court wrote:Have shmups ever been known to help exercise neural pathways?
After frequenting these forums for around 10 years (fuck), it would appear that playing these games causes extreme irritability, and in some cases, advanced forms of retardation.
As for recommendations, Muchi Muchi Pork! is pretty much required.
I downloaded quite a few demos of fan based shooters off the Tokyo game site. I noticed 2 things I didn't care for:
1. I thought the Witches/etc would be neato but after about 5 minutes of screeching voices/etc I had enough.
2. Most of the titles have this look that they were programmed in flash or something. I definitely prefer the old low res RGB bitmap look. For me personally there is a point where the graphics look too polished.
So far Cho Ren Sha remains the best PC based shmup I've tried.
I think you've hit upon one of the main reasons spaceships are favored around these parts.
ChoRenSha is definitely one of the best out there; you may not find any that beat it. I'd say the ones that come closest to it in style (with nice old school pixel art) are the Siter Skain games (Kamui, Reflex - both free), and Zen Ichi (maybe free, not sure).
A personal favorite of mine takes lo-res to the next level and has some excellent tunes to boot: ring^-27. It is also freeware.
Did you try Touhous yet? No voice in those. They do have 3D-backgrounds though, but they fit this part:
court wrote:
Something that will help build my skill level from 0 to hero.
really well, since you get difficulties ranging from ridiculously easy to harder than most arcade shmups. I know many people who got good pretty quickly through the games.
