High-Concept Ideas for Bullet Patterns

[BrightSuzaku]

WARNING: A HUGE BATTLESHIP IS APPROACHING FAST!

Oh, wait, that *is* the battleship... (Nice change from the fish, though!) Hilarious thought, actually.

[Estebang]

Thunder Dragon 2 kinda does the "text as an enemy" thing, you can shoot all the letters of the "STAGE X GET READY!" sign at the beginning of each stage (before it zooms away) for a bonus.

[spadgy]

I really liked that start.

Harmful Park and Parodius have a bit the 'text as a bullet' thing. Words pour from a character's mouth and you have to shoot the crap out of it. I guess it's really 'text as an enemy' though.

[PC Engine Fan X!]

You can even shoot the ending staff credit text on Namco's Tenkomori Shooting/Tenkomori Variety Shooting PCBs for extra bonus points added to your overall score. Flick "on" auto-fire (with an external auto-fire PCB hack) and watch your Tenkomori scores increase in no-time flat. ^_~

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[Scrub]

Hey, as you can tell, I'm new here. Anyway, this isn't a bullet pattern, but I always thought it would be funny if the warning sign before the last boss attacked you, or turned out to be the boss itself. Even better, if the TLB took place on the mission accomplished screen; perhaps it could shoot the digits of your score at you.

I've seen something like that before, although not in a shmup; in one part of I Wanna Be The Guy, the game gives you a bogus error message and freezes your controls for about 5 seconds. After your controls unfreeze, you have a few seconds to run before the error message falls and kills you.

That game is pure evil.