If there’s one thing games fans really like to do, it’s argue with each other.

There’s hardly anything on which the entire gaming community can be said to agree. For everyone who acknowledges that Shigeru Miyamoto makes the world’s best games, there’s someone else saying “No, it’s Peter Molyneux”, others insisting on Hideo Kojima or Warren Spector. For every nutter who thinks Grand Prix or Gran Turismo 3 is the best racing game of all time, there’s a sane person pointing out that they’re both overhyped borefests of  garage-mechanic simulators that have about as much of a true resemblance to racing as they do to pigeon-fancying. But even in our flame-happy little world, there are a few things that everyone recognises as simple undeniable fact.

One is that the PC can’t lay claim to a single decent arcade-style 2D shoot-‘em-up in the vein of console epics like Giga Wing or Radiant Silvergun - PC owners being far too snobby to enjoy such simple blasting antics. And another, perhaps related, undeniable “fact” is that Japanese people have no interest whatsoever in the PC, seeing it for some unfathomable reason as a monstrously huge piece of expensive junk that doesn’t work properly. (And since most Japanese people live in flats the size of a phonebox’s kitchen but have to pay about 93% of their wages in rent and work 23 hours a day, it’s easy to understand why a games machine that spends half its time crashing and is eight times the size and ten times the price of a console doesn’t seem like a very attractive idea to them.) However, chums, like almost everything else you think you know, these ideas are, in fact, complete cack. Why? Because you’ve obviously never heard of Nipon ShootEmUps.

Seemingly alone in the world, the Japanese are still big fans of 2D scrolling shoot-‘em-ups - the Dreamcast especially was well served with a whole raft of examples, mostly from arcade specialists Capcom, who brought arcade hits like Giga Wing, Gunbird 2 and Mars Matrix to the doomed Sega console. Sadly, the 3D-obsessed West has forgotten about its love affair with the sort of simple twitch entertainment that made us all love games so much in the first place, and it would be a brave company indeed who would release a 2D shooter on the PC nowadays. But in one of those twists of enthusiasm-led fate that makes all the hassle of owning a PC as a games platform worthwhile, Japanese PC owners have given birth to an entire community of coders dedicated to creating dozens of modern 2D shoot-em-ups (generically identified in Japan as “STGs”, which I’m guessing comes from “ShooTing Games”). And what’s more, they’re practically all free.

The world of Nipon ShootEmUps (that being the correct punctuation) is one of the most obscure niches you can find in PC gaming, but it’s a very highly populated one. Assuming you can make some headway into any of the websites (unusually for the Web, English-language sites are almost unheard of), you’ll find literally hundreds of games, mostly created by teams of just one or two people, yet boasting production values the equal of much commercial software. And more importantly, gameplay that you could hang your hat on.

Taking a formula that’s been honed and refined over years of practice, Japanese STGs offer a gameplay experience where the rules are mostly the same (the rush towards ludicrous screen-obliterating power-ups that characterised the last games most of us saw in this genre has actually been abandoned, in favour of a simpler and rather more narratively coherent system where you start the game with most of your weaponry already installed) and all the effort has gone into the actual design of the levels to ensure that the game remains challenging right to the end (compared to previously, when it was about amassing a virtually impregnable ship by the middle of level two and then sellotaping the fire button down and going to the pub). 

And with the power of modern technology at hand, this is most often achieved by filling the screen with astounding amounts of mathematically-patterned enemy fire and leaving you to weave a nerve-racking path through the geometrical blizzard. (The payoff more often than not coming in the form of the “reflect shield”, a staple weapon of Japanese STGs which allows you to charge up a barrier and then reflect all the enemy’s bullets right back at them, which is almost stupidly enjoyable.)

Most of all, these are games that test your skill, not your endurance. This isn’t Max Payne, where you quicksave outside every doorway and keep repeating every room until you win. You can’t win by inches here. Mess up in a Nipon Shoot-‘Em-Up and you’ve blown it, especially since most of the games are focussed towards highscores rather than completion – you generally get infinite continues and can “finish” on your first go, but there’s usually a trademark scoring system where the points get higher the longer you stay alive and reset whenever you get killed or use a superweapon. (Also, many games have, or are even solely comprised of, “Score Attack” modes where you play a single level or timed interval at a time.)

If you haven’t played a scoring-based game for a while, and the chances are you haven’t (offhand I can’t even remember the last big PC game where scoring points was even recorded, never mind being the main objective), you’ll probably be amazed at how compelling it is. We’ve all become soft, forgotten even the concept of being irretrievably punished for failure in skill. These games are addictive in a way that simply hasn’t been seen on the PC for years, where the sheer surprise of being told your game is over after 45 seconds sees you stabbing furiously at the Start button over and over again until you realise that the gnawing pain in your stomach is the result of missing dinner for a week.

We don’t even have the room here to start telling you about the best individual games, or the companies like the fantastically-named Twinkle Soft who set so many of the benchmarks that others follow. The best thing you can do is head to the address at the end of the feature and just start downloading things. (Though we’ve scattered a few screenshots of some of the more excellent games around to get you started.) Most of these games pack themselves into no more than 5MB complete, so you’ve really got no excuse. Unless, that is, you’re scared.

WE ARE GENTLE SERVICE
Aren’t foreigners funny?

One of the best things about Nipon Shoot-‘Em-Ups, of course, is having to trawl through Japanese websites trying to find them, and encountering descriptions like this:

“Leads you into areas like The Present Of Okinawa Taste (Do not leak GOYA (NIGAURI) of the Okinawa production and it is given to an applicant. Okinawa production articles other than GOYA are also under present.) and EcoDive (Best dive plan making free. We are gentle service. So,don`t warry be happy) and the “Okinawan Indie Band”, The Crankshafters.”

Okay, so it’s easy to have a chuckle at funny Japlish and its accompanying game names. But let’s face it, they’re a lot less embarrassing than “Arcanum: Of Steamworks And Magick Obscura”, so let’s not feel too smug about it, eh? Anyway, how could you fail to feel more exciting and glamorous playing games with titles like these?

Lunatic Princess: Tower Of Hanui

Morning Bread Hina

Strike Back Of A Not Baka-Game

Sexy Death

Sexy Death 2: Lunatic Force

Blast Noodles

Excess Fraction

Go! Go! Twenty-Five

Genocide Circuit 2: 2001 Sexual Violet Wonder 3

THE WESTERN APPROACH
Why can’t we do it?
 

The question that’s unanswered in all this, of course, is “Why does it take the world’s least PC-friendly market to produce these great PC games?” After all, it’s not like it’s a cultural thing – us Western types like to shoot things just as much as the Japanese do. But until recently you had to go back six years to find the last thing resembling a halfway-competent Western attempt at doing a scrolling shooter on the PC, and “halfway-competent” is a generous description of most of them. The most high-profile titles were Apogee’s Raptor and Epic’s Tyrian 2, and they’re both textbook examples in how NOT to do the job – slow, tedious, badly-balanced and generally crap. Which would seem to answer our question – rubbish games made people not want scrolly shoot-‘em-ups any more, so nobody made any good ones. (It’s taken until now for Small Rockets to attempt to revive the genre with their recent Star Monkey, but that’s almost exactly the same as Raptor and Tyrian, only better-looking.)