If I had to name a genre to describe in a single word what it means to play an arcade game, I would have no doubts. The term "Shooter" says a lot about the frenetic chaos-filled atmospheres you have to face in order to survive and complete the mission.
The "shoot'em up", as they are universally called, are all those video games that involve a strong component of manual reactivity, hand-eye coordination, which is at the basis of every respectable arcade game, and here becomes a predominant element.
Coining the term Shooter to refer to this genre was a happy and apt choice: the screen of shoot'em ups, in fact, features the presence on screen of a myriad of laser beams, plasma bullets, heat-seeking missiles, bombs, grenades, and anything else that stimulates the fertile minds of programmers!
Di solito, a shoot'em up allows us to use as an avatar a spaceship, or a hero (human, android, or creatures impossible to define by our standards) who moves on a plane generally with side-scrolling, vertical, or isometric movement, fighting against hordes upon hordes of enemies whose only objective and mantra is to destroy us, by every possible means.
Prendiamo ad esempio Galaga, produced by Namco, a 1981 classic where space becomes a territory to be conquered by insectoid-shaped aliens, ready to sacrifice themselves in kamikaze attacks driven by a deliberately suicidal pattern, all in order to defeat us. Shoot'em up then means Shooter? Not exactly.
Lo shoot'em up could be defined as the leading subgenre in a complex network of variants united by the mass destruction of every enemy present on the screen. There are various types of shooters, but personally I prefer to divide them into two macro-categories, especially when we are talking about arcades and not modern video games (where further analysis would be needed, which is not our concern at the moment): first-person shooters and those that are not.
It might seem like a superficial distinction, but for me it is anything but: video games like Doom and Wolfenstein, for example, have very different technical and gameplay characteristics from R-Type or Konami’s frustrating, but exceptional, Gyruss.
The first-person perspective radically changes the approach to the levels and to the very concept of the video game. Shoot ’em ups, as we understand them, instead sacrifice the immersion offered by the first-person view in order to step on the accelerator of adrenaline and the chaos typical of the hail of bullets that we must avoid so as not to run into the dreaded game over.
Shoot'em ups are much loved by old-school hardcore gamers, the kind who, just to score one more point in the final tally, perform impossible maneuvers at the risk of breaking their wrist, to put it plainly: another important feature that sets them apart from all other genres is therefore the ability to earn a score at the end of the gaming session, an element that, over time, has come to be missing from most video game productions, until today, where it has almost completely disappeared.
Personally, I believe that it is a shame, because if there is an essential component in the video game as it was conceived, it is the possibility of testing oneself and improving more with each game, taking advantage of the learning curve that the programmers have designed for the player: as always, what really matters is challenging the toughest opponent of all: oneself.
