Shmups- An acquired taste?

Pixel_Outlaw · Post by **Pixel_Outlaw** » Tue Oct 09, 2007 4:56 pm

Shmups were a bit of an acquired taste for me personally. I have to say that I never realized them as a serous genre until I began to play them very frequently a few years ago. My very first shmup was Gaiares and I played it to death when I was younger. I really liked the game but never really thought of it as part of a genre just an obscure "space ship" game. The more of the genre I played the more I began to love it.

Were shmups or shoot-em-ups an acquired taste for you? Did they just click one day and become your main interest in gaming?

Post by **Shatterhand** » Tue Oct 09, 2007 4:59 pm

they had always been my fav genre, since River Raid on the Atari 2600. It had always been about shooting and dodging the bullets.

This site taught me to play them in a more agressive way towards scoring, but waaay before it had always been my fav genre.

moozooh · Post by **moozooh** » Tue Oct 09, 2007 5:22 pm

Played half a dozen shmups on consoles as a kid, then about the same amount in the last 3-4 years, started playing (and enjoying) them more-or-less seriously only in 2007. Touhou games probably were the turning point after which I realized how enjoyable a good shmup can be.

stuminator · Post by **stuminator** » Tue Oct 09, 2007 7:19 pm

I'd played them off and on as a kid, but only started seriously playing them about a year ago. Since I found the shmups forum I hardly play games from any other genre anymore.

Brian · Post by **Brian** » Tue Oct 09, 2007 7:35 pm

I was hooked with Space Battle and Astro Smash on my Intellivision as a kid. Tiger Heli sealed the deal for me later on when I was about 11. I'm 32 and I love them more now than I did when I was 7.

sven666 · Post by **sven666** » Tue Oct 09, 2007 7:37 pm

ive played shooters for as long as ive played videogames, but i didnt really become as score focused untill the release of Ikaruga.

but as far as playing shooters for the 1CC ive always been into it, since salamander on the NES or whatever my first clear might have been..

Mortificator · Post by **Mortificator** » Tue Oct 09, 2007 7:47 pm

Galaga was probably the first game I ever played, and over the years I played a handful of shooters, but I didn't catch the fever(on) until recently. It started with the original R-Type, then I compulsively played every R-Type game, then I tried some Konami and Cave games in MAME, then I went nuts and played shooter after shooter after shooter. G. Darius! Lords of Thunder! STRIKERS!

I wonder what comes next? I hope it's not football games. That would totally suck.

DEL · Post by **DEL** » Tue Oct 09, 2007 7:49 pm

Hooked from the start. I think there are things that you get drawn to instinctively. Although other genres existed, I knew from the start that shoot'em ups were my thing. 1979 through til now.
It surprises me how few people 'stay the course' on things though

Post by **BulletMagnet** » Tue Oct 09, 2007 7:51 pm

I always generally liked shooters, but it took awhile before I really got "into" them...also, some shmups that I wasn't nuts about early on due to unorthodox play styles (Garegga, most notably) have grown on me over time (though there are others that I've always hated and still do, heh heh).

kengou · Post by **kengou** » Tue Oct 09, 2007 7:53 pm

I was always playing shmups on my pc and in arcades as a kid growing up, but I didn't realize they were a real genre, as someone above said I just thought of them as neat shooting games. Only about a year ago did I find out about the depth of the genre, and bullet-hell games, and MAME, and since then it's been one of my main genres of play although I still play FPSes, RTSes, and all sorts of other stuff.

bsidwell · Post by **bsidwell** » Tue Oct 09, 2007 8:14 pm

I played a few shmups when I was a kid, but they were never really my thing. In the NES era I mostly played sidescrollers (especially the Megaman games) and then moved onto FPSes and RPGs. Then, a few months ago I saw a Mushihimesama video on YouTube and thought "oh my God, I have to try that".

I'm not sure if this counts as "hooked immediately" or "took 20 years to warm up to them".

aphexacid · Post by **aphexacid** » Tue Oct 09, 2007 8:32 pm

I dont even remember when i started shmupping, but i was a kid i know.
years later, my friend got hooked from watching me. and then his wife got hooked from watching us play! and she's friggin good too!

tada · Post by **tada** » Tue Oct 09, 2007 8:55 pm

It took me a little while to warm up to them. I really didn't like the fact that I used to get killed so quickly (mostly due to my brain being underdeveloped being a child and all, and me predominantly liking RPGs), but around 1999-2000, I started to like them, especially the Raiden Fighters series.

