Whats the shmup that inspired you to get into this hobby.?

[safetyboy]

Nemesis (Gradius) and Gemini wing. Jackal also was big for me.

[denpanosekai]

Raiden. The first game, in the arcades. Then my brother and I got the Turbo & SNES home ports.

I've taken a liking to bullet hell over the years but I still vastly prefer "traditional" which is why I'm having so much fun with trizeal 10th anniversary right now!!! Eschatos & Ginga Force were also amazing.

[pixeljunkie]

Space Invaders on the 2600, never left the genre

[Shin Daisuke]

Salamander for the NES/Famicom. It was the first shooter I played, and my favourite.

[trunk]

I played shmups on a pirate famicom multicart in the late eighties: galaga, star force, twin bee, bwings. But it was not necessarily something I focused on.

I feel that it was not a particular shmup that got me into it but the concept of the single credit. This change in my head brought shmups from cheap, short, shallow(AKA the stereotype) to challenging, exciting, worthy.

I had been reading the shmups forum for a while and right around March of 2007 something clicked about shmups. The concept of trying to go as far as possible on 1 credit. Suddenly there was a barrage of purchases starting with Trigger Heart Exelica, then Under Defeat, DOJ, Karous, Last Hope, Espgaluda, a couple of HRAPs, xrgb-2+, etc...I finally joined the forum late summer 2008 and have posted very little but have learned so much.

[mortified_penguin]

Galaga. Grew up watching my dad play it at a skating rink between begging for more quarters for Shinobi and Street Fighter 2.

[CStarFlare]

Hard to say. I picked up Mushihimesama for PS2 for $20 but didn't really give it a serious shot.

Later, I downloaded Perfect Cherry Blossom. I stuck with Extra because the POC was always active; I spent a lot of time trying to improve but didn't really grasp the scoring or go for the clear.

Somewhere along the line I got Ikaruga for GC. I stuck to one credit but when I hit a wall (late stage 3/the wheel at stage 4) I walked away.

All of these were fun distractions but I didn't really consider myself into the genre. Then I moved out. In the few days I was without internet, I went back to Mushihimesama. When I got internet back I googled around and found two things - EOJ's guide (which blew my mind and brought me here) and talk of Futari. It was my introduction to the depth the genre could answer, and the first time I started seeing these games as something that could be beaten and mastered instead of things that were fun to throw a few hours at here and there.

[parts]

Back in the day at the arcades I was playing gyruss, millapede, 1942, darius, raiden and xevius. Last year playing the newest mortal kombat on ps3 started my shmup obsession on multiple consoles.

[lothies]

I played various shmups on the PC back in the 90s (raptor, tyrian, etc) but very casually. Touhou peeked my interest in the genre as a whole and Cave games (DDP for the most part) showed me how fun it can be to play for score instead of just survival.

[stryc9]

Last year playing the newest mortal kombat on ps3 started my shmup obsession on multiple consoles

Mortal Kombat Sky Stage?

[admiralcrunche]

[quote="Serraxor"]As a child growing up, I spent a lot of time playing 1942 on a pirated multicart. I also have fond memories of playing that game in an old, small arcade on the military base my father was stationed at.

exactly this for me, small arcade on an air force base in england where me and my brother wore that 1942 machine out. also a lot of darius on the snes

edit:bad at quoting

[nash87]

raiden fighters jet

[parts]

Mortal Kombat Sky Stage?

Goro was a mother to take down!

[BarfHappy]

Space Invaders on the 2600, never left the genre

Same here.
I used to play Galaxy 2 (epoch) in my bed after reading time as a kid as well. So i d say both.

[stryc9]

Mortal Kombat Sky Stage?

Goro was a mother to take down!

I'll tell you something else that could have contributed to my inspiration, and at the same time confirm just how damn old I am: in the mid eighties, I lived in England for a year. The Christmas I had there yielded some interesting gifts, stuff you just didn't see in Australia at the time. Like a WIND-UP SPACE INVADERS CLONE!

Seriously I only just remembered this. I think it only had 3 invaders at the top of the screen, but it was a cool little novelty at the time. I'm gonna see if I can find an image for it.

Wonder what a wind-up SDOJ would be like?

[Oniros]

I think both Jamestown (PC) and Blazing Star (Android) did it for me. Now I'm looking into buy Under Defeat HD and Ketsui for the PS3!

[6tusBeckmesser]

For me personally it was the desire to find back to simpler yet refined video games. And although I want to keep my collection small and limited, shmups fit these criteria perfectly.

[o.pwuaioc]

Would love to resurrect this thread. For me, it was Galaga and Centipede first. Of course, back then, I treated them more as "arcade games" than shooters. I think what really got me into the genre was Gradius III. There's just some dark and foreboding about the Gradius games. I later went to 1cc Abadox and got really into Life Force and the Thunder Force series. Only much later did I find my true favorite shooter style: Strikers 1945. Even today I'm not that big on the bullet hell or anime genre, or even cute em ups, and prefer quick action shooters like Strikers, Raiden, Aero Fighters, and Gates of Thunder, though atmospheric games have a special place in my heart.

