I'm not super familiar with rail-shooters as a genre, but I do play Star Fox 64- my personal favorite video game of all time. Are there any staples in the genre you could recommend I check out?
Rail shooters are dead, nowadays. I'd be surprised if the average number of rail shooters released per year since the start of the millenium is bigger than 1. But in case you want to play some, The House of the Dead, Virtua Cop and Time Crisis are three of the most fondly remembered series from the genre.
The House of the Dead: Overkill is a very well received and relatively recent rail shooter. It has good sense of humour, it's very well acted (well, if you put faith that the bad acting is trying to imitate the horror films it parodies), is very fun, has a great soundtrack, pretty challenging as long as you don't buy any of the crazy automatic weapons, and even better, you can get it on Steam pretty cheap. The Steam version is
The Typing of the Dead: Overkill, which is actually a version where you have to type at the mutants to kill them, which is ridiculous but just as much fun. You can still play the old rail shooter if you want to, though. There's also The House of the Dead 4 on PS3, which is fun, too.
Virtua Cop... is a series Sega's swept under the rug. I don't think there are any recent rereleases of any of the 2 games, and Virtua Cop 3 doesn't even have a console port...
unless you have an original Xbox and are willing to hardmod it and double its ram, then you can literally port VC3 yourself. I think the most recent rerelase is on the PS2, and it comes with both Virtua Cop and Virtua Cop 2, which is nifty. The Virtua Cop games focus more on your reflexes to aim quickly, avoid civilians and finding secrets such as Life Bonuses and new weapons. Out of the three series I'm listing, Virtua Cop (atleast the first two) is the
only one with no cutscenes and no story. You don't even have much of a context to what you're doing. So, if that bothers you, keep that in mind. Virtua Cop 2 is arguably better than 1 because I think it's almost double the lenght and is far more difficult (VC2 really doesn't screw around with the difficulty, it gets real as early as the second scene in the first level).
Time Crisis is arguably the best out of those three, and the one with the most entries, too. You got Time Crisis and Project Titan on the PS1, Time Crisis 2, 3 and Crisis Zone on the PS2, and Time Crisis 4 and Razing Storm (which has 4 included with it like I said before) on the PS3. Time Crisis 5 was released a year ago but it has no console version yet and no word on one. They all have great soundtracks, very inovative gameplay with the time mechanic, the cover mechanic and the fact two players don't play on the same screen, they have a story with lots of actually pretty decently acted cutscenes (well, not in the case of 4 and 5), and you get lots of enemies to shoot and plenty of things to blow up. They all have a decent lenght to them (except the original which is 10 minutes long but that game puts you in a massive hurry, it's probably the only game where there's an actual
TIME CRISIS going on) with Time Crisis 3 being the longest and the one of the hardest. My personal favourite is 2, but 1 and 3 are great games, as well. 1 compensates for the ridiculously short lenght by being the hardest. There's no hit indicator for the bullets, you need to use cover in advance to dodge bullets, you only get 3 or 5 lives unless you cheat, you only have 6 bullets instead of 9 like in the future titles, if the time runs out, you instantly lose a continue (the future games only make you lose a life) and in the PS1 version, you go back to the beggining of the area if you continue, and the game gives you barely enough time to finish the stages and it loves wasting the little time it gives you.
Just remember that, if you want to play any of these games with a lightgun, you're both gonna need a lightgun itself and an old CRT TV. Any questions, just ask me.
New Don't know if this is unpopular, but here goes: Dual sticks is the worst method of control for shooters. I much prefer using a mouse or even a stylus.
You can get really,
really accurate with Dual Sticks if you practice enough, and it's not even as hard as you think. You'll never be as accurate as a mouse, but it's serviceable.
Dunno how you think it's worse than a Stylus, though. Ugh. Call of Duty on the DS is bloody unplayable, for me.