Mid-2004 or so, my interest started to wane, seeing as how this was a bittersweet love. I loved the games, but at the same time was saddened that I was in love with a dead genre (this being before I knew that Japan gets a lot of arcade games that the US doesn't). 2006, I found the Touhou series and in early 2007 I acquired the Cave PS2 collection, and I traveled to Tokyo in July and found Hey.

Whew, that turned out a lot longer than I expected.

Veracity · Post by **Veracity** » Tue Oct 09, 2007 9:08 pm

Checked 'hooked', since I can't recall ever not having liked them, back to arcades when they still existed and whatever I could get my hands on for home systems. There are few genres I have much enthusiasm for (these, turn-based strategy and some RPGs mostly cover it), so it's the more appropriate poll choice. That said, I had a fairly long shooter hiatus coinciding roughly with PSX dominance. Mostly no arcades, and the only home shooters I had on that platform were R-Type Delta and Donpachi, neither of which I much liked. I think Psyvariar was more responsible than anything for dragging me back into them enough that I started actively seeking out newer releases again.

I'm perfectly happy playing things like R-Type or Gradius with distance as the primary objective, but I was always a score whore even before most games assumed it, so that shift wasn't one I ever consciously needed to adjust to much. If anything, it's just a relief, since modern shooters seem usually less likely to have an obvious and attainable theoretical maximum to chase and, even if they do, there's no way in hell I expect to be able to get close to it.

Zebra Airforce · Post by **Zebra Airforce** » Tue Oct 09, 2007 9:36 pm

stuminator wrote:I'd played them off and on as a kid, but only started seriously playing them about a year ago. Since I found the shmups forum I hardly play games from any other genre anymore.

pretty much exactly what happened to me, too.

TVG · Post by **TVG** » Tue Oct 09, 2007 9:46 pm

I don't remember ever not being hooked to the genre since i got my first one (R-type SMS).

Hell, even when i lived in a VERY rural area and had no clues consoles or arcades existed, i liked my LCD games with ships and shooting the best.

Ayanami · Post by **Ayanami** » Tue Oct 09, 2007 9:53 pm

I have played shmups for some time, but it took me a while to really delve into them. So, aquired taste for me.

Twiddle · Post by **Twiddle** » Tue Oct 09, 2007 9:58 pm

I like any game that involves firing projectiles.

Zebra Airforce · Post by **Zebra Airforce** » Tue Oct 09, 2007 10:00 pm

Twiddle wrote:I like any game that involves firing projectiles.

You mean like this?

Twiddle · Post by **Twiddle** » Tue Oct 09, 2007 10:01 pm

Except that.

Post by **system11** » Tue Oct 09, 2007 10:44 pm

Where's the option for 'when I started all games had aliens to shoot'?

Frederik · Post by **Frederik** » Tue Oct 09, 2007 11:46 pm

Good poll idea.

To me, it was pretty much Contra: Shattered Soldier -> Metal Slug -> Ikaruga -> Dodonpachi (and other shmups that run in MAME), and the moment I started DDP I knew this is THE genre I´ve been waiting for.

Some guys here seem to "still" play shmups and have grown up in arcades, while others (like me) did the backwards movement - catching up with the stuff they missed in the past. As for myself, I am even starting to enjoy Gradius, some time ago I was only interested in modern bullet hell games.

When I discovered shmups it almost felt like a door was slammed wide open before my eyes. As with most people, it wasn´t so much that I didn´t like the genre before, I just didn´t know something like that EXISTED AT ALL in this intensity.

(And to be more precise, the concept of dodging bullet patterns on a 2D plane fascinated me since I first played the end boss in Super Mario Land, which is the first experience of being "in the zone" that I can recall. I distinctively remember how I figured out that it was easier to look at the whole screen at once.)

Kaspal · Post by **Kaspal** » Wed Oct 10, 2007 12:16 am

my very 1st shmup was lifeforce back in the 80's... i loved that game, but i was more interested in drivin games... then i moved onto FPS, but always was looking for shmups ... and, i got really hooked like 8 years ago... dont remember the game, i just know that there can be NO games on my PC at any given time but at least one shmup HAS TO BE istalled, so i can get my fix from time to time... my PSP?... just about the same, there's got to be at least one shmup in it, my DS more of the same...

actually, i BOUGHT my PS2 and DreamCast ONLY for the shmups they have... other games are plusses! hehe.

