Beating bosses is about destroying them part by part, progressively disabling their guns, limbs or even their movement. Beating bosses is not just about reducing their hit points to 0. Boss fights have always been huge highlights for me, and among boss fights the shmup ones are definitely my favorite. The terrain is also highly destroyable, so spamming the shoot button is encouraged to destroy buildings and find score tokens. This tells you that they are dying, and also doubles as an urgency notification that you should finish off the enemy soon (for your own safety). As enemy ships take damage, they start glowing increasingly red. What I love the most about the arcade shooters is how perceivable the enemy damage is. The enemy patterns have their openings, but without previous knowledge you will probably die. The best phrase I can use to describe the difficulty is “predictably unfair”. The enemy patterns also start simple, but end up being very fast and hard to react to (and much harder to dodge due to your slow ship speed). Power-ups are lost on death and might take a while to get back. Unlike modern shmups, your hitbox is much bigger and your move speed much slower. To summarize, the game is designed to kill you and get you to spend more coins. I don’t necessarily mean this as a positive, because we have to judge it in the context of arcades. You can even limit the number of continues if you are looking for a much greater challenge or even attempt 1 credit clears. You can change things like the game difficulty, the filters, set wide-screen, set a background, box the screen, number of points before you gain an extra life (extend), reset or continue when you left off from game overs, etc. I gotta admit that it is very highly customizable. While inside the game you can also customize a bunch of arcade setting. From the get go you are presented with a menu which lets you play as either the Japanese or American release, play caravan or high-score mode. If you are unfamiliar with the ACA Neogeo series, then you should know that you can tweak a bunch of settings. While the controls might seem simple, they do make for an experience that is easy to pick up. You only have 2 buttons: shooting and bombing. Aero Fighters 2 plays as a vertical shmup. There isn’t much to say about the gameplay. The one thing I remembered the most is the dolphin pilot and the shooting star ninja. I didn’t play the arcade version, but I did spend a lot of time playing the SNES version. So let’s see which is the first game in the list: ACA NEOGEO Aero Fighters IIĪmong the Arcade releases, this is the one I remember playing first when I was young. With the rise in popularity of the switch and the revival of classic arcade shooters, I figured it would be fair to be the one to play them all and compile a ranking! Of course, this ranking will take a lot of time, as I will be tackling each game individually with a mini review. This means I love shmups like Lords of Thunder, but also games like Ace Combat. That means 2 things: I love shmup games even if they don’t have aircrafts, and I still love aircraft games even if they are not traditional shmups. My love for aircrafts evolved over time in a love for the shmup genre. From arcade shooters to console games, I was always playing them no matter what. Aircraft have always been amazing to me, so whenever I was young I wasted no time playing any sidescrolling shmup that I could get my hands on. I am a big shoot ’em up fan (or shmup for short).
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