SHMUP innovations you'd like to see more games use.

[Captain Wrong]

For starters, I liked the "encroachment meter" idea in RayCrisis. If you haven't played it, as you shot more enemies, your emcroachment went down. If you missed it went up. The thing is, if it got too high, you started seeing less and less baddies making it more challenging to get back down. The levels also got shorter if you got it too high. From what I understand, if you reached 100% the final boss poped up and you got the dreaded bad ending!

Pretty neat idea because it really forces you to shoot everything in sight. And it's a pretty cool game, anyway.

[Ascending Wordsmith]

Multi-player SHMUPS are something I'd like to see. With all these consoles built with four controller ports, a 3-4 player SHMUP would be excellent. To avoid confusion, the piloted crafts would be color ID'ed.

On a different note, I forgot which Raiden game it was, but shooting enemies resulted in pieces of the falling from them. When the enemie was destroyed, the debris would in fact fall to the earth below and make an impact on the ground. More shooters need this kind of interaction with the background.

[bargora]

Giga Wing 2 = 4 players

[NvrMore]

The "Minmay cannon" from Macross: Scrambled Valkyrie was a interesting addition to the game. Basicall if you didn't shoot for a few seconds a glowing shield would grow and surround your ship, then if you touched an enemy (although not all were suseptible) you would convert it to your side and it would fight along side you.

It was a real nice touch and really added to the game as you had to choose your assistant wisely and successfully capture them. The variety of capabilities that you could get to assist you added an element of strategy to each level and it was just cool having one of the enemies own on your side.

[Anonymous]

I really liked Einhander's divergent bonus levels. If you shot a certain enemy or so many enemies, or even a certain backdrop point (eg in the first level if you shoot all of the neon signs off of buildings that you are flying past), you would go to an alternate part of the level. The best part about this game is that the levels had very palpable story elements to it, not just "the atmosphere level" and "the underground water level" (although those were in there). And if you went into a bonus level you would get a little more background on the storyline. This really is a great game all around. I shoul've just made a new topic vilifying this game.

[ROBOTRON]

Radiant Silvergun....

Shooter Bliss...

Huge Bosses, mid bosses, multi angled, large levels, incredible sound and graphics, a triumph for the Sega Saturn....one of my favorite shmups!