Er, well, it's not a blog, and it's not my site, just a game-related piece I wrote for someone else, which is WAY too long to reproduce here. I didn't mean for it to come off as trying to up my viewer count for a different site (and the last time I linked there nobody raised any objections, IIRC), but if this is technically against the rules here I'll take this post down, sorry if I was in error.

Thanks Hamza - now it can be rightfully not-read like all the rest of my postings, heh heh. ;)

Heh, glad you enjoyed it - most of it I was able to compile myself, simply because I'm regularly involved with the genre, but I did require some help from fellow shmuppers on some stuff, as evidenced in the "thanks to" list at the end. No idea how many hours the whole thing took, I'd probably just depress myself if I found out.

As for Exelica, I actually have the Dreamcast port of it, but as far as I know it's relatively similar to the XBLA version. I thought it was good (not great, but not bad), since tossing enemies at each other is fun, if a bit hard to learn, and while the graphics aren't great bullets and such are easy to see. It is definitely easier than Ikaruga, though not a total walk in the park - you could definitely do worse. For a real "intro to the genre", however, I'd probably suggest firing up MAME and giving DoDonPachi a shot - it's the game that got me into shmups proper, and is my personal favorite shooter down to this day. Granted, there are many different styles to try out (DDP is very different from, say, Raiden, which is different from R-Type), but if I only have to choose one game to recommend, that's always the one. If you want more recommendations I'd be glad to offer them.

Thanks again for reading.