The Raiden series carries a legacy of remarkably solid, well-designed shooters that never fail to impress, yet the individual entries never seem to make it into shooter fans’ Top 10 lists. DonPachi is pure bullet hell; Ikaruga, with its polarity-shifting gameplay, draws much praise; Mars Matrix‘ mosquito system turns the enemies’ guns on back on [...]

When it’s not suffering horrible hardware maladies, the Xbox 360 can be a special thing sometimes. It has some decent exclusives, a robust online matchmaking service and the Xbox Live Arcade where one can download arcadey games of the past and present – Metal Slug 3, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game and Ikaruga [...]

Virtual Vox Pop is a weekly open mic in which we ask you, the reader, to sound off on a particular topic. This week, it’s space shooters. Like the mighty and noble Brachiosaurus (at least that’s how I imagined the beast after watching Jurassic Park), the space shooter once ruled the landscape with a quiet [...]