As I’m sure I’ve mentioned here before, I’m more than a little fascinated by shoot-em-ups (or “shmups”) of the old arcade variety. I love the look of them, the way the camera’s bird’s eye view opens up all manner of possibilities for ducking, dodging, and of course destroying the enemies popping out at you from all corners. I love their frantic nature, the way playing one for any length of time gears up your pulse rate and takes over all of your senses, pulling you into its world of narrow escapes and enemy wave patterns. I’ve said before how much the “play till you die” nature of them interests me, how, when you know you’re doomed, part of your mind becomes free to try things you never would ordinarily. They’re a great genre of games, and as much as I might preach and shout about innovation in games, it makes me happy that the shmup always seems to live on in one form or another.

Well, mostly happy. Lately (particularly since the birth of Xbox Live Arcade), it seems “shmup” has more often than not come to mean “lazy reskin” as more and more people take an older game they really loved, change the graphics and name (if you’re lucky), and then shove it back out into the world. It’s a bit depressing, really – for every Assault Heroes there seems to be a dozen Raiden clones. Thank God then for Kenta Cho’s Aba Games, home to some of the most varied and interesting shooters around.

Cho is an interesting developer to watch – he produces games all on his own, releasing them for free at the rate of one or two a year. While nearly everything he produces can be neatly categorized as a shmup, each game is completely unique, home to an innovation or twist you find anywhere else. Take TUMUKI Fighters, for instance: while the side-scrolling shooter aspect is familiar to pretty much anybody who’s seen a videogame, its great idea lies in the way you upgrade your ship. Rather than blowing up enemies for powerups, you add their entire ship to your own, knocking them (or pieces of them) out of the sky and snatching them before they fall off the screen. The result is a completely different looking ship every time, a deadly mash-up of your fallen foes drunkenly stumbling through the skies like a drunken Katamari.

Elsewhere, Gunroar drops you into naval combat in a world full of bright lights and blurry images, taking your standard vertical scroller and adding two new features: the ability to lock your direction of fire, allowing you to shoot at one angle while moving freely around the map, and player-controlled progression. The two mixed together lends itself to incredibly hectic and fun situations, as you can race into dangerous situations, guns blazing, or wait for the danger to come to you.

There are many more games here to try, each one trying something different while staying true to the nature of shmups. Torus Trooper, for instance, is an incredible rush of speed, capable of causing a mild sense of vertigo at its highest difficulty levels. rRootage, on the other hand, takes the Japanese art of bullet mazes and whittles the gameplay down to a constant, ever-changing boss fight. Cho’s love for shmups is apparent in each one, and his work is something of a master study in the genre and the potential it still holds to surprise and delight us. Simple enough to learn (“N” is almost always fire, arrow keys to move, “X” or “Spacebar” for any special attacks available), each game is Windows-only and tiny enough to be played on the most antiquated of machines. If you’ve ever played a game where you piloted a little ship over a scrolling background against endless waves of enemies, you owe it to yourself to download and try a few of his beautiful little love letters.

Filed under: Monday Games