Shmopera release celebration continues!

Masked Klaus sent in this video of him playing the Xbox Community Game “Beat Hazard” (which we discussed on this week’s podcast) using the Shmopera tune “White Pines” as the soundtrack. The result? Pretty bad ass.

Check it out:

Written by Hilden, this song features Jon Yeske on guitar, Scott Hass on bass, and Phil Haymes doing the solo; in addition to Hilden doing vocals and a bit of guitar at the end, and me playing drums.

You like yourself some shoot-ing-shoot-ing-shooting games? No idea how this event has even hung on this long, but it’s still around and it still wants you to play with it.

Shooting Game Tournament 2009 is a friendly score competition among users of shmups.com. The score validation works like in the hi-score threads. You just play the game on PCB, emulator or any console port and post your score which you don’t need to prove. ANYONE CAN JOIN!

Contestants are broken up into teams by choice or assigned.  Over a hundred people compete in teams from all over the world. There have been full teams from Italy, UK, Sweden, Brazil, Japan, Canada, France, and other countries I’m not thinking of.  People still come out of the woodwork to attend this. It’s an interesting event and one of if not the best thing going for the shmups community. The big changes this year are no voting for the upcoming game and there is no break in-between games. It’ll be six weeks of five games played on mega-illegal-fun MAME. Players submit scores by posting in a designated thread. You can choose to play as much or as little as you want. No need to register with friends. Come with people or come alone. You play your cards and the organizers will sort you out.

Players can sign up by going to this thread, sign in, quote the 2nd post of the thread, fill out the entry form, then post it in the thread. People are around to help out if you don’t understand. Don’t be afraid, child. Compete. No need for skill levels. Everybody of all types welcome you with open arms; some with more gin on their breath than others.

Registration period is now. The shooting begins August 31st.

I do believe this also means Robot Panic turned one year old recently. Congrats to the three deans for not stumbling drunk and accidentally shutting the site down for 365 days. They should make a ceremonial chip for accomplishments like that, like sobriety periods.

Just look at that vertical screen. Perfect for vertical up/down shmups, right? Unfortunately, finding a good shooter on the iPhone hasn’t been easy. An audio-free rRootage came out several months ago, but aside from that the choices have been slim and what has been there hasn’t been very good.

The other day, I decided to scour the App Store for a good shmup; vertical, horizontal, whatever. Much to my surprise, I came across a few that are well worth your attention and, in some cases, actually worth your money. Granted, none of them quite achieve console shmup status, but they’re still good little time-killers.

Let’s have a look…

Hot Field
C2 Matrix
Price: $1.99
Demo Available

Despite the generic title, Hot Field is actually a pretty impressive little shooter reminiscent of games like Soldier Blade or Batsugun. Your ship’s guns are set to auto-fire and you use your finger to move the ship around the screen. Tapping with another finger will activate your laser, which helps to clear out waves of enemies. Double tapping will cause your ship to enter “Bullet Time”, which is exactly what it sounds like: enemies and their bullets will slow down.

Bullet Time sounds good in theory, but the one problem I had with Hot Field was that it’s a bit sluggish and slow to begin with. Your ship crawls along at a snail’s pace, and the bullets don’t come at you very quickly. Your ship also has a life meter, meaning no one-hit deaths. These factors wind up making the game feel a bit cumbersome as the levels seem to take an eternity to get through. Nevertheless, at $2 I’d still give it a recommendation. Hot Field still manages to be enjoyable and fun to pull up in a pinch.

To check out some videos, hit the official site here
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I got some epilogues to shmuppreciation month. One is this dohicky. There’s like, six sites now that break down shooting game news since Danmaku-gata, the once great king of the shooting news blog took a nosedive. Much of that news, like a NeoGAF thread, gets buried in whining and paragraphs about scanlines. Other chunks of the new shit passes by much of Kotaku’s nets. Furthermore, a lot of old great references need a good ‘ol fashioned bookmarking. All people really need are references and name drops in a genre like this. That’s what this here news feed’ll give you. There’s a few people workin’ the post button on that scene: Megalixir, Postman, GaijinPunch, and Meself. Follow the cause if you’d like, RSS dat shiz, or just run though those other forum discussions manually. You got choices, kids.

Gotta plug some sites since they’re good guys: Shoot-the-Core ‘n Gamengai