THE SHOOT'EM-UPS FAMILY TREE - February 1994
| SPACE INVADERS The daddy of 'em all. The game that brought war to the arcades (there are, after all, only so many different permutations of bats and balls you can put up with before terminal boredom sets in) and complete insane chaos to the streets of downtown Tokyo. Every single game you play today with shooting in it owes a debt to Space Invaders. But where would it all go from here? SPACE INVADERS pt 2 At first glance this is just Space Invaders in colour, but there's a bit more to it than that. This is, in fact, the first game to introduce the concept of secret hidden bonuses which is such a big part of today's big hits. Shooting the columns of invaders in the wrong order (ie from the top down) rewarded you with extra points and, if you were extra good, a dazzling and unexpected rainbow display. GALAXIANS GALAGA GAPLUS GALAGA 88 All these are variations on a theme, starting with Galaxians, which was the first game in which the aliens could kill you by colliding with you as well as just by firing bullets. The simple swooping attack patterns of Galaxians were soon replaced by breathtaking aerobatics in the sequels as enemies looped, dived and swirled dramatically all over the screen, but the gameplay is still essentially Space Invaders. COSMO GANGS The end of the 'Galaxians' line as far as Nintendo gaming is concerned, the SNES' Cosmo Gangs is basically Gaplus with a licence of a weird cutesy arcade shooting game tacked onto it. Super-simplistic single-screen blasting action all the way, and brilliant with it. GORF Gorf is an obvious progression from Space Invaders, because it actually had Space Invaders inside it. Gorf was five little sub-games all joined together into one whole (including mini versions of both Space Invaders and Galaxians), and so set the trend for countless multi-section film licence games to come. It also featured, as the last sub-game, a single big enemy ship, which in turn led to... PHOENIX ...the first end-of-level boss. Discounting the Gorf ship (since it was a separate bit of game rather than a thematically-linked follow-on), the Phoenix mothership is the first shoot-'em-up boss character. Four waves of ordinary Galaxians-type attacking suddenly gave way to a gigantic, heavily-armed ship filling most of the screen with a nasty little space creep leering out from the middle of it, and nothing would ever be the same again. Phoenix also introduced the Shield, probably the first power-up. XEVIOUS Although Galaga 88 boasted vertically-scrolling sections, it certainly wasn't the first shoot-'em-up to do so. That honour quite probably goes to Atari's 1982 Xevious, a gorgeous game which also boasted some fearsome bosses. Xevious was written for the NES, but if you can find a copy of it anywhere these days, then, er, could you tell us about it? We'd quite like one. (If not, the Game Boy's Solar Striker is probably the closest we're going to get). DEFENDER STARGATE Partly derivative of Scramble, but the Defender games (StarGate, the Defender sequel, is basically the same game but twice as mean) were really amazingly original in almost every way. A bewildering array of controls put the wind up the player right from the start, and then came swarms and swarms of aliens attacking from every direction at once. Defender allowed you to control the scrolling of the screen, which was a first, it had intelligent enemies who reacted to what you did rather than following set attack patterns, which was a first, and perhaps most importantly of all it introduced the first offensive super-weapon - the Smart Bomb, which killed every alien on the screen but left you and the humanoids you were defending completely unharmed. Can you name half-a-dozen shoot-'em-ups today which don't offer some kind of variation on the Smart Bomb? Thought not. SCRAMBLE The first shoot-'em-up not to take place on a single screen at a time, Scramble introduced the horizontal scroll that's the staple of just about every blasting game released nowadays. Continually forcing you in one direction at a steady speed, Scramble took away some of your sense of control, but added a new element of 'Ooh, I got a bit further that time, I wonder what's coming up next?', which really raised the stakes as far as addictive qualities went. VANGUARD The first step on from Scramble, of course, was to make the scrolling go different ways. Vanguard scrolled horizontally, vertically and even diagonally, in a shoot-'em-up that was also notable for allowing four directions of fire at once (thanks to a SNES joypad-style four fire buttons arranged in a cross). ROBOTRON Williams, the producers of Defender and StarGate, were the hardcore arcade player's gods in the early years, and the next shoot-'em-up they released invented another new genre. Robotron put the player in a series of single-screen arenas viewed from above, in which numerous intelligent enemies with different characteristics attacked the player from all directions. The best thing about Robotron, though, was the control system, which gave the player two joysticks, one for controlling movement and the other for controlling direction of fire, a brilliant system which wasn't seen again until... SMASH TV Almost 10 years after the original, Williams updated Robotron into Smash TV, basically the same game but with 90s-style power-ups and bosses. Acclaim converted the game to both the NES and SNES brilliantly, using two joypads in the case of the NES to recreate the coin-op control