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Shoot’em’up games are in nature very unforgiving. Unlike a modern FPS title it is impossible to quick save yourself through a shoot’em’up game (if not playing in an emulator and save states all the time). Shmup games with saving are few and rare, mostly concentrated to MS-DOS and the 486 era, so mastering a shmup usually takes skill and dedication.

Here are some tips in mastering a shoot’em’up game.

Play in TATE mode

If the game permits you to play in vertical mode then do so. TATE mode shows more of the screen, instead of playing a vertical game on a horizontal monitor shrinking the image down you can have almost twice as big screen in TATE.

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Horace was a character in three ZX-Spectrum games. He looked like a cross between a Kiwi bird, an egg and Pac-man. Some Horace games were also ported to the C64 but the ZX-Spectrum version is generally considered the better versions and the character is much better known by Spectrum users.

There where three Horace games released on the Spectrum.

Hungry Horace

The first one was called Hungry Horace and was released in 1982. Hungry Horace was a Pac-Man clone with some unique differences from the original. There are four different mazes (or levels) but you do not have to eat all green dots on a screen to get to the next maze since the door is always open. The fourth screen is the weirdest. Instead of a Pac-Man maze where you always have a possibility in most cases to escape the guards the maze are designed in such a weird way that you are guaranteed to lose a life in some occasions depending on where the guard spawns when you enter the level.

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The Game Boy Advance micro is a fantastic handheld video game. But it has a minor flaw since it does not play older black and white Game Boy games. The older Game Boy advance handhelds did play older games and could even play Game Boy color cartridges. This was made possible by miniaturizing the circuit of the Game Boy and the Game Boy color and adding it besides the GBA circuit. If a player inserts an old GB or GBC game into the cartridge port the cartridge would push a switch that would tell the GBA to switch itself to GBC mode and thus it was essentially an older Game Boy in a new case.

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Doom was an important game, it defined the IBM-PC compatible as the new gaming computer. Amiga users became angry because they where used to the fact that Amiga generally had better games than the PC. In order to show the world that the Amiga could handle Doom they began working on lots of “Doom-clones” to prove stupid PC users that the Amiga was better than they thought it was.

Doom clones:

Alien Breed 3D 1995

Alien Breed 3D was the first successfully commercial “Doom-clone” on the Amiga. It was only compatible with the Amiga 1200 and the Amiga 4000 because it used some clever hardware tricks for the game engine only present in the AGA chips. Alien Breed 3D can run on a stock Amiga 1200 with 2 MB but shines on an Amiga upgraded with a 030 CPU. In the graphics department Alien Breed 3D has worse graphics than Doom and runs in a much smaller window. The actual game though is very good and fun to play.

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Smart bomb

The smart bomb is used in most shoot’em’up games as a last resort that when used gives your ship some seconds of invulnerability and clears the screen of every enemy except end level bosses or medium sized enemies. Sometime the smart bomb only kills enemies on a part of the screen.

Save the world syndrome

A lot of shoot’em’up games have a simple story where a world (sometimes earth) is invaded by an alien race. You are the last hope for humanity and need to beat the aliens by flying around in a cool looking ship with impressive weaponry that does not overheat even though you shoot with the guns constantly.

Cool “shoot’em’up” ship

Even though the player most often controls a tiny ship is often designed to look very cool and pack lots of heat. It is almost essential to a shoot’em’up game to have an aggressive looking ship with massive weapons that should be upgradable.

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From 10 to 1 where 10 is the least amount and 1 is the highest sign of newbie.

10. You fondly remember the Atari 2600 but where born in 1989

9. You think the Commodore CD32 is a rare game console with highly unique games

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Sprites

A bitmap picture of an object in a 2D game is a sprite. In a platform game the main character is the sprite, in a shoot’em’up game the ship is a sprite. Sprites are small but are sometimes combined to give the illusion of a big character (think of old school end level bosses).

Transparency

Transparency can be seen in some 2D games and is an effect where a layer is put over the top of the graphics objects. This transparent layer shows only some objects that can be raindrops or snow, the rest is transparent. This effect can then give the impression of snow or rain over a landscape.

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