The Unofficial "Quick introduction to shmups"

[nimitz]

Frederik gave me that idea in another thread, to make a thread that could be a reference for newcomers so that the can quickly understand what the genre is about and what makes us play these games instead of FPSes.

The part I'm writing here will be remove when/if the idea works.

So please post ideas we could add to the thread, drafts or parts of the main text or idea concerning concept (FAQ styled, didactic, short story??)

So heres a quick draft i'm making on the fly (I think it would be best to make it very concise to avoid tl;dr)



This is a quick introduction to the Shmup genre, for a complete thread about the forum and the genre see the Official Board FAQ


Shmups, STGs, 2d Shoot'em ups, the oldest form of videogaming and one of the simplest . With this in mind, one might wonder why would anyone still want to play these games 30 years after they first appeared. This is where this forum comes in to, amongst other things, raise awareness of what make these games so good.

Shmups went through constant evolution over the years, a lot of diffenrent ideas have been tried, these "simple" games now have many layers of complexity underneath that impression of simplicity.

So what is it that makes these games interesting enough that we still play them after all these years? Mainly, two things: The progression the player makes(which is very rewarding) and the twitch almost visceral apsect of the games.

One thing to keep in mind if you want to enjoy this genre is in the way to track your progress, shmups are made to be played over and over in hope of getting better than the last time you played, in order to do this we keep track of our highscores using ONLY one credit then you can compare with other players here or compare with your past scores to track your progress.


Finally, now that we have an idea of what brings us to this forum and how to play these games, the next question may be. Where do I start?, out of hundreds of great shmup titles how does one finds what suits him the most. So in order to make it relatively short, the list has the most archetypal shmups of their respective categories.

R-Type
Dodonpachi


Raiden


Many people are wondering where they could find Free and Fun pc based shmups so here's a few of the Best avaible

Blue Wish Ressurection



CHO REN SHA

[ZOM]

Nice intro so far.

I would advise to go the 'FAQ/long story short' way,
that way it's less a hassle to put together enough info and it's more profitable for the newbies reading it IMHO.

Also, a link list with the most known doujin devs (Kenta Cho,Siter Skain, etc.)
and maybe a very quick&short MAME introduction would be a good idea , I think.

[nimitz]

could you draft an example of a Mame introduction?


also do you guys think the images are a bit too much? or a good thing?

[RackGaki]

For what it's worth, the images are blocked at my work. In general, adding a few pics never hurt, though.

I would personally scrap the "why we play" paragraph. A noob already figured out he likes shmups, lets just point them in the right direction. I guess I'm just seconding ZOM's suggestions.

[Frederik]

Wow, that was quick

I really need to go to bed now, otherwise I´d contribute something. I kinda forgot about the board FAQ, I have to admit, I didn´t know it contains so much information, including things like what TATE is and how emulators work. Maybe we could just expand that FAQ a bit?