Arcade Button Mashers!

I never got the appeal of the "Bullet Hell SHMUPs" genre that started popping up in the arcades in the 90s. I just saw a game that cost 50 cents that had lots of confusing shit happening. Surely you just get wasted right away because it's so hard compared to Galaga, and I know I suck at Galaga even though I torture myself with it daily.. So tonight I tried Fire Barrel on my MiSTer. No reason for that one vs any other SHMUP title, I think it was on some list of best arcade games or overlooked gems or something.

Anyway I had no idea how easy it is to feel like you're getting good value for money on this stuff. Even on the MiSTer it feels like a good deal. You quickly start blasting away with rapidly increasing weapons until hey I'm shooting guns, firing in 6 directions plus rockets and homing missiles. And there's fire everywhere. If you catch a bullet you will rapidly get leveled back up. Galaga is damn near impossible for the Average Maroon to play for very long.

I'd been playing a bit of side scrolling R-Type type games recently and they're fun and fairly unforgiving, I last maybe a couple level-ups so far before I have to move on. I probably should familiarize myself with the priorities of those games and what each different little nearly identical sphere thing means in like Xenon on the ST and Amiga..

In the meantime it's fun to just feed a couple quarters in for continues and Fire Barrel feels like a pretty good value for dollar pretty quick. As I'm looking for screenshots it doesn't seem like it was super beloved or anything, there's just rudimentary "This was a SHMUP from 1993" type information. If Fire Barrel is the "bottom of the barrel" that no one plays and is hardly documented, maybe the "good ones" are actually worth playing.