When I was a teenager one of my favorite types of games were space shooters of the side or top-down variety. There were tons of them particularly on the Sega Genesis, which at one point in time was the only system that I had. I think they made so many of them because of the fact that those machines, even though powerful given the time period. weren't really capable of much else. Almost any time that they tried to do anything 3D, it was just more stupid than it was fun. There were some exceptions like Starfox but we were still many years away from 3D anything, let alone shooters, at that point in time.
I became quite good at many shooters including R-Type, Thunder Force 2 and 3, and Gradius just to name a few.
In the 2000's shooters kind of fell out of favor as systems became more powerful and I hadn't really heard much about them until I was introduced to a new type of shooter called "bullet hell." I was initially excited to see that the shooter genre appears to be making a comeback, but it was only a little bit into one of the more popular ones before I had to completely give up on this. I just don't have the skills necessary to play it.
I was recommended a game called Ikaruga by a friend who is considerably more hardcore than I am when it comes to gaming. I have known this guy for 30 years so I just presumed he was telling the truth. I think he WAS telling the truth but also messing with me a bit because this friggin game is TOUGH.
It's a top-down shooter that has an old school feel to it and this appealed to me immensely. I have played games in the past where you were meant to dodge all sorts of stuff flying at you in the past, this is just the norm as far as these games are concerned. I was not at all prepared for how crazy this game was though because after the introductory level, they really throw the kitchen sink at you.
There are certain parts of the game and eventually basically all of it, where you aren't actually meant to be able to dodge all the shots that are headed your way. Instead, you are supposed to change the tuning of your ship so that either the red or the white shots don't cause any damage. This sounds simple enough right, well it isn't. sometimes the red bullets are intermingled with the white and you have to decide in a flash which tuning you are going to use for your ship. Choose incorrectly and you can only take a little bit of damage before you are blown up.
Thankfully, getting killed doesn't take you all the way down to pew pew pea shooter, but it does step down your potential damage output.
To make matters even more difficult there are portions of the game where there are environmental dangers such as walls and mountains as well as other ships that are flying towards you. The environmental hazards pay no attention to your tuning and the larger ships it doesn't matter either. Thankfully, collisions with the smaller ships provided you are tuned correctly, won't cause any damage and they can actually upgrade your ship.
to get an idea about how insane this game is have a look at this 3 minute video.
While I admire people that have the reflexes to do something like this I am not one of those people, not by a long shot. So I didn't make it very far into Ikaruga before I turned it off forever and then berated my friend a little bit. He chuckled on the phone and offered to pay for the game for me. It was only $5 so I declined.
If you seriously have amazing reflexes and nerves of steel it is my understanding that Ikaruga is considered a great game. For me, this is difficult to the point of not being fun at all :)