Recently I started to become fascinated with shoot 'em ups, vertical shooters, horizontal shooters, and the like. I had always enjoyed messing around with the old 1945 cabinets whenever I went to an arcade, and Ikaruga is one of my favourite Gamecube games. I stated looking around the SHUMPS site a bit ago, and now it's becoming one of my favourite genres. I really enjoy the rewarding of skill and insight over memorization and repetition, and the limitless room to improve, just like fighting games. Unlike fighting games, shmups are genuinely challenging without needing someone else to test you, though.

So I guess it goes without saying that when you want to play something of this genre, you want a tough game, but you have to be reasonable. Stuff like Touhou or other exercises in "bullet hell" are just ridiculous. I’d much rather play something of the difficulty of Ikaruga or Bangai-O. Tough, but beatable without endless practice.

I think I had something more to say about this but I forget it now. At any rate, it’s a very cool, very underrated genre of games. It’s like the coelacanth of games.