt systems and generaly I tend at leat enjoy most games even if they do have some major flaws.
Now to say which Shmup is the worst of all time that is a serious question. I mean this is not just something that you can pin on a game that has annoyed you in the past couple of months or even years but a game that is so earth shatteringly bad that you questioned your sainty while playing the game. In other words this game has to be the meter stick of all poor Shmups in your eyes. For every poor shmup you play you have to be like "Well this game is bad but at least it's not as bad as...".
This meter stick of poorness for me happens to be an arcade game called
B-Wings also known as Battle Wings in some parts of the world.
There are plenty of things wrong with this game but here is the short list which I consider to be key factors in my reasoning. Lets start with game design or the complete lack of. The enemies are just comepletly "stock" and look like enemies taken out of any early eighties space shmup arcade game but done
really badly and the levels are just the same bogey green coloured background that are supposed to represent something but go knows what. Below I have disclosed a picture so you can see the horror for yourself without having to look at my move I made...
but wait some times the background changes to a disgusting colour of GREY!
If that was not enough the game is mirgrain inducing so this game actualy cuases you pain as you are playing the bloody thing. The reason for this is a combonation of two things which is the pulsating lights and the god awfuly droning sound that this game has, especialy the background sound yes that's right not music but sound which is this terrable pulsating sound which is the main headache causing culprit.
The the graphics and sound are bad enough to make this game nothing to write home about but once you actualy start playing the game you notice that the gameplay is a real stinker as well. For a start forget Ghost Pilots ship movement speed because your fighter craft in B-Wings really does take the buscuit when it comes to unfair player movment speed vs enemy aircraft speed. Your ship is about as sluggish and slow as venessa felts and rik waller though a military assualt course, no joke! To make matters even more dire for the player the game designer (if you can call him that) decided that when you power up you plane it should double in width... OH JOY! So when you fighting off a horde of kamaze enemies who are pretty much twice as quick as you you are stuck with this hulk of a ship which has low fire range and crappy weaponary unlike the NES version of the game which was slighty better because they had plenty of ship choice with differnt weapons that actualy did some damange and helped the player progress though the game unlike this pile of horse crap which does every thing in it's power just to suck all the fun out of the game for the player and eat there quater, note that's not pural because nobody would play this more than once if they were forced to put real money in an actual arcade machince not even in the eighties.
After you battle you way though the tedious levels which are as about as exciting and stacking shelves in a super market
(yeah you try it for a week trust me it's boring!) you will encounter a boss which you will either completely own or it will completely rape you accordingly. The idea is "to shoot the core" but you have to get rid of all the parts protecting said core before you can shot it. This becomes a test of scrolling from left to right hoping that the boss ship's homing black bullets which are roughtly the same size as you ship but a little quicker don't crash in to your ship the v. felts mk. 1. Again because youre weapons have such short range and low fire rate it's kinda hard to land decent hits on the ship without being cought out by the bosses homeing bullets or crashing in to the damn boss ship itself. Once you do shop the core you get the lamest explosion ever because
NOTHING HAPPENS! The boss ship just disapears the game despenises the high pitch squeal and the game just transports you to the second level. This is not right, the general rule of thumb in Shmups is that once you defeated a gaint spaceship style boss give the player a explosion to enjoy at the end of a fight. It's not a hard concept to follow yet the person making this game obviously does not play a lot of shmups because he did not include any.
Overall I feel that B-Wings is a game that is the meter stick of poorness when it comes down to poor shmups. Yeah there may be games that rub you up the wrong way and yeah you may not agree with some of the design choices that designers have made in some games but none are put togther with such abondon for the person playing the game itself than B-Wings.
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