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shmup (n): Shortened form of “shoot-em-up;” a genre of 2D video games based on shooting down waves of enemies while dodging waves of projectiles. (Usually in an aircraft, usually scrolling in one direction, but not necessarily either.) Japanese synonym: STG (short for "shooting game").

Shmups are one of the most fundamental forms of action game; most of what I used to play on the Atari 2600 as a kid qualified as a shmup. But sometimes it's easy to confuse "fundamental" with "basic," and there was a long period where I wrote the genre off as a low-nutrient diversion that relied on cheapness instead of challenge.

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So a couple years back I got obsessed with a vertically-scrolling shmup called ZeroRanger. It drew me in with stellar audio/visual design and a spare and cryptic story about eternal recurrence and the cycle of suffering, but then it kept me invested with some intensely satisfying shoot-and-dodge gameplay. The varied weapon loadouts offered a ton of agency for approaching a challenge, and the risk/reward balance of the complex scoring systems pushed me to keep improving my aggression and accuracy. I played the shit out of that game and frankly so should you.

My main takeaways, once I had beaten the true last boss and gotten all the White Vanilla achievements, were:

1. System Erasure rules, and I should grab Void Stranger sight-unseen when it drops. (This turned out to be absolutely correct; more about this some other day.)
2. Shmups as a genre also actually rule, so what am I missing by not playing very many?

Thus, I roved out a-questing. I started out with some stuff I already knew of or had recently stumbled across, then started digging deeper with the help of some kind of opinion poll on a forum for intense genre otaku.

Here's some notes so far.

( 3000 words about various shmups )

In Conclusion

Play ZeroRanger, because it's probably still the best "gateway shmup" to show newcomers what that world has to offer. But many of these other games also rule, and I'm having a great time exploring them.