Prepare to die. A lot.

June 7, 2010 11:53 PM

Hydorah is a delicious shump inspired by the likes of "Gradius, Castlevania or R-Type, but also from other classics treated worse by the time: Turrican, Enforcer, Space Manbow, Hellfire, Guardian, Hydefos, Armalyte and many others...". Also, "There is a single dificulty level, based on the 80's standards." Translation: try not to cry on your keyboard. [Windows] [via Destructoid]
posted by threetoed (35 comments total)

Shump is apparently short for "Shoot 'em up."
posted by contraption at 11:58 PM on June 7, 2010

Ok, so my favorite NES game growing up was Life Force (which I just found out was called "Salamander" in Japan... ). There was something unique to it that wasn't duplicated in any shooter I've seen since.

I'd say about half of the levels and boss fights in that video look like they were directly lifted from that game. Now, I'm not sure to which extent they're both drawing from a common source, but the similarities are just way too striking to ignore.

Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
posted by heathkit at 12:06 AM on June 8, 2010

Shmup, not shump:

Shoot 'em Up.

Shmup.
posted by barnacles at 12:07 AM on June 8, 2010 [7 favorites]

Well that takes me back.
posted by Artw at 12:08 AM on June 8, 2010

Shmup, not shump:

Shoot 'em Up.

Shmup.

Up and at them!
posted by lumensimus at 12:12 AM on June 8, 2010

Saying 'Shump' over 'shmup' is a bad habit that I can't seem to break, even after some angry dude in an arcade corrected me years ago. Growing up it was always 'shump', and I guess that's just stuck in my brain.
posted by threetoed at 12:16 AM on June 8, 2010

Not Shemp. Never Shemp.
posted by pracowity at 12:45 AM on June 8, 2010

Shump vs shmup is a stupid, pointless nerd argument that completely ignores the fact that both are terrible contractions of an already terrible genre name.

They're shooters. Just shooters. Sometimes they're side-scrolling shooters, sometimes they scroll vertically. But seriously. They're just shooters.

"Beat 'em up" is just as bad.

I am prepared to shmup and/or bmup anyone who argues otherwise.

(This is one of the few pointless nerd arguments I will get into shouting matches about. Fuck emacs vs. vim, et al. This is the one that matters.)
posted by sparkletone at 1:00 AM on June 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

"Gradius, Castlevania or R-Type, but also from other classics treated worse by the time: Turrican, Enforcer, Space Manbow, Hellfire, Guardian, Hydefos, Armalyte"

One of these is not like the others...
posted by pwnguin at 1:13 AM on June 8, 2010 [2 favorites]

Flashing back to watching someone play R-Type for about half an hour then when I had go lasting about 30s
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:07 AM on June 8, 2010

They're shooters. Just shooters. Sometimes they're side-scrolling shooters, sometimes they scroll vertically. But seriously. They're just shooters.

This is a silly argument. Let's all agree to call them Happy Bullet Funtime Simulators.
posted by RokkitNite at 2:33 AM on June 8, 2010 [2 favorites]

Ok, so my favorite NES game growing up was Life Force (which I just found out was called "Salamander" in Japan... ). There was something unique to it that wasn't duplicated in any shooter I've seen since.

Well, it's probably because Salamander/Life Force was a spinoff of Gradius. These guys are pretty obviously paying homage to the Gradius series, with the sharp, pointy ship, as well as the z-pattern movement of ships that drop a power-up orb, as well as the secondary missiles that fall downwards from the ship. It's too obvious of an imitation; it's a homage.
posted by suedehead at 2:41 AM on June 8, 2010

I prefer the term "skeeters" for "skeet shooting" and "Serial Killer Training Programs".
posted by pracowity at 2:51 AM on June 8, 2010

Well, the link seems dead at this point...
posted by delmoi at 3:02 AM on June 8, 2010

And I call them "fly-a-japes"! Diversity is a wonderful thing. But, yeah, either the link is dead or I died and was dumped to an uninteresting GAME OVER screen before my retina even registered that the game had begun.
posted by No-sword at 3:32 AM on June 8, 2010 [2 favorites]

Coral cache of main link
Coral cache of game zipfile
Filefront link to game zipfile

You know, if mankind was under attack from a malevolent entity capable of sending countless attack craft and powerful (yet with a weak point) battleships, yet oddly sending them in waves of limited numbers... and I was mankinds last hope in a lonely starfighter... Then mankind would be screwed!

(spent far too much money in R-Type in the late 80's while listening to Alice Cooper's poison on the juke box... That game and that music are forever linked in my brain)

Oh no, R-Type is downloadable for the Wii.. Damn there goes my life!
posted by nielm at 3:37 AM on June 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

Trailer video, if you're wondering what it's like.
posted by nthdegx at 3:39 AM on June 8, 2010

Space Manbow

He's the man whose name you'd love to touch
But you mustn't touch!
posted by turgid dahlia at 4:34 AM on June 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

(This is one of the few pointless nerd arguments I will get into shouting matches about. Fuck emacs vs. vim, et al. This is the one that matters.)

