Greg Kasavin Executive Editor, PC Games	Now Playing: Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Virtua Fighter 4, Disciples II Most Wanted: Soldier of Fortune II, Warcraft III All-Time Favorite Shooters: Space Harrier, Gyruss, Victory Road, Lifeforce, Lords of Thunder, Gaiares, Raiden II

An Ode to Shooters

The word "shooter" had already been a part of my vocabulary for many years before I ever played Doom or Wolfenstein 3D. To this day, when I see the word standing by itself, I think back to its original meaning--as a description of the genre of gaming in which the object is to single-handedly (or almost single-handedly) rid the world/galaxy/universe of an onslaught of enemy forces. By shooting them. You've played these types of games before--Space Invaders is an example everybody is familiar with. It's safe to say that the heyday of this classic genre of gaming is long gone--I'd say about ten years gone, in fact. So bear with me while I shed a big, gushy tear for it. All I ask is, before you continue reading, adjust the colors on your monitor to a sepia tone and spread some Vaseline on the edges of your monitor screen--all to give everything on this page that wistful nostalgic look. Kind of like what you'd find on the Hallmark channel. Except instead of listening to some tear-jerking piano music, let your ears feast on this.

This is the first arcade game I seriously got into.

Fine, you don't have to do all that stuff. The Vaseline thing is pretty gross, actually. But listen to the music--it'll put you in the mood. It's a little ditty from 1993's Lords of Thunder for the Turbo Duo system. As far as I'm concerned, Lords of Thunder has one of the best soundtracks of any game ever released to date. Those virtuoso heavy metal riffs are impressive in their own right--certainly impressive for a 1993 game, and all the more so when you hear them in the context of Lords of Thunder.

For some strange reason, shooters have always had incredible soundtracks. That's actually a big part of why I like them. Take Gyruss. Though it was released way back in 1983, and is one of the first games I distinctly remember playing a lot at the arcades (I was 6 at the time), what I remember best about Konami's old shooter is its music.

Every 16-bit system, including the NeoGeo, offered a variety of outstanding shooters.

I couldn't possibly mention all of the shooters I've played and enjoyed in this column--maybe in a book. As I've suggested, I've been playing shooters almost as long as I've been alive. Since video game consoles pretty much sucked back in the early '80s--compared to arcades anyway--my wonder years of gaming invariably involved pocketfuls of quarters. I loved games like Gyruss and Sega's Space Harrier. I couldn't get enough of them. They were fast, beautiful to look at, and beautiful to listen to. They were tough, and they were fun like nobody's business.

Damn it all, I never had enough quarters. That's why I had to get good. Back then, being good at a game meant playing longer--a truly fascinating concept unique to arcade gaming. Compare an arcade shooter with a game of billiards. If you're good at Asteroids, you can play it forever. If you're good at billiards, you can sink every ball on the table before the other guy's done chalking up his cue stick. Whee, game over. I went to pool halls to play shooters. I went to supermarkets and convenience stores to play shooters. Even after all these years, my favorite games remain those that are challenging to me. I once measured challenge in millions of points, and I miss those days.

From Vietnam to God-knows-where...the sequel to Ikari Warriors is a real trip.

The archetypal shooter is set in outer space. Not all shooters are, though. Some of my favorites--some of the best--aren't. SNK's Ikari Warriors takes place in what looks an awful lot like Vietnam. You play as a couple of Rambo look-alikes. The sequel, Victory Road, takes place in a fantasy world filled with monsters. You still play as the Rambo look-alikes. You still use machine guns and grenades. Weird. I loved that game. I played it to death in the arcades. I played it to death for the NES even though it was garbage compared to the arcade version. That's how much I loved Victory Road. If the state of California permitted it, you'd best believe I'd walk Victory Road down the isle.

Lords of Thunder is my favorite game for the TurboGrafx/TurboDuo systems.

Lords of Thunder is another fantasy-themed shooter, though it's an otherwise conventional (though exceptionally well executed) side scroller in the vein of such classics as Gradius and its sequel Life Force. The side-scrolling shooter is probably my favorite kind, and it's probably most people's favorite kind considering how many of them were produced relative to other kinds. It got to the point that developers like Konami started to release really abstract shooters like Parodius Da!--literally in parody of other shooters.

Gyruss and its predecessor Tempest are examples of...I don't even know what to call them. Paddle shooters. Swirly shooters. Ikari Warriors, Victory Road, Heavy Barrel, Forgotten Worlds, and others let you swivel to shoot in any direction. You could drop bombs in Xevious. You could scroll the screen in any direction in Time Pilots. You could choose from three cool characters in U.N. Squadron (my favorite: Greg Gates). Thunder Force II switches between top-view and side-scrolling levels. Raiden II has that crazy pink twisty laser. Space Harrier is still the world's greatest third-person shooter (sorry, Max Payne) and the reason I had to have a Sega Master System. I later had to get a Nintendo Entertainment System because of another shooter--Contra. (Actually, Contra doesn't fully qualify as a pure shooter since it lets you jump--pure shooters only let you shoot.) I'll always cherish my Sega Genesis for games like Gaiares and Thunder Force III. And for Herzog Zwei, which is not only a great shooter, but the great grandfather of real-time strategy games. There's incredible variety within the shooter category--all that's in common from one to the next is the fast pacing and the act of blowing stuff up.

Easily my favorite thing about Shenmue was that it let me play this game again.

The SNES had some great shooters like Axelay and Starfox, and while I ultimately preferred the SNES to the Genesis, the Genesis' raw speed made it a better system for shooters. And while we're talking about raw speed, I might as well mention games like Ghost Pilots and Pulstar, which I really enjoyed for SNK's NeoGeo system. Back before SNK and the NeoGeo became synonymous with fighting games, the company was rather famous for its shooters--dating back even before Ikari Warriors to the early '80s in games like Vanguard, which is actually a rather innovative side-scrolling shooter since it let you shoot in any of eight directions. Some years later, Capcom's Section Z let you shoot either forward or backward and managed to be frickin' impossible.

Oh, and here's an obligatory reference to R-Type. I'm pretty sure that was the first shooter to let you hold down the fire button to charge up a powerful shot, rather than having to constantly mash on it. Innovation.

			Do you have fond memories of playing shooters? Yes No

There are far too many other great shooters in existence than I could possibly give credit to here. In keeping with the misty-eyed tone of this column, I wish I could mention them all. There are a number of outstanding ones for the Sega Saturn that were never released in this country. Fortunately we did get Panzer Dragoon, which incidentally has an incredible soundtrack. There are some good shooters for the PlayStation, especially Raiden Project (one of the PlayStation's launch games), an arcade-perfect port of two classic vertical scrollers. Raiden Project is so cool that it gives you the option to tilt your TV over on its side to better emulate the tall and narrow screen of the arcade version. Show me another game that lets you do that.

This column is dedicated to Satan's Hollow and all other shooters I didn't mention.

To the untrained eye, all shooters look alike. Stupid, stupid untrained eye! To me and other shooter fans, they're all uniquely different. Some games don't age well. But shooters remain fun and quite possibly get better as you grow more and more nostalgic for them as they continue to slip deeper into history. They might not look so hot anymore, but they sure still sound good, and they sure still play great.

These days, when you think of shooters, you probably think of games like Halo and Counter-Strike--great games, by all means. These games may be classics in their own right. But when I think of classic shooters, well...you know what games I'm really thinking about.

Note: Special thanks to the Killer List of Video Games for some of the screens above.