method perfectly, resulting in two of the best Nintendo shoot-'em-ups money can buy. GAUNTLET GAUNTLET II In many ways, Robotron gave rise to Gauntlet, another overhead-view you-against-the-hordes blaster. The differences were that Gauntlet scrolled, it came as a set of mazes to navigate and hide in rather than open arenas and, the crucial innovation, it introduced the idea of lots of people playing at once, which almost no decent shoot-'em-up is without these days. For Nintendo owners, the spiffy NES conversion of the sequel Gauntlet II is your entry route into four-player dungeon-plundering. NEMESIS Things were a bit quiet on the horizontal-scrolling front (in terms of new ideas, that is) for quite a while after Scramble. The big breakthrough, in fact quite probably the biggest single breakthrough in shoot-'em-up history came several years later with Nemesis. That breakthrough was the collectable power-up. By shooting certain enemies in Nemesis, you could pick up little icons that doubled your shooting power, gave you extra weapons, or even created a little drone that followed you around mimicking your behaviour and dramatically increasing your firepower. Within a month, the concept of a shoot-'em-up without power-ups was completely dead. SALAMANDER VULCAN VENTURE INTERSTELLAR ASSAULT GRADIUS III As with any big success, Nemesis spawned many spin-offs. Salamander, the first sequel, is like its forebear, available on the NES under a different name (the two games being called Gradius - ugh - and Life Force respectively). Interstellar Assault is a Game Boy original sequel (the first Nemesis is also available on the handheld in an altered form), and the SNES' Gradius III is partly based on the unconverted second arcade sequel, Vulcan Venture, and features an innovative customise-your-weaponry system which gives a whole new depth to the power-up concept. PARODIUS The ultimate mark of success, of course, is when somebody starts taking the mickey. Oddly, though, it was Konami themselves who did it to Nemesis with Parodius, a tongue-in-cheek cutesy cartoon version of the hit series. Available on Game Boy and SNES, Parodius is funny and cute, but most importantly it's a great shoot-'em-up as well. BURAI FIGHTER Burai Fighter more or less IS Nemesis, except the scrolling goes in lots of different directions. R-TYPE R-Type is a very Nemesis-like game too, but it brought to the genre some big ideas, the most durable of which has been the entire-level-as-one-ship baddy. ASTEROIDS ASTEROIDS DELUXE A different kind of game altogether, the only real connection between this and Space Invaders is that Asteroids was more or less the last monochrome arcade game. Asteroids' biggest innovation was Hyperspace, the emergency panic button that warped you to a random area of the screen (at the risk of fatal explosion), but it brought a whole new style to video gaming which sadly, with the exception of a pretty poor conversion of Asteroids itself on the Game Boy, hasn't made much of an impression on the world of Nintendo. ELITE ...except, rather improbably, for this. Okay, it's a long way down the road from Asteroids to Elite, but there's more of the arcade veteran in here than you might think. From the wireframe graphics to the hyperspacing to the spinning around in inky blackness shooting at enemy ships and bits of debris, Elite couldn't have existed without Asteroids. MOON CRESTA Moon Cresta borrowed from Galaga the concept of linked ships. Your ship was divided into three sections, which split at the start of each round (divided Phoenix-style into eight waves). After surviving a couple of waves with the first section of ship still intact, you got the chance to dock with the second section, giving you a much better offensive capability, then after another couple of waves you could dock with the third section to be truly awewsomely endowed. Moon Cresta's build-up ship was very probably the source for Nemesis' 'Option' power-up, and hence one of the most important shoot-'em-up innovations. XENON 2 The link between Xevious and Xenon 2? Well, they both start with 'Xe', don't they? ZAXXON A different kind of progress from Scramble came in the legendary Zaxxon. The exact same game at heart, the difference was that Zaxxon was in 3D. Still visually striking to this day, Zaxxon scrolled in a weird, 45-degree, isometric Ôinto-the-screen' style that wasn't often imitated simply because it was so distinctive. If you want to play Zaxxon on your NES, er, you can't. CAPTAIN SKYHAWK ISOLATED WARRIOR ...but you can try either of these. Isolated Warrior is probably the closest thing there is visually, but Captain Skyhawk has more of Zaxxon's shoot-'em-uppy feel. Neither of them are really that close, but as more and more old coin-ops get the 90s treatment, dare we imagine that SNES Super Zaxxon is on the way? Let's hope so... ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE ROBOT MONSTERS One of the few coin-ops to take Zaxxon's 3D viewpoint is EFTPOTRM, which is basically Robotron. Funny old world, isn't it. AXELAY Axelay - state of the shoot-'em-up art? Well, let's look at the evidence. It's got Zaxxon-inspired 3D sections, Burai Fighter-esque multi-directional scrolling, multi-directional firing like Vanguard, some weapons and horizontally-scrolling sections straight out of Nemesis, and vertically-scrolling bits a la Xenon. As well as the 'XE' in the title. Pretty conclusive evidence, I'd say. But then again, you never can tell what's going to happen next... |
||
|
||
