Even Scramble, the (arguable) forefather of all traditional multi-level side-scrolling shmups, is now officially part of the Gradius series according to Konami. Nemises? To be sure, the Gradius series has one of the most title-shifting and confusing pedigrees in gaming history, marked by releases, name-changes, pseudo-sequels, spin-offs, conversions, and ports spanning two decades from arcades to Japanese home computers to the PS2. Ever heard of Life Force? Salamander? In actuality, all of these games are Gradiuses! Or Nemesises. In other parts of the world they were Nemesis. To put it more truthfully, those games were Gradius to some of us. That company was Konami, and those games were Gradius. A player with a single quarter had a chance as great as one with a handful. You see, before you could subsist solely on your pocket of quarters, ensuring that with enough money you would obtain certain and swift domination of whatever arcade game you happened to be standing in front of, a particular company set out to make you feel like you were fighting an enemy with finesse instead of brute force. Classically referred to thusly, but colloquially over the last few years as "shmups" (short for shoot 'em ups), these games are products almost wholly of a bygone era: the one when "arcade-perfect" actually meant something in a home conversion and you could measure the amount of entertainment you'd have at the mall by the size of the lump of quarters in your pocket.īut while the genre's been recently undergoing a somewhat innocuous revival at the hands of the hardcore in shmups lovingly placed into the shooter subsection called "bullet-hell" (a classification sure to be dealt with in a future column), shooters of the old-style have gone almost completely by the wayside. I n our age of fancy 3Ds and 4Ds there's a kind of game not many people seem to pay much attention to anymore: shooters.