Did we play co-op this weekend?

I was over at my colleague and I got to play PS3 for the first time. In fact, I haven't played playstation for at least 10 years. Tennis is always fun.

My colleague doesn't like shmups at all, I actually don't know what he likes... I had intended to visit another friend to play some retro games Sunday, but it turned out to be too long with train. A bit depressing as I had looked forward to it. Last time we met we played Twinbee, and I must say I enjoy that as a two player game. We started with twinbee on the famicom, which may actually be more difficult two player because you keep bumping into each other.
Then we went on to twinbee on the Saturn and I don't quite know what happens in those more modern shmups. It seems to me that the old shmups were more about strategy, but modern ones are interesting too, in their own way.



This is Twinbee for Famicom. You need to take the bells when they have the right color. Blue is speed-up for example.

In the old shmups you really need to get the right powerups and not lose them, but modern shmups is just about raw fire power. I wonder if they were able to improve the genre much in the last 10 years. There were a couple of top quality shmups for the Saturn and the Dreamcast such as Ikaruga and Radiant Silvergun. 


Ikaruga on dreamcast. They couldn't have that many items on the screen in 8 and 16-bit consoles, so it became a natural limitation.


Here is Twinbee on the Saturn. When you play two-player you'll keep on taking each others bells too... I often don't know what happened (or who was playing as who), but who cares as long as it's fun, right?

The problem with shmups is that enthusiasts kept on wanted them to be more challenging, but the more challenging they got, the fewer people could enjoy them...
The original twinbee sold 1.2 million copies in Japan which makes it the second most sold shmup ever in Japan, after Xevious. 
Ikaruga was only released in 50 000 copies.