When I say shooters I am probably using the terminology incorrectly but back in the day this was one of my favorite type of games. I think today they are a bit too simplistic for modern systems but I really enjoyed them way back when and due to the limitations that existed with the 8 and 16 bit systems, a lot of the games featured spaceships or some sort of flying something or other as well as an army of enemies and pretty wild bosses.
I have tried to get involved with some modern-day shooters but they all end up being bullet-hell games and this doesn't really appeal to me at all. Here are some of my favorite classic games that consumed a lot of my childhood time.
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Like most of the shooters from the early 90's, Thunder Force 3 was on the Sega Genesis. It seems as though that was one of the only things that the Genesis was doing better than Nintendo was and to be honest with you I can't think of a single shooter on the SNES even though I am sure they had some.
Thunder Force 3 was one of those games that seemed really tough when you first started playing but then by repetition you became really good at it. During a couple of playthroughs I was able to complete the entire game without losing a single life. TF3 was different than other shooters in that you could cycle through all of your available weapon types to fit the need of a particular situation. If you got hit, you would lose only that one type of weapon and have to figure out how to carry on with the others.
It was a lot of fun and had a bangin' soundtrack as well.
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I don't think I actually need to tell anyone who was around in the 90's what this game actually is. The picture that I featured above was pretty synonymous with the game called R-Type. It was IMO considerably more difficult than other shooters and detaching your little pod to put on a particular side of your ship was extremely important to survival because it was immune to damage for the most part.
This was one of the few games that actually ended up ported to the TG-16, which I thought was one of the most underappreciated consoles that has ever been made. I'm not sure if I ever completed this hella difficult game, but I know my super gamer buddies did.
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Gaiares is probably a lot less well-known than the others and I don't think it sold very well. Just like Thunder Force, this game seemed difficult to the point of being damn-near impossible at first glance and play but as you became more familiar with the weapon types and enemy patterns you got into a grove that was impressive to the casual onlooker.
I remember getting a lot better at this to the point where I could go through nearly the entire game and burn my eyes out managing to not take many hits at all.
The thing that made this game so special was that even though we were dealing with 16 bit graphics, it seemed a bit more "crisp" than other games and the boss design was just really wonderfully done.
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It is from this game that one of my favorite boss battles of all time comes from. I always called him "Death" although the game likely had another name for him. The music during this battle was, like the rest of the game, absolutely awesome and there was a tension created that no other game at the time could match IMO.
The creator of that video dispatches the boss a lot faster than I could but the strategy was always the same. You'll notice how the player lingers at the middle of the screen because you never really knew which side of the screen Death was going to warp to and they would try to trick you with the graphics. If you were sitting in his way when his materialized it was insta-death for you!
If you were around to play any of these games or even some other shoot-em-ups, i'd love to discuss your experience in the comments!