The new stars of the Shooting Game Historica, volume three, are from the following games:
- Raiden
- In the Hunt
- Soukyuu Gurentai/Terra Diver
- Wolf Fang
- Granada

I'll take one of those Raiden ships and the In The Hunt submarine to go, please. Here's to hoping that Capcom signs on for Shooting Game Historica fun and brings us some Side Arms and Forgotten Worlds capsule toy joy.

Gashapon Shooting Game History volume 3 [Shoot The Core via GameSetWatch]

And if shooter creation fame isn't enough to light a fire under you, Kongregate is handing out cold hard cash to the best shootorials-based user created game. Play Shoot! if you want — the fun lasts many, many seconds — but then read on to learn about Flash game development with handy illustrated examples. We're hard at work on our own "Dude Huge" shmup, currently known as Cliffydius. Watch for it!

Kongregate Labs [Kongregate]

According to the company's official blog, Deathsmiles for the 360 is going to see a serious resolution update in a "rearranged" mode, the first pics of which were released just prior to Tokyo Game Show. Now let's all chant "Please be region free. Please be region free."

今週は色々ありすぎて… [Cave Blog via Siliconera]

Having just (finally!) picked up series one of Yujin's mini-toys, we couldn't be more pleased to see Fantasy Zone's Opa Opa rendered in small amounts of plastic. And that M.U.S.H.A. from Musha Aleste? A nice surprise. Wave goodbye to another $25, over-consumers!

Shooting Game Historica Vol. 2 [NCSX]

Shooting Game Historica Vol. 2 [NCSX]

Nintendo has announced this weeks VC games, which should be live on the Wii Shop Channel as you read this. We get a dungeon crawler in the TurboGrafx game Dungeon Explorer and two space shooters, the horizontal Gradius and the vertical Soldier Blade.

Gradius (NES): One of the original shmups, the Gradius series is know for its power meter, shooting the core, Moai statues as enemies, and the Vic Viper space ship. If I didn't already own the original I would deem this well worth the $5 asking price.

Soldier Blade (TurboGrafx16) : Soldier Blade is a vertical scrolling shooter from Hudson Soft's Caravan Shooting series, which includes classics like Star Soldier and Blazing Lazers. Yours for $6.

Dungeon Explorer (TurboGrafx16) : It's a top down multiplayer dungeon crawl in the Gauntlet vein, with character classes like fighter, thief, warlock, and elf...which always confused me. Is elf a job? A race? Can you be an elven thief? Why or why not? Explore these mysteries and more for $6.

Not a bad crop of games, especially if you're a Dreamcast gamer looking to explore your roots between import shmup releases. Michael Fahey

WII-KLY UPDATE: THREE NEW CLASSIC GAMES ANNOUNCED FOR WII SHOP CHANNEL

Jan. 8, 2007

Today Nintendo adds three new classic games to the popular Wii video game system's Wii Shop Channel. The games go live at 9 a.m. Pacific time. Nintendo adds new games to the channel every Monday. Wii owners with a high-speed Internet connection can redeem Wii Points to download the games. Wii Points can be purchased in the Wii Shop Channel or at retail outlets. This week's new games are:

Gradius (NES, 1-2 players, 500 Wii Points): Across the galaxy, there exists a distant planet known as Gradius. Gradius' peaceful existence has been brought to an end by an intense space invasion by a race known as the Bacterion. To save the planet, the hyperspace fighter Vic Viper has been deployed to fight the Bacterion invasion. Players pilot the Vic Viper through seven stages, shooting and dodging through deadly obstacles, while using various power-ups, including missiles, lasers, options and shields. The Vic Viper's target is the enemy fortress, Xaerous. The only way to end the war is to plunge deep through the enemy forces and destroy its very core.

Soldier Blade (TurboGrafx16, 1 player, 600 Wii Points): A new shooter in the "Star Soldier" tradition. Players play as an SIA (Special Interception Airforce) pilot flying the heavy assault fighter "Soldier Blade." Players face the Zeograd invasion force with weapon attacks that change each time they grab a power-up item. Players can unleash three different kinds of attack depending on the color of the power-up item. New features, such as the "Gunbody" option for avoiding enemy attacks and the "Burst Out" system (which has a different effect depending on the power-up level), add a strategic element that requires players to make snap decisions about which items to grab and when to use special attacks. Awesome boss battles await players at the end of each operation. Playing in "CHALLENGE" mode requires players to try to get as many points as they can in a limited amount of time.

