Shmup

Despite the generic name, S.H.M.U.P. is not a generic shmup. A finalist at the Chinese IGF, it is indeed a horizontally-scrolling shmup, but with some unusual characteristics.

Killing enemies gives you points you can use to upgrade, a common trope, but upgrades persist the next time you play under the same username, even if you've died. Indeed, it's designed so that you will almost certainly lose the first time you play, but that over time (a few hours of gameplay, at any rate) you will build up enough to be able to persist and triumph even through the higher, and more difficult, levels.

Control is entirely with the mouse; your cluster of ships follow the mouse pointer around. Right-click launches missiles, of which you have a limited supply. There's a boss at the end of each level, but these are not all that impressive.

Behind you are a cluster of squares that you can think of as akin either to the cities of Space Invaders or the points you must protect in a tower-defense game. Ships you fail to kill as they scroll by reduce them, and you can lose either by losing them all or losing all your ships.

However, at higher levels, enemies self-organize into impressive opposing formations -- sometimes taking advantage of combined arms, with defensive ships protecting high-fire but more vulnerable ones, sometimes organizing into megaships, in the fashion of amoebas forming into the cells of a multicellular monstrosity.

Gameplay is not, however, particularly challenging from a traditional shmup perspective; at worst, you simply die a lot, build up points to buy upgrades, and eventually triumph even with a fairly minimal twitch-action skill set. There would seem to be a bit of a casual game influence in this.

High scores can be posted to your Twitter feed, something I haven't seen before.

In general, it is neither the most visually beautiful shmup, in a genre known for its weird psychedelic beauty, nor the most challenging game of its type, but there are some interesting design ideas here.

Kino One is a retro 80s arcade-style shmup, vertical-scrolling, with borrowings from the bullet-hell style and R-Type-like bosses. The 80s feel is reinforced by some nice flourishes; the start-game screen shows several arcade cabinets, and in addition to playing Kino One itself, you can select some of the other cabinets and play small Pac-Man and Arkanoid clones. Among the logos displayed during the start-up sequence is a Department of Justice logo along with a warning against drugs -- a common feature of early 80s arcade games.

Farbs, developer of the must-play ROM Check Fail, brought this game to IGF China and took no prisoners. It was an award well-earned, as this is pure awesomeness distilled into a Flash shmup. ROM Check Fail remixed 8-bit classics in a novel way, and his latest outing also splices in other influences. Captain Forever takes the shmup core and melds it with RPG progression and modular Lego construction. The end result is an interesting beast of a game that places emphasis on player-generated content. Even if you don't dig Asteroids or R-Type you should definitely give this a go.

When I say the phrase "online multiplayer" visions of tea-bagging and PvP probably fill your head. They don't apply here though, as you are playing against opponents across a temporal divide -- not just a physical one. This is indeed a multiplayer game, but instead of duking it out in real-time you face an echo of their playthrough. You know, their ghost. This asynchronous multiplayer brings out some interesting playstyles, and is fun to see in action. The game's tagline is awesome enough that I'll reproduce it here: "So the guy I'm fighting is actually a recording - a recording of a fight against a recording of a fight, all the way back to the beginning of time?"

Rake In The Grass has been making very meaty, very polished fusions of arcade spectacle and thinking optimization. The best example was the immortal Jets'n'Guns, which has gotten plenty of replay even though its myriad combinations suffer from some balancing issues. Larva Mortus gives you a similar dish: repetitive action fused with RPG elements, mixed with a horror aesthetic that comes off somewhere between H.P. Lovecraft and the Vincent Price monologue from Thriller. As your revolver bullets tear into zombie flesh, faces of demons flash over screen, psychologically interesting the first time, then eventually an obfuscation challenge. It feels badass like Jets but without the tongue-in-cheek satire; the procedurally generated levels put you in a Sisyphean loop while you earnestly send demons back to hell.

Mechanically the RPG elements suffer from balancing issues but unlike the issues in Jets, the number of components aren´t as numerous so the gaps are more noticeable. You have seven skills that can be upgraded each time you gain a level: health, health regain rate, time affected by status ailments, probability of item drops, damage dealt by the melee weapon, walk speed, and the XP bonus. Now, I´m a finance geek; when I play Tower Defense games and I see bonuses for like a Tesla Tower, a Flamethrower Tower, and then a 10% interest bonus, I´m like "hey, let me at that 10%". The first time through I went for the deferred trade-off of more skill dependence early on for greater power later. The problem is that XP pay-offs don´t scale much between enemies, while the amount of XP you need per level gain grows in a logarithmic fashion (technically it moves in a graded steps, but the regression is logarithmic). So if you invest a lot of skill points into more XP, you can´t really get ahead and end up wasting most of your bonuses. Luck and regeneration are similarly disposable; since the odds can be churned and you can wait to heal for as long as your patience allows, they´re mostly conveniences. The melee weapon is the only one whose damage scales, but it also carries the most risk, so you need to invest the majority of your points into it to get a real balance there. There is therefore a dominant strategy in putting all your points in walk speed and health with a few in status resistance.

Still, the basic gameplay is pretty satisfying, the pathy map generators keep tickling some basic maze-crawler left over from paleolithic evolution, and the leveling and items are compelling enough to keep you trucking. If you´re in the mood for these kind of grind-fests then you regret the trek into the underworld.

According to the sell copy for Turning the Tide, in January 1945 "The Nazis' march towards total world domination is gathering pace". Which should tell you right off the bat this is an arcade shmup, evidently created by people who are historically illiterate. (The turning point was in 1942, with Stalingrad and Midway; in January 1945, the Bulge is extinguishing the Germans' last hope of stopping the Western Allies, the Russians are rolling relentlessly toward Berlin, and the Japanese are beginning to starve.)

Upgrade Complete and Achievement Unlocked are a pair of satirical games from Armor Games. They're both playable, and quite different in terms of gameplay -- Upgrade Complete is a shmup while Achievement Unlocked is a platformer -- but you don't actually play them for the gameplay. At least, I don't think you do.

Gum Drop is a terrible name for this game -- makes me think of some pastel-scale 'casual' game, probably of the noxiously cute variety. What it really is, is a space shmup, only you don't actually shoot anything, which is unusual. Instead, you use a tractor beam to attach to what the game calls a "S.M.A.S.H.", which you then swing around yourself, using it to smash into enemy ships. Or you can kill the tractor and fling it along its current trajectory to hit an enemy, then recall it. Or grab a powerup, which does something else (like lay mines) and move around with that.

Kissma stands out immediately as a very Japanese game. At first you’re barraged by pinks, yellows, retro pixel-art, and sounds that for some reason remind me of the Japanese band Polysics. A moment later (if you’re anything like me) you’re scratching your head asking yourself what’s real and what’s not.

Rubbish Barrage is somewhat crude: hand-drawn images by someone who is clearly not a Photoshop jockey, backgrounds and music ripped from somewhere or other, hacked together by one guy pretty quickly.

It's also kind of charming. It's a sidescrolling shmup, with enemies appearing at any or all screen edges and following pre-set (but not a priori predictable) movement patterns. You have to dodge, or destroy enough of the attackers that they don't intersect you. Three lives and you're out, though this just puts you back at the beginning of the current level (thankfully), not the game.