Vertical Scrolling Shooter

Once a staple of the gaming industry, Vertical Scrolling Shooter games are rather rare since the latter half of the 1990s.

As the name suggests, the game's playfield constantly scrolls vertically over the course of a level, giving a top-down view of the action. The most common use of such an engine has been for games with some kind of spacecraft or plane, although a number of games were based on roads with the player controlling a car.

Most such games had the player collect health, lives and weapons as powerups in the levels, although some allowed the player to make purchases with their points between levels.

Complexity varies by having different numbers of layers of parallax and in some cases, transparency effects, such as translucent explosions.

Many vertical scrolling shooters were designed for arcade machines with screens taller than they are wide, which causes technical problems when playing them on home systems where TV screens/monitors are invariably wider than they are tall. To accommodate this difference, some home versions have an option to alter the orientation of the video output, requiring the display to be tilted 90 degrees, or, failing that, the player's head; this is known as "tate" mode (not short for "rotate" but the Japanese word for vertical). The alternative, "yoko" (horizontal) mode, allows the display to retain its usual orientation at the expense of having the playing field truncated, zoomed out, squashed or scrolled back and forth.

Compare Horizontal Scrolling Shooter. Bullet Hell is a subgenre of this.


 * The 194X series
 * The Aero Fighters/Sonic Wings series
 * Air Assault a.k.a. Fire Barrel
 * The Aleste/Power Strike series
 * M.U.S.H.A. (a.k.a. Musha Aleste)
 * Super Aleste (released in the US as Space Megaforce)
 * Armed Police Batrider
 * Astro Blaster
 * Battle Garegga and sequel Battle Bakraid
 * Blazing Lazers
 * Blue Wish Resurrection
 * Cho Ren Sha 68 k
 * Crimzon Clover
 * Crisis Force
 * Dangar UFO Robo
 * Dangun Feveron
 * The Demon Star series
 * The Don Pachi/Do Don Pachi series
 * Dragon Spirit
 * Enigmata and sequel
 * Espgaluda and sequel
 * ESP Ra.De
 * Flying Shark and sequel Fire Shark
 * Flying Tigers
 * Go Beryllium
 * Some sections of Salamander/Life Force (internationally) and its sequel.
 * The Guardian Legend
 * Highway Hunter is a powerups-only example that uses a car. Classification as Nintendo Hard is quite likely, especially given the fact that you can't save your game.
 * Hitogata Happa from the Gundemonium Series
 * Gun.Smoke
 * Hellsinker
 * Ibara
 * Ikaruga
 * Ikaruga
 * Jamestown: Legend of the Lost Colony
 * Ketsui
 * Kiloblaster
 * KOF Sky Stage
 * Lightning Fighters
 * Magical Cannon Wars
 * Mahou Daisakusen (a.k.a. Sorcer Striker)
 * Shippu Mahou Daisakusen (a.k.a. Kingdom Grandprix)
 * Great Mahou Daisakusen (a.k.a. Dimahoo)
 * Major Stryker
 * Mars Matrix
 * Muchi Muchi Pork
 * Mushihime-sama (Look here for what may be the hardest Bullet Hell Boss ever.)
 * Noiz2sa
 * Parsec47
 * Prismatic Solid
 * Radiant Silvergun
 * The Raiden series
 * The Raiden Fighters series
 * Raptor: Call of the Shadows
 * The Ray Series: RayForce, RayStorm, and RayCrisis
 * Recca
 * River Raid, one of the first
 * r Rootage
 * Seihou
 * The Shikigami no Shiro trilogy
 * Soukyugurentai
 * Star Force
 * Star Soldier
 * Strania the Stella Machina
 * Strikers 1945
 * Spy Hunter
 * "StarCannon" from Fun Orb
 * Sugar Shooter
 * The Tale of Alltynex
 * Kamui
 * RefleX
 * Alltynex Second
 * Terra Cresta
 * Tiger Heli
 * Touhou Project
 * Triggerheart Exelica
 * Truxton
 * Twin Cobra
 * Twin Cobra II
 * The TWINS / TWAIN series
 * Twilight Insanity
 * Twilight Refrain
 * Alternative Sphere
 * Tyrian
 * Under Defeat
 * Warning Forever
 * Xevious
 * XOP
 * Zanac