[copy-paster]

For me, definitely Gradius / Salamander series

[pandoraXhunter]

For me, that would be Touhou games

[JBC]

I can't remember the exact one, but it was something with brutal difficulty from when I was a kid in the 80's. I couldn't let any game smash me, not when I had just learned to beat Super Mario!

I think it may have been Legendary Wings for NES, which I've recently learned is easy as can be with a second player.

[mamboFoxtrot]

A friend gave me Super R-Type as a kid. I was pretty fascinated by the whole idea of some spiffy ship flying through space annihilating things. However, other than Star Fox 64 and some Mega Man games, I never got any other shooting games. I'm not sure if it was Super R-Type's brutal difficulty putting me off to the genre, or the fact that I just don't remember ever seeing those kinds of games at the stores. (Admittedly, I was mostly a Nintendo kid, and yeah, pickings are damn slim on the N64 and Gamecube. The PS2 wasn't exactly bursting with the things, either)

Funnily enough, it wasn't an STG specifically that piqued my interest again, but actually fighting games. I was interested in making one somewhere around 2010 and started looking seriously in to the design of these games. I ended up being exposed to STGs because fighting game fans tend to be in to arcade and doujin games. There was also that Touhou fighting game (I think it was IaMP). I ended up buying Castle of Shikigami 3 (which I had previously wrote off as another cheap nostalgia grab on the Wii), and DLing X.X's Blue Wish Resurrection and Edin's Aegis, which were fun, but it was Akai Katana that really cemented my love for this genre.

[rjosal]

I think this thread is worth resurrecting. It's interesting to see what games are most responsible for bringing people into the genre. For me I played tons of SNES shmups. Then they disappeared on the N64. Later on I played DOJ, and that's the game that gets credit for addicting me to the genre. It just seems so badass to me, with the art, explosions, sfx, music (especially stage 5). Daifukkatsu totally lost that.

[Doctor Butler]

I had a Hong-Kong pirate cart for the NES with a shitton of game, including Gradius, Macross, and Galaga. I also had a proper cart of 1942.

Sometime in the early 2000's, I found 19XX in a hotel arcade, and was floored that they still made shooters like that.

But it wasn't until I went to college a few years ago, that I really started to form more than a cursory appreciation for the genre. I found out about Touhou, which that gave me an itch to play 19XX again, so I downloaded MAME - and now I'm here.

[Synnae]

Touhou.

But if I recall correctly, the very first shmup I played in my life was Sonic Wings/Aero Fighters on my SNES when I was a kid. Back then I didn't really enjoy shmups at all, though. I didn't even know they were called "shmups".

I will be completely honest here, the cute girls from Touhou were what got me into the series, but I also enjoyed the gameplay. My interest in the genre expanded into traditional shmups afterwards. Mostly doujin shmups and what mame has to offer. I'm still not a very good player, though. I mostly play the games casually, and that's enough for me to have fun.

[S_Fang]

I played various shmups game when I was young: Space Invaders; Asteroids; Herzog Zwei and various titles on the MAME. But the title that made me want to insert myself in this genre was watching Crimzon Clover, played by slowbeef.

From that moment, I joined this forum and played a lot of STG games, mostly on MAME.

[Squire Grooktook]

Funny story, but the game that got me back into shmups was a freaking mmo, of all things.

As a kid, I eventually developed a great appreciation for games like Einhander, G-Darius, Gradius III, etc. going from seeing the genre as boring "space ship simulators" to games of mental gymnastics and reflexes. Never really went for 1cc's or anything, but logged a ton of playtime into a lot of them.

When I got into fighting games later though, I pretty much forgot all about shmups (and every other game genre) and just played nothing but fighters for years on end. Eventually, I came to a kind of epiphany that fighters were more about reading the other player than pure reflexes (although they involve both, obviously, there's no reaction that'll save you from a psychic dragon punch though). At that point, I decided I'd branch back out into other genres again.

Mostly started playing hack and slash and stuff like Bayonetta, Demon's Souls, etc.. A friend convinced me to play the action MMO Phantasy Star Online 2, and I really liked it. Particularly, I liked how instead of just blocking or i-frame dodging through a lot of attacks, like other 3d action games, you actually had to manually aim your dodge/step/dash in the correct direction to avoid a lot of melee and projectile attacks. It reminded me of how much I loved the manual maneuvering and sight reading in 2d action games. With that, I started thinking about shmups again.

College was also starting for me, so I decided it would be easier to play shmups during the semester than more involved and lengthy games. With that, I started trying to 1cc Darius Gaiden, and had a great time.

[MathU]

I hate to nitpick at this but Phantasy Star Online isn't actually an MMO--which is part of the reason it's so much better than all the other garbage out there. "Online RPG" describes it well enough. Now I haven't played PSO2 yet, but I assume its game organization setup is similar enough to PSO's that it still isn't an MMORPG.

[Squire Grooktook]

Yes, it's based on the same structure as the original PSO and therefore not technically the same genre as something like WoW. I thought that made a funnier opening sentence though lol.

[MathU]

O-okay then. Cool to hear someone's first single-credit clear was Darius Gaiden. Kind of wish it was my own.