A cool little 3rd person perspective Tube shooter developed by Tetragon and published by Virgin in 1996-1997 on the original Playstation. The only platform it came out on.

Silpheed is the name of the ship you fly in this 1988 game released on MS-DOS, it was originally developed on the PC8801 & FM-7 computer systems and later ported to MS-DOS, Apple II and the Tandy Coco (!!!). I originally encountered this game first on the SegaCD/MegaCD but that was a remake of the original shown here.

A great sequel called Silpheed: The Lost Planet came out for the PlayStation 2 and I just happen to own that game as well so another video with that will probably pop-up eventually.

There's also a Silpheed game on the xbox 360 which is called ' Project Sylpheed' .

A great game from the Gradius series, this is the Gofer Gradius II game on cd-rom running on the Duo-R/PCEngine console. There's also a port of this game on the MSX systems. One of the amazing features of this game is the giant suns and firebird on the first level. Hard as nails!

In 1985 Konami released a great game called Gradius (also known as Nemesis) in the arcades but also on home computer systems and consoles. It was heavily inspired after Scramble which was released in 1981 and is considered the precursor or start of the series. In this video I play all the MSX cartridges that I own of the series. There are more games for the MSX though and a whole plethora on other systems as well. One of my favorite shmup series.

Written by the now gone Bizarre Creations, Geometry Wars originally could be found on the original Xbox was a mini game within the Project Gotham Racing 2. This game is the sequel to it and it was the most downloaded game on Xbox Live on the 360. For me this game was the must have game for the Xbox 360. Check it out.

The Sequel Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 was released on the 360 but also on the Wii and the DS. There's also a version out on iOS.

MIND YOU: This clip has some loud noises so you'd better not use headphones while watching this. Sound quality is not the best as the microphone had some issues that couldn't be fixed in post.

It's been a few years since the announcement of the development of Sturmwind: Windstärke 12 by Duranik, and on Wednesday April 24th, 2013 the final game is scheduled to be released. There will be two different SKUs for the game- a limited edition version with plush Kraken boss and upgraded packaging for $129.90[USD] and a regular release jewel case version for a much more reasonable $39.90[USD] with free shipping included.

Back in early 1984, when I was first exposed to the Commodore 64, one of the games that I had a chance to play a fair bit of was Blue Max by Synapse Software (SynSoft in the UK). In the game, you take on the role of a hot-shot World War I biplane pilot by the name of Max Chatsworth who is known affectionately to his friends as Blue Max.

The game is essentially a 3/4 perspective vertical shooter similar to Zaxxon in presentation. You have at your disposal a machine gun with unlimited ammo as well as a finite number of bombs which you can use to take out buildings, tanks, bridges, roads and boats. Overall control of the plane is very responsive, although (as with Zaxxon) keeping your altitude straight can be rather tricky. The shadow cast by your plane helps a lot in determining your horizontal location on the level (for bombing purposes) but you need to match your altitude to that of the enemy planes in order to shoot them down. You also need to mind your altitude to do strafing as well as estimate the time for a dropped bomb to reach its target.

In this video I take a look at the Japanese Playstation disc with the game Zanac X which is becoming more rare by the day :( Go check it out.

Zanac is a very cool series of Shmup games created by Compile. The game originated on the MSX and NES but also found its way on many other systems like this Playstation One version. It's very similar to other Compile shmups like PowerStrike, Aleste, Super Aleste, M.U.S.H.A. All these games feature a similar weapons system.

Other good Compile shmups are Blazing Lazers on the TG16 and Gunnac on the Nes.

Space Manbow by Konami was a great shmup that shared a lot of family resemblances to Gradius and Parodius. It featured a very similar weapons system. A great game and a must-have for any MSX2 owner who likes shmups.
Sadly this game never was released outside of Japan.

It did come out on cell-phones/mobile phones in Japan in 2006 and it came out on the Wii's Virtual Console in 2009, sadly also Japan only.

The game only comes on cartridge and it features a special SCC soundchip that greatly enhances the sound capabilities of the MSX2 platform. A great looking, sounding and playing game.

Galaga Destination Earth is a turn of the century incarnation of the well known Galaga game. But it has a twist to the gameplay making it into a bit of an all compassing shmup. It shares similarities with Gyrus, Gradius and even Panzer Dragoon Ortha. Go check it out.