Keep On Truxton: The Soothing Stress of Shoot ‘Em Ups

Welcome to The Shmuptake, an occasional column about the history of the shoot ‘em up, aka the “shmup.” Here’s an introduction, and here’s an archive of every column so far.

A few years ago I started a column about a certain type of game I played a lot as a kid and occasionally turn to today when I need to unwind, relax, or just generally dissociate from the real world for a bit. The Shmuptake concerned itself with shoot ‘em ups, or shooters, or shmups, or STGs, or whatever you want to call ‘em; you know, those games where you fly your little character around the screen, both shooting AND dodging bullets as waves of jerks rush towards you. It’s an ancient genre dating back to the earliest days of arcade games, and although they’re typically very hard, I find them to also be incredibly peaceful—up to a point. I did 10 or so pieces over the course of a year before kind of forgetting about the whole thing, but I’ve been playing a lot of shmups again lately and it seems like a real good time to get back to some serious dissociation, so let’s do it. Let’s shmup again. 

I got a Steam Deck last year, and it’s been a godsend for my shmup intake. It’s replaced the Switch as my shooter system of choice, although the deep roster of shoot ‘em ups found in Hamster’s Arcade Archives series keeps the Switch in heavy rotation as well. And the shmup I’ve played the most on Steam Deck over the last few months, which is available both individually on Steam and in a variety of different bundles and collections, is a game called Truxton (or, as it’s known in Japan, Tatsujin). It’s by Toaplan, who was one of the best studios cranking out shooters in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and it originally came out in arcades and on the Genesis / Mega Drive and PC Engine in 1988. It’s an ideal shmup for me, personally, because it’s less about lightning-fast reflexes or pro skills than it is memorization—and, despite my best efforts over the last 25 years, my memory’s still pretty good.

Truxton doesn’t fill the screen with bullets. It’s not a fast-moving game. It scrolls vertically at a stately pace as chains of enemy ships swoop down at the same time and in the same pattern every time you play it. Quick reflexes are invaluable to getting through a new level on your very first play, but odds are you’ll die and have to burn some of these patterns to your memory to win in the future. This becomes obvious near the end of the first level, when a trio of ships that spit deadly lasers approach and start to three-card monte their way across the top of the screen. The lasers are twofers, twin beams too close together for a ship to fly through, and all three ships fire them at the same time. At first it seems like the three ships are going to follow a basic, predictable pattern, with uniform spacing between all of their lasers, making them easy to dodge; but then there’s a little hiccup in their movement, a virtual stutter step as they swap positions that you probably won’t anticipate, and if you’re not fast enough to react it will kill you. That unexpected motion is something you’ll have to remember every time you play Truxton, and since you already have to remember a number of (less tricky, more straight-forward) patterns just to get to the point where this one happens, it may not always be sitting at the top of your mind. 

Truxton is also a little stingy with the power-ups—not the power-ups themselves, which come fairly often and in the same pattern every play, but the degree to which each individual power-up actually powers you up. Speed and bomb icons do what you expect, speeding your ship up by a level and adding an extra bomb to your stockpile, but you’ll need to collect five power-ups to increase the power of your main weapon. If you start a level from scratch you won’t be able to get that gun powered up until near level’s end; in a weird but fortunate choice, if you die with anywhere from one to four power-ups stored, you’ll retain those at the start of your next life, although you’ll lose whatever speed and active weapon bonuses you had. Like, say you’ve collected five power-ups and your gun is now shooting twice as many bullets as it normally would in a spray that’s twice as wide; and say that since unlocking that more powerful weapon you’ve grabbed three additional weapon power-up icons. When you die, you’ll lose that more powerful gun and restart with the basic, unpowered one, but you’ll still have those three additional power-ups in storage, so you’ll only need to grab two more to get back to that stronger gun. 

Fortunately the three standard guns you can use are all fairly useful. You’ll start with a gun that shoots out three bullets in a spray. You can swap that out with a more powerful but more focused green bullet by picking up a green icon, or grab a blue icon to go with a blue lightning bolt that’s pretty weak but homes in on the closest target, guaranteeing that it will always hit something. When you collect five power-up icons, the spray gun effectively doubles the amount of bullets and the size of its spray, whereas the green bullet becomes wider and faster, and the blue gun starts to shoot out three homing lightning bolts instead of one. I usually just stick with the basic gun, to be honest; once it’s powered up its bullets can cover a huge part of the screen, and although they’re not the strongest they are fast and plentiful, making quick work of all but the strongest enemies.

And then there are the bombs—perhaps Truxton’s most memorable visual. When your bombs explode a ghostly skull appears on screen, marking the blast radius. It’s a cool way to depict what is otherwise an absolutely standard shoot ‘em up bomb—one that does a ton of damage to anything it hits, as well as wiping out enemy bullets. I tend to store those suckers up until I’m fighting a boss, because I always play these things way too conservatively, but extras aren’t that hard to come by so you probably don’t have to be as reluctant to use them as I am. And you lose any extras when you die, restarting with three, so yeah, let ‘em rip. 

If this all sounds pretty by-the-book for an ‘80s shmup, well, it is. Truxton is not innovative. There’s a reason this wasn’t some unparalleled smash back in 1988. It is entirely competent, though—just a really well-crafted shooter that does everything a game like this should do, without any glaring flaws. If you’re a bullet hell lover who gets your kicks by navigating endless clouds of color-coded bullets, or a speed junkie looking for some real blast processing, Truxton will probably bore you. If you’re looking for a old-fashioned shmup that wants to exercise your brain as much as your reflexes, though, Truxton could be the game for you. It definitely is for me, and although I haven’t put nearly as many hours into this as I have, say, Avowed, I have played Truxton multiple times a week since November or December. Truxton‘s lack of innovation, its stolid spartan solidness, is what makes it so soothing; there’s something inherently relaxing about Truxton’s focus on refreshing my memory and its refusal to demand too much else from me. And by the time the challenge starts to pick up in later levels, I’ve warmed up and eased into its rhythms and can actually hang. Truxton’s a good one.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.