![]() ![]() Basically, it's the future and you're civilization's last hope. The plot of Ikaruga is, for all intents and purposes, the same as the plot of every other space shooter ever made. Yet even those who aren't particular fans of space shooters would undoubtedly appreciate a lot of what Ikaruga has to offer. If you have, then the game's classical design and its high level of difficulty will also happen to be two of the things you'll invariably like best about it. It follows many of the genre's 20-year-old conventions, and you'll find it very challenging even if you've been playing games of this sort all your life. ![]() That's perhaps not as absurd of an idea as it might seem, since Ikaruga is truly a shooter fan's shooter. It's almost as if Treasure, Ikaruga's distinguished developer, is deliberately trying to limit its audience to a core group of enthusiasts. For that matter, neither will the recently released home version of the game, which is available only in Japan and for the Dreamcast system (though a GameCube version was also recently announced). Like many space shooters, Ikaruga was first released in arcades, though it never saw the light of day in this country. Ikaruga is the last great game for the Dreamcast. But along comes Ikaruga, a traditional space shooter with an innovative twist and some undeniably stylish production values, to single-handedly prove that games like this are still as enjoyable as ever. Shooters also tended to be very short, even by yesteryear's standards. The genre seems long dead now, though, since the intuitive dodge-and-shoot mechanics of classic space shooters seem overly simplistic compared with the complex 3D games of today. Invariably, arcade shooters were designed to suck up your hard-earned quarters as well as to let you have some fun taking on evil aliens. After all, these games were all about testing your skills and reflexes to the limits and also about making you feel pretty special about yourself what with being humanity's last, best hope against huge alien fleets and all. ![]() This genre of gaming was a large part of what made video arcades so popular in the '80s and into the '90s, and for a while, the shooter epitomized gaming in general. Back before the term "shooter" was used to refer to games like Doom, Medal of Honor, and Halo, it referred to games like Xevious, Life Force, and Raiden. ![]()
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