What is a Shoot Em' Up? Defining the Genre with Shmup Junkie

Comments · 381

• MI

  @mikelpelaez · 3 years ago (edited)

  Quite possibly one of the greatest questions the brilliant Socrates had while arguing against the super-armored sophists

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• MU

  @MURD3RWAVE · 3 years ago

  The 2 chans that got me in to the genre.  Pretty much only playing shoot em ups because these guys. These guys got me to appreciate so many new games at once that it fired me up to be playing games again. I had no idea so many great games even existed. Like it was a chapter in gaming I completely skipped over.

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• CE

  @censoredterminalautism4073 · 3 years ago

  Plato: &quot;It&apos;s a game about shooting them.&quot;<br>Diogenes, holding up Call of Duty: &quot;Behold Plato&apos;s shmup!&quot;

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• ED

  @EdgardR. · 3 years ago

  Steam did not watch this vid

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• DJ

  @DjDizzy216 · 3 years ago

  It’s like music genres where a definition works well for many years. &nbsp;But as the genre gets older, ppl will have to get creative with how they approach the genre so it sounds new. &nbsp;So that definition will get blurry over time. &nbsp;So now the genre becomes an umbrella of multiple subgenres that are variations.

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• DE

  @derjahgalgion · 11 months ago

  In spanish we fixed this confusion real good thanks to the older magazines. All those STG games that we love are called &quot;Mata marcianos&quot; literally &quot;Alien killer&quot; and Space Invaders started it all 👾💥

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• AI

  @ailius1520 · 3 years ago

  I recently made an indie top-down shmup with keyboard-and-mouse controls. A weird thing is instead of auto-scrolling, I went with the beat-em-up system. You&apos;re locked into a direction until you enter a room, then the screen locks on to that location, then the enemies spawn on a set of timers, and the screen won&apos;t move until you defeat all the enemies. It still feels very shmup like because you have to dodge everything in the space you are given rather than retreat far enough that the patterns become much less dense.<br><br>So I think a more precise way to describe it instead of &apos;auto-scrolling&apos; is space is artificially limited. Like the difference between boxing and a street-fight is in boxing you have that ring where you can&apos;t leave while in a street-fight you can run up and down the street and potentially turn it into cardio.

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• DA

  @davehansan · 3 years ago

  I just realized rail shooters are a subgenre of a niche genre that no one actually knows the definition for anymore 😓

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• TH

  @TheCompactStack · 3 years ago

  Traditional roguelikes have the same problem. Nowadays anything procedurally generated or with permadeath is called a roguelike. The OG roguelikers now need a new word.

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• PI

  @PikaStu666 · 3 years ago

  Two legends unite! <br><br>Shmups is the ultimate genre of risk and reward, love and heartache, euphoria and dysphoria. <br><br>I’m so bad at shmups, but I can’t get enough of them. <br><br>Funnily enough, Youtube certainly doesn’t understand what a Shmup is, as underneath this video it’s suggesting I play Doom 🤦‍♂️

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• JU

  @juliancassin7475 · 3 years ago

  It become an issue when online stores started flooding their shooters category with both shoot em ups and first person shooters... while technically both shooters they have different audiences. &nbsp;Shoot em ups is good enough already.

  4

• CO

  @Cotylorhynchus_Gaming · 3 years ago

  my favorite shmup is nier automata, sonic frontiers being a close second

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