Shoot ‘em ups (colloquially referred to as ’shmups’) are a lot the same: you have a vehicle of some kind (usually one that flies) that’s extremely maneuverable yet extremely fragile. You have to take this vehicle up against a ludicrous amount of enemies, and use your extreme maneuverability to pierce their defenses and kill them all. This typically requires you to have pinpoint reflexes, extremely quick reflexes, and a bit of memorization of the enemies’ attacks.
ChoRenSha 68K is a throwback to some of the classic shooters. There’s no story (that I know of), just your ship flying through space shooting and trying to kill lots of enemy ships. And it’s hard. Real hard.
This game was too hard for me, but I’m admittedly a wimp at shooting games like this. The main reason I picked it up was that it was free to download, free to play, and not half bad to boot. An odd combination, really. This game looks almost professional quality, which is quite impressive for a game that takes up less than 2MB of hard drive space. You can download it and give it a try here.
[...] turns out that Axelay is a shoot-em-up. So you have to take your obscenely expensive and almost comically fragile ship up against wave [...]