Tyrian 2000

free. epic. comes with dosbox wich needs a bit of tweaking but generally awesome

I had a blast reliving the glory days and blasting enemies out of the sky! An absolute classic game with an awesome soundtrack.

This is a top-down vertical space shooter that has good writing, good soundtrack, an impressive source port, comes with so much guns that it might as well be classified as "Texas: The Game", gives you a multitude of defense options so that you don't die in one hit, has an arcade mode as well as a story mode, as well as support for both manual and automatic saves. And it's free.

This is one of the games I truly loved as child (I played shareware version of Tyrian many years ago) and I truly love it even now. It's amazing how game so rich in content: lots of weapons, ships, mini-games, different game modes, episodes of story mode and bonuses, can be also FREE. I will forever remember the first time I discovered carrot ship, hot dog weapons and some other stuff I don't want to spoil for everyone :-) If you want to jump into SHMUP genre, or if you are a fan of it but you are looking for something great, you MUST play Tyrian.

I was looking for an arcade space shooting game and this one is terrific. It is so much better than some of the other paid alternatives. The steps by 'alejandronova' made it run much smoother as well.