Tyrian 2000

I feared that it would just be nostalgia that made me regard Tyrian as of of the great vertical shooters of my youth. I was so happy to be wrong. It's still all there, all the weapons, all the holocubes, all the fun. MUCHAS GRACIAS GOG!

Rewind 15 years, to a 11 year old me, playing this for hours every day. Randomly found it here on GoG, google revealed it has been freeware for some years, but that soundtrack is just Epic! 5 Stars - Nostalgic value, and then some. Also, play it now, and you will get Christmas Mode! (Or mess with your pc clock, works too.)

Tyrian is hands-down, one of the greatest arcade shooters to date. It also has a dual function as a mock bullet hell on Super Tyrian mode Oh cool trick for getting arcade ships in the main story. ---- Type in the code at the tittle screen as you normally would, then back out when the chapter menu comes up, finally, start a new game and select the story mode, chapter, difficulty, you should start with the ship. It won't appear in the ship purchasing menu till after you beat a level. Also, modern gamers, eat your hear out! Tyrian was the FIRST game with motion-blur. It is, however, but a unexpected side-effect of having a blue tinted background as shown on some levels, that and the high-speed Savara levels. It looks, however, like a simple video-artifact, but the fact that some even like this would show up on a old game is phenomenal. I could be wrong, and the developers actually put that in there.

One of the best games in existence. Excellent music, gameplay and awesome graphics for it's time. This game is from the time where games had to be actually FUN to be sold.

Among the first videogames I ever played as a kid, Tyrian left an indelible impression on me, as a vertical scrolling shoot em up to put most, I think, to shame. I was delighted by Tyrian's fast action, tight controls, vibrant colors, amazing soundtrack by Alexander Brandon, depth of ship customization , and most unusually for the genre, the sheer volume of written story and dialogue, lending itself to the unusually long length of the singleplayer campaign, as shmups go. Given the medium, Tyrian did as much as it could to provide context for your desperate flight from the namesake world and a long, pitched struggle against the evil forces of the Microsol mining corporation, with allies few and far between and a way out of the madness fading in the distance. Tyrian is the sort of shmup and the sort of game in general that fully expects the player to actually finish it, something that was uncommon in its day. It has many difficulty settings, and takes pains to give you the tools to negotiate its levels and to make the experience enjoyable throughout. It WANTS to be played. Tyrian was probably my first experience with a game that put an emphasis on fun and storytelling. While games of the 90s and action games in particular had no shortage of the former, the latter was significantly harder to come by. Games like Tyrian, One Must Fall: 2097, Traffic Department 2192, and Strife established the value of plot and context in various genres outside of RPGs for me, something I would never forget.