It's funny how I can have such a strong opinion about words I never use. Both shmup and shump are horrible contractions, and should die a miserable death. Shooters is correct. But even at that, dammit, shmup is less wrong. :-)

I don't have my Windows PC set up right now, so all I could do is look at the trailer, and it does indeed look very 80s-ish. And it got me to thinking about how this was exactly the type of game that all us PC nerds wanted to make, and couldn't, because the hardware was so awful. The arcade machines had all this specialized hardware with sprites and scaling and rotations and automatic collision detection, and all the PC had, even with 'advanced' VGA graphics, was a simple bitmap driven over an incredibly slow bus. ISA was 8Mhz, 16 bit, and on top of that, most video cards were pretty slow at taking writes, so it took a LONG time to send a full frame. There wasn't much horsepower left to run a game when you had to spend so much time writing the pixels to the screen.

That steadily improved over time, and it struck me, watching that trailer, that the hardware in modern PCs has gotten so fast, between the insanely quick CPUs and the superpowered video cards, that you can now write games that good in BASIC. You have to use a fast one, like Blitz Basic, but geeze, what a difference two decades makes.
posted by Malor at 5:13 AM on June 8, 2010 [3 favorites]

I really did read that as "delicious shrimp"... and was hoping for a new species even tastier than what I am used to...

mmmmmmm.....shrimp!
posted by HuronBob at 5:43 AM on June 8, 2010 [2 favorites]

I thought shoot-'em-up/shmup was a retronym that came along after shooters like Wolfenstein and Tomb Raider (i.e., first-person or third-person shooters) were invented. I could definitely be wrong.
posted by box at 5:51 AM on June 8, 2010

box: "I thought shoot-'em-up/shmup was a retronym that came along after shooters like Wolfenstein and Tomb Raider (i.e., first-person or third-person shooters) were invented. I could definitely be wrong."

You are definitely wrong. Shoot-em-up was used long before first-person shooters.
posted by mkb at 6:13 AM on June 8, 2010

Not Extended

A mandatory extension policy in the request is not accepted by the server for this resource.

Apache/2.0.52 (CentOS) Server at www.locomalito.com Port 80
posted by Meatbomb at 6:29 AM on June 8, 2010

Deep Blue. End of story. I think it is actually not possible to pass the first level without cheating.
posted by avocet at 6:52 AM on June 8, 2010

HuronBob: mmmmmmm.....shrimp!

It's "shirmp," dammit.
posted by Western Infidels at 7:56 AM on June 8, 2010 [2 favorites]

That's quite a game; just killed an hour playing it and still haven't beaten level two.

The only thing I'd like to see different about it is how quickly you earn powerups - R-Type spoiled things by giving you uber-cannons up the wazoo; that's what I've come to expect in any shmup.
posted by Hardcore Poser at 8:31 AM on June 8, 2010

I should clarify--I thought that 'shooter' was, years ago, the most common way to refer to shoot-'em-ups/shmups (or, if you'd prefer, that shmups were the most common kind of shooter), but that, after first-person and third-person shooters gained popularity, shoot-'em-up/shmup (shmup especially--did people say 'shmup' in the '80s?) became the more popular term for that particular subset of shooters, while 'shooter,' when used synecdochally, was more likely to refer to FPSs than to shmups. Again, I could be wrong.
posted by box at 8:43 AM on June 8, 2010

They've been Shoot Em Ups to me since at least the 80s.
posted by Artw at 9:21 AM on June 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

Whenever I hear someone say 'shooter', I assume it's more likely that they're talking about Counter-Strike rather than Ikaruga. However, a quick poll of ten random people on my MSN list on what they think the 'shoot em up' genre is called gave me 1 for 'shoot-em-ups', 2 for 'shooters', 1 for 'arcade game', 5 for 'I have no idea', and 1 'fuck off'.

(10:23:27 AM) Cat Hero Dojinshi: You know those old games like Gradius and R-Type where you have a little ship that flys around the screen shooting stuff? what would you call that genre. this is important, it's for an internet discussion
(10:24:12 AM) roddo: jesus christ fuck off with this right now, I'm working.
(10:24:40 AM) Cat Hero Dojinshi: would you say shooter or shoot-em-up
(10:25:04 AM) roddo: don't you have anything better to do?
(10:25:19 AM) Cat Hero Dojinshi: lol

Results are inconclusive.
posted by threetoed at 10:07 AM on June 8, 2010 [4 favorites]

metafilter: this is important, it's for an internet discussion.
posted by juv3nal at 11:01 AM on June 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

"Cat Hero Dojinshi"?
posted by boo_radley at 12:09 PM on June 8, 2010

I call them Side Scroll 'Em Ups!
posted by turgid dahlia at 2:09 PM on June 8, 2010

"Beat 'em up" is just as bad.

So you tell people you are going to be in your room playing beaters all weekend?
posted by BrotherCaine at 10:22 PM on June 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

Cat Hero Dojinshi is an awesome nick.
posted by Malor at 1:07 AM on June 9, 2010

So you tell people you are going to be in your room playing beaters all weekend?

That's pretty crude. "I was straddling my joystick all night" is much more family-friendly. If the game was frustrating and you found yourself shouting at it, tell people that "it made me ejaculate all over the place!"
posted by turgid dahlia at 5:36 AM on June 9, 2010