Arvandor · Post by **Arvandor** » Wed Oct 10, 2007 12:31 am

I used to play a lot of Zaxxon, 1942, Legendary Wings, Isolated Warrior and Captain Skyhawk when I was a kid, and I loved them. They weren't my favorites by any means though. I kind of lost track of shooters in the 16-bit era though, and only played the occasional bit here and there in arcades, and with how limited my arcade spending was (about a buck whenever I was close enough to an arcade), the short play-time in a shooter just didn't seem worth it (though it WAS fun).

Ikaruga's release on the Gamecube and making new friends who were big into the Dreamcast, Saturn, and shooters in general changed all that. I suppose technically it was an acquired taste, but I acquired it VERY quickly. Especially after one friend brought over all his PS2 stuff =) ESPgaluda was love at first play. Another friend let me borrow all his Saturn stuff, but he was missing some of the biguns like Dodonpachi and Battle Garegga. He DID have Parodius, Thunder Force V, Game Tengoku, Radiant Silvergun, Twinkle Star Sprites, and Soukyugurentai though, amongst a sea of mediocre stuff. Now I'm a bigger fan of the genre than any of my friends =/

KNTain · Post by **KNTain** » Wed Oct 10, 2007 12:38 am

I kinda liked them for a while (hey dave I got a new NES game called gradius / radiant silvergun is awesome man / hey man there's a new DC game coming out called ikaruga you should get it), but Espgaluda was a big turning point for me.

szycag · Post by **szycag** » Wed Oct 10, 2007 12:49 am

I bought Arrow Flash when I was a kid because I needed a Genesis game besides Sonic and it was cheap. Safe to say I didn't really get off to a good start with shmups. Later on I would read this post on a forum saying how awesome DoDonPachi is and only then was I hooked.

Somewhere in there I played Gradius III for SNES and hated it. I didn't really like hard games as a kid. I would throw the controller and such.

Ganelon · Post by **Ganelon** » Wed Oct 10, 2007 12:58 am

bloodflowers wrote:Where's the option for 'when I started all games had aliens to shoot'?

I think there's a fundamental difference between proto-shmups and after-crash shooters. To this day, I still can't stand Space Invaders.

Anyway, it took me years just to find shooters interesting. Even now, with multiple 1CCs and well over a thousand hours play under my belt, I have to question whether I'm as dedicated to them as many other folks are... I think it's the nonhuman aspect that still unnerves me on some subconscious level. Maybe it's because I still don't grasp this desire for score that permeates the genre.

-Bridget- · Post by **-Bridget-** » Wed Oct 10, 2007 4:30 am

Giga Wing and Mushihime-sama did it to me about a year ago, I think.

Oh, I had numerous shmup games before that point of course, dating back to the days of the NES, but it was mostly console games; Arcade shmups were basically unknown to me (until I got GameTap), and I'd never even heard the names Cave, or Psikyo, or any of the others.....

But then I found Giga Wing on GameTap, and at that point, that was the largest volume of enemy bullets I'd ever seen in a game of that type, and the chaos of it hooked me (and at the time, and the skill level I was at back then, it was rather hard...... now it's easy, lol).

And then a friend randomly showed me a video of Mushihime being played, and I thought "Holy CRAP how does anyone DODGE all of that?" and I had to import it right away, and then I was hooked.

ROBOTRON · Post by **ROBOTRON** » Wed Oct 10, 2007 8:38 am

Been around since the Atari 2600 scene....I'd swear 70% of the games on there were shmups. The early quarter arcade days were shmuppy too.

But I didn't go shmup crazy for the genre until Compile's Zanac.

D · Post by D » Wed Oct 10, 2007 8:42 am

I played shmups just like any other genre. it wasn't until 1999 or something like that when I realized that it is my favorite genre. I discovered tate and suddenly knew why shmups in the arcades always looked so cool and special as opposed to console shmups. I leared about verts on the saturn and that they had tate-modes

I was immediatly lured in/never looked back.

shmups.system11.org

Shmups- An acquired taste?

Were shmups an acquired taste for you?

Shmups- An acquired taste?

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