Number 7.

Shoot1Up (XBLA Indie Games)

Every once in a while , you come across something that is a very pleasant surprise. One of the nicest surprises of A Game A Day so far has been Shoot1Up, which cost me all of 80 Microsoft Points (60-odd pence) when I first bought and played it at the end of February 2010.

Shoot1Up is probably the simplest game in my top 10, so there's maybe not much I can say about it that I didn't say three months ago. It's a terrific piece of arcade fun, and although it's not tremendously difficult, the real fun lies in getting a high score. And that, my friends, is the essence of arcade gaming, and something I still love to play for after 30 years.


That's the stuff. Massive laser death all round.

I've played it a bit more lately, and I seem to have missed a couple of things in my initial euphoria. The first thing I missed was the Score Trek mode. This, as you might suspect, is a score attack mode, but you only get one ship to make it through as much of the game as usual. It's quite a clever way to incorporate a score attack mode into the game.


That fat purple thing is an end-level boss. It's huuuuuuuge!

Something else I missed, or at least I think I missed, concerns the scoring system. When you shoot anything, the score you receive appears in a box in big numbers on the screen. Naturally, I presumed these scores were just added to your total. But it appears, I think, that you have to collect them to add them to your score. That's pretty novel for a shooter, and adds another element of risk/reward to the game.

Shoot1Up seems to be doing very nicely on XBLA's Indie Games store. It's certainly planted itself in the Top Rated games section, and rightly so. It's a game that I expect to be playing for a long time yet, even if it's just to pick up and play for fifteen minutes. It's easily one of my ten most enjoyed games from the blog.

Shoot1Up (XBox 360 Indie Games)

80 points.

80 Microsoft points.

How much is that, anyway? If you buy points from XBox.com, that's 68 pence. Let's make it 70. Now let's convert it into the currency of the arcades... seven tens.

If Shoot1Up had been in the arcades when they were in their heyday, and if you could have got past the iffy name, you would have easily spent seven tens on it, and probably a fair bit more.



Shoot1Up is like a cross between TacScan, Terra Cresta and... oh, I don't know. Something else beginning with 'T'.  Truxton. That'll do. Something with a lot of bullets. You start the game with a fleet, nay, a phalanx of fighter planes. As you'd expect, alien hordes are in need of dispatching, and your boys are the ones given the task.

Here's the game mechanic. You start with a small fleet of ships. Holding the A button fires a stream of bullets. The trigger buttons will expand or contract your fleet of ships. If you contract, the ships fly "on top" of each other, so they only take up as much room as one ship. As a result, you only unleash a small stream of bullets. It also makes it easier to dodge enemy bullets and ships... but as a consequence, your scoring is reduced.



If, however, you expand the formation, then your ships' firepower links up to produce an awesome blast of laser death, far more destructive than when they're contracted. And as this is a riskier tactic and you're more prone to losing ships, you score more heavily.

You can't just stay expanded, though... at times it will be necessary to narrow your field just to stay alive. If you lose all your ships, it's game over. Luckily, though, you can obtain additional ships quite regularly, and they're instantly added to your fleet on the screen. Nothing is kept in reserve... it's all out, all of the time. The most ships I've had at a time is 18, but I think the maximum available is 30. Occasionally you can also pick up a Ghost, which puts a mirror of your fleet on screen for a limited time, for twice as much damage potential.



With only six levels, it's not hard to get to the end, although those six levels are bolstered by a choice of routes as you go. And although the graphics look charmingly old-school, the backgrounds repeat a bit too much, which is a wee bit of a shame but nowhere near a problem. I also hear talk of a problem where using the shield attack gives you an unbalanced multiplier, resulting in massively over-inflated scores. I wouldn't know, I've never used shield attack!

Even with those "issues", there's no way you can say this isn't worth the money, if you're an old-school arcade shmup fan. In fact, I'd happily pay more. I've played it a few times now, giving myself the good old claw hand from playing it a bit too intensely. And I certainly intend to go back to improve my score. Shoot1Up may not be as subtle as the likes of Leave Home, but it's a hell of a good time for your seven tens.