Top 10 Lists: The Top 10 Best Scrolling Shooter Scoring Systems

You new-generation gamers might assume this is about FPSs or light gun games, but no, it's about a relic of a genre from a past generation that's just now experiencing its renaissance, the scrolling shooter, or "shmup." (Think R-Type or Gradius.) More often than not these games are based around points, something we now usually equate to "frags." In recent years, developers have experimented with new and innovative ways for shmup players to score, leading to heightened competitive strategies and replayability. Let's take a look at the ones that excelled most in creative design, cohesiveness, and workability.

Progear is a rather innovative shooter with excellent art that's the only horizontal shooter on this list. It's also notable for being the last game on the CPS2 hardware. Progear's scoring system involves collecting jewels from the bullets of dead enemies. With your normal guns, bullets drop rings, with your alternate guns they drop the more valuable stones. All of these items are vacuumed into you, which is quite convenient. By getting more of one kind, you increase the value of the other. It's low on the list due to it being somewhat convoluted and not straightforward at all, but it's quite fun to kill a boss just when he fires off a ton of bullets and watch the screen fill up with glittering diamonds.

The arcade-only (though a DS port is allegedly in the works) cult classic Ketsui's scoring system is very simple, but it is incredibly accessible and is implemented to great effect. Destroying enemies gives you bonus boxes. The closer you are to enemies when you kill them, the better the boxes will be. The boxes act as score multipliers and give you a bonus at the end of the stage. Like many other similar systems, you can keep a combo of these boxes going, which multiplies your multiplier(!) It's nothing too special, but you don't have to really think about it, which lets you concentrate on the game's stunningly innovative and difficult bullet patterns.

Garegga is notorious for its near-impossible difficulty and almost as hard to master scoring system (not to mention hard-to-see bullets), but I think it's actually quite fair. Medals drop from enemies, and as long as you keep picking them up as they come without dying or missing one, they'll increase in value up to 200000 points. It's extremely difficult to juggle your medal count along with all the other crap going on on the screen, but that makes it all the more enjoyable. This system was reused many, many times in later games such as Ibara and Armed Police Batrider, and still managed to seem fresh. Also, the higher your score, the harder the game gets, and this feature is implemented quite dramatically, as it's advisable to purposely die on some occasions to defang the difficulty. Luckily, this is balanced out by plentiful extra lives.

ZUN's esoteric Touhou series is known for its exceptionally complex and deep scoring systems, and Imperishable Night is no exception. I'll let bloodflowers' review on Shmups.com do the explaining. (http://shmups.classicgaming.gamespy.com/reviews/imperishable/index.html) Imperishable Night is a huge game with literally hundreds of bosses (well, sort of), and while this rich system prevents it from being a true pick-up-and-play title like most shmups, it makes for a uniquely deep and rewarding experience. So far it's the most refined version of the system in the series, but we'll see if it can hold this position when Mountain of Faith comes out.

One of the hidden gems of the DC, Mars Matrix took Giga Wing's bullet-reflecting concept and greatly expanded on it. You can fire your enemies' bullets right back at them in any direction you choose. When you destroy enemies, they drop experience cubes. Pick these up continuously to keep your experience bar up and eventually level up. The more you pick up in a combo, the more each is worth. Destroying enemies with their own bullets will give you more cubes. As well as giving you experience, the cubes multiply your score, letting it reach astronomical (no pun intended) heights into the trillions!

Psyvariar took a single page from Radiant Silvergun's (see #2) ornate gameplay system and turned it into a whole book. The whole game is focused around getting as close to your enemies' bullets as possible without actually being killed ("buzzing.") This is very fun to do, and almost gives the impression that you're playing a dancing game (the techno music and spinning animation help.) It can also get you killed in no time flat! Buzzing combos account for most of your game points and can give you a brief period of invincibility if you keep them up.

Guwange (pronounced goo-wahn-geh) is a much overlooked arcade-only shmup that I think is one of the best ever. Its scoring system is like the game itself: simple, subtle, and deceptively easy. As you kill enemies, your skull meter builds up. It drops when you're not pumping them full of steel or explosives. When it's partially full, enemies drop silver coins, and when it's completely full, they drop gold ones. If you hold down the fire button, you can control your spirit, which will automatically pick up coins from enemies it kills. You build a coin combo which can be carried through the whole game if you don't let your meter fall once...now there's a real challenge!

Donpachi might have introduced the series' trademark scoring system (and was the first shmup with a combo meter), but Dai-Ou-Jou perfected it. Like the original, you keep a combo going by continuously killing enemies without letting the combo meter fall, but now you can get into much higher numbers, thanks to the addition of Hyper Mode, which skyrockets your power and hit count. It's extremely difficult to balance enemies on the screen with your combo meter and figure out the best places to go hyper. The system is painfully unforgiving and I've practically gotten bald patches from pulling my hair out every time I stupidly break my combo (just kidding), but it's a pleasantly chaotic piece of craftmanship that keeps you on the edge of your seat.

Sometimes described as a "proto-Ikaruga," RS is a bloody brilliant game in its own right. No game of its genre has broken more ground: RS was the first shmup with (arguably) a serious storyline, bullet buzzing, weapon combos, and chaining. The chaining is different from Ikaruga in that there's three different colors and no polarities, and the colors are not equal in value. Bullet buzzing, which became the game focus in Psyvariar, forces you to stick close to enemy bullets, putting you one baby step away from death. If Ikaruga is the pinnacle of minimalist design, RS is the epitome of maximalist. And I won't get into the "Merry Dogs..."

This is it, the finest gameplay or scoring system in any game ever. Many people are already familiar with its chaining and polarity switching, as the GC port garnered plenty of attention. If you're not, then do some research, or better yet, buy it now! The scoring of Ikaruga begs comparison to the "minute to learn, lifetime to master" aspect of traditional games such as chess or go (and Ikaruga was heavily inspired by the latter.) The patterns of enemy polarity demand that you memorize the whole game and learn its nuances inside out, but if you persist, the feeling of accomplishment after perfectly chaining a stage is comparable to little else. There has never been a more well-thought-out, genuinely difficult, replayable, and cohesive game since its release. If I had to describe it, I'd call it an almost spiritual experience, fitting of the game's subtle Buddhist theme.

Score in single-player games may be something alien to most modern hardcore gamers, but before we had online play, our source of unlimited replayability was beating our scores and others' over and over. Many shmups can literally last for decades due to their difficulty and the dauntingness of their scoring systems. I hope that future developers will experiment further with the element of score in video games.

List by InvisibleYogurt (06/07/2007)