Back before the term "shooter" was used to refer to games like Doom, Medal of Honor, and Halo, it referred to games like Xevious, Life Force, and Raiden. This genre of gaming was a large part of what made video arcades so popular in the '80s and into the '90s, and for a while, the shooter epitomized gaming in general. After all, these games were all about testing your skills and reflexes to the limits and also about making you feel pretty special about yourself what with being humanity's last, best hope against huge alien fleets and all. Invariably, arcade shooters were designed to suck up your hard-earned quarters as well as to let you have some fun taking on evil aliens. The genre seems long dead now, though, since the intuitive dodge-and-shoot mechanics of classic space shooters seem overly simplistic compared with the complex 3D games of today. Shooters also tended to be very short, even by yesteryear's standards. But along comes Ikaruga, a traditional space shooter with an innovative twist and some undeniably stylish production values, to single-handedly prove that games like this are still as enjoyable as ever.

Ikaruga is the last great game for the Dreamcast.

Like many space shooters, Ikaruga was first released in arcades, though it never saw the light of day in this country. For that matter, neither will the recently released home version of the game, which is available only in Japan and for the Dreamcast system (though a GameCube version was also recently announced). It's almost as if Treasure, Ikaruga's distinguished developer, is deliberately trying to limit its audience to a core group of enthusiasts. That's perhaps not as absurd of an idea as it might seem, since Ikaruga is truly a shooter fan's shooter. It follows many of the genre's 20-year-old conventions, and you'll find it very challenging even if you've been playing games of this sort all your life. If you have, then the game's classical design and its high level of difficulty will also happen to be two of the things you'll invariably like best about it. Yet even those who aren't particular fans of space shooters would undoubtedly appreciate a lot of what Ikaruga has to offer.

The plot of Ikaruga is, for all intents and purposes, the same as the plot of every other space shooter ever made. Basically, it's the future and you're civilization's last hope. You've got a high-powered spacecraft with unlimited ammo, but your enemies have entire armadas of killing machines, and you're their only target. Ikaruga actually has an optional simultaneous two-player mode, so it doesn't have to be just you against the world, but still--you get the idea. The game consists of only five vertically scrolling stages, but offers three distinctly different difficulty settings and a decent number of unlockable extra features. Considering how apparently short the game is, you'll find that Ikaruga actually has a surprising amount of depth. Like with many great games, this depth isn't readily apparent at first due to the game's seeming simplicity and quickly familiar controls, but spend some time with Ikaruga and you'll find in it an action game that actually forces you to think on your feet, constantly.

It's also one of the best space shooters in many years.

The gameplay has a few twists, but one of them, a concept first introduced in Treasure's own Sega Saturn side-scroller, Silhouette Mirage, is especially noteworthy: Every enemy in the game is either light or dark colored, and your little spaceship has both a light surface and a dark form as well, which you can switch between at any time. These two forms are identical, except for the color of your ship and its energy blasts. The thing is, you can absorb same-colored energy, and only enemy fire of the opposite color can ever hurt you. For more than 20 years, the object of every space shooter has been to avoid absolutely everything on the screen, except maybe the occasional power-up, while returning fire. Ikaruga effectively disposes of this time-honored tradition by forcing you to train yourself to avoid only one type of enemy firepower at a time.

It's not as straightforward as it sounds, though. You'll gradually realize three things: One, that absorbing same-colored energy is actually a good thing, because you stock up that energy to unleash a devastating homing laser attack--your only alternative to your basic rapid-fire energy shots. Two, that there are no power-ups in Ikaruga. Get used to the basic capabilities of your ship, because the game was fundamentally designed to push them to their limits. It seems disappointing at first that there are no superpowered weapons or defenses to be picked up, but you'll realize that this was only to ensure that Ikaruga remains a skill-based game every second of the way. And three, that shooting an enemy with the opposite-colored energy deals double damage. Obviously, though, the disadvantage of doing this is that you yourself will be vulnerable to the enemy's opposite-colored firepower, and in Ikaruga, when you take a hit, you die. So matching your enemies' color is the way to play it safe, while changing to the opposite color is the riskier, faster way to take out the opposition. In reality, you'll be switching colors often, and in the later stages of the game, almost constantly. The screen often fills with a withering hail of enemy fire, and only by quickly and precisely switching between light and dark will you survive.