Shmups on the PC often had to choose a sort of schizophrenic style of play either you upgrade and design your own ship, building up a budget, and struggle to beat levels ahead of you, or you get these big, splashy arcade games where you could collect huge powerups and pick up coins and enormous hamburgers hovering in space. In Japan, I understand shmups took on a whole new level, but in the mid 90s, there was a duelling pair of PC shmups – Raptor vs Tyrian. Shmups on PCs from the west have never really been a thing compared to how well they work on the more fast-paced consoles.
When Tyrian first hit my screens, it was as a simple top-down shmup. Oh there was One Must Fall 2097 (and keep an ear out for developments on that front), but there was also this unassuming little crusher, Tyrian.
Apogee had Commander Keen and Doom and Wolfenstein, sure, but man did Epic bring the games that ate days. Epic was distributing the games I usually preferred. Epic and Apogee software spent most of the 90s marketing and distributing the works of dozens of smaller development studios – some that you may now recognise as meaningful (like, oh, say, id). Tyrian was a game that came out in the 1990s, as one of Epic Megagames’ massive shareware pushes. What I’ve played, then, mostly, are games where I can abdicate my feelings and thoughts and just enjoy the experience itself. These past few weeks I have played very, very few videogames, with most of my gameplay experience coming in fits and starts. More startling than that to me though are the huge numbers of games I have never played. There are games I own that I’ve not finished other games I have not finished but I have reviewed. I was a child who had few games, but played them a lot I’ve since become a grown man who has plenty of games, many of which have gone unplayed. The Game Pile has been a project of mine that’s meant to address one of those small sins of the modern era, the excesses of our entertainment.
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