Dungeon Explorer (TurboGrafx16, 1-5 players, 600 Wii Points): Dungeon Explorer is a multiplayer action/role-playing game where up to five players can play at the same time. The story takes place in underground dungeons. Players can choose from eight different character types: Fighter, Thief, Warlock, Witch, Bishop, Elf, Bard or Knome. Depending on the character, the types of magic, attack strength and movement will all vary. To survive, players most know all about their enemies' weaknesses. Players also must know about the special attributes of each magic spell and use them to their greatest advantage. In team-play games, working together is the key to victory. Any combination of Wii Remotes and Nintendo GameCube controllers can be used in multiplayer games.

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Over at Destructoid, a site which apparently functions as a cross-posting repository for all of our favorite amateur game bloggers, they've posted a great little overview of what might possibly be the most homoerotic game series of all time: Cho Aniki.

Cho Aniki is probably best known for being among the most arguably homosexual video games ever created, or to be objective it stars more muscular men in thongs than any other shooter ever. It's one part Hard Gay and one part Sexy Parodius whose most prominant release was on the PC Engine, which means massive sprites and great music... and lots of misplaced muscle groups. But alas, this game remains rare and weird as it was only played by a) The Japanese and b) a few amused teenage guys with part time jobs in the 90's.

Perhaps most alarming to me is that I recognize many of these scenes from my own homo-oneiric fantasies. For example, that giant Japanese hedonist puncturing a metallic sphere with a muscle-man erection? An LSD-inspired hallucination I had at a party, circa 1999, after Crecente passed-out next to me and slammed his head face-first into my crotch. Crecente, with the shaved head he sported at the time, took the place of the muscle man. Florian Eckhardt

Weird Game Wednesday: Cho Aniki series [Destructoid]

I love SHMUPs just as much as I utterly suck at them. I've never been quite sure exactly what kind of Cylon you need to be to master some of the more manic Japanese bullet hells, but I still find myself pumping a million dollars worth of virtual quarters in MAME trying to transmogrify myself into one.

So, while I cheerfully admit not to having fully watched it yet, I thought I'd better point your attention to this fantastic French documentary of SHMUPs from cheese-sniffing channel "gameone." A manic fan translated it and inserted subtitles, which you can see if you use a player like VLC. Florian Eckhardt

shmup.avi translation (via TIGSource)

It's impossible to top the ambidextrous Ikaruga video we posted last week; that guy instantly made every other SHMUP video irrelevant until someone figures out a way to beat one with his crotch.

But this more boring Ikaruga vid of a SHMUP master beating it on hard sort of emphasizes something that I've noticed before: although SHMUPs tend to be brutally difficult, if not impossible to beat for the average gamer, the masters make it so easy as they just park their ships in that one pixel window that allows them to destroy the next wave without dying.

I love SHMUPs almost theoretically: the freneticism gets my heart raging like no other type of game, even as I find myself hurtling controllers around and screaming at the top of my lungs in frustration at some arbitrary design cheapness. Playing the average SHMUP is like dating some extraordinarily cruel, obnoxious woman whom you are nevertheless attracted to for those very qualities: you can't figure out if you love or hate her, and have no idea whether you want to caress her or just run before she beats the crap out of you. Florian Eckhardt

What. The. Hell. ?. I'll admit to being somewhat of a noob to the bullet hell-style shooter category, but this is just insane. Ten minutes of eye-drying, bullet-dodging expertise from the doujin game Imperishable Night, 8th in the Toho series of for-the-hardcore-only Windows shmups.

Interested masochists can get the demo at the official site or the English fan site. Michael McWhertor

Thanks for the heads up, Alan!

Another reason to thank God for making you a lefty and that Catholic nun for calling you Satanic until you turned ambidextrous. No one should be good at SHMUPs. FLORIAN ECKHARDT