shoot 'em up

plural shoot 'em ups · alternative shoot-em-up · alternative shoot-'em-up · alternative shoot them up

1. idiomaticbroadcastingA piece of media which depicts considerable gunplay.

   My wife won't watch this movie; it's a shoot ’em up.

   2 more examples

   The arcaders have it easy. All they need to do is drop a quarter into a machine to find out how good the latest shoot 'em up game really is. But for the home computer owner, it's another story.

   1983 August, Popular Mechanics, volume 160, number 2, page 88

   An unmissable shoot 'em up.

   1989, Duncan Macdonald, R-Type (video game review) in Your Sinclair issue 37, January 1989

   1. idiomaticbroadcastingA video game in which one plays as a character moving and shooting in an autoscrolling two-dimensional world, with emphasis on dodging bullets and predicting enemy movement patterns.

      Bullet Hell: DoDonPachi exemplifies the term better than any other shoot 'em up, providing a snowstorm of fiery pixels to both simultaneously dodge and eliminate.

      2011 December 5, Tony Mott, 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die: You Must Play Before You Die, Hachette UK, →ISBN

      2 more examples

      In a shoot'em up, the player usually looks from above on her player character (most commonly in the form of a spaceship). The spaceship is constantly moving forward, but since the perspective is relatively fixed on it, the traversed space is actually moving from top to bottom or left to right, and the player has no ability to influence that movement.

      2013 August 28, Sebastian Domsch, Storyplaying: Agency and Narrative in Video Games, Walter de Gruyter, →ISBN, page 65

      It is surprising nowadays to see so much silicon dedicated to a "niche" feature [starfield rendering], but the extreme popularity of shoot em ups like R-Type, Gradius, or Darius at the time made a good case for it.

      2022 November 5, Fabien Sanglard, The Book of CP-System, Sanglard Publishing, page 88

      Synonyms: shmup