9. Space Raiders (Taito, Playstation 2, 2002)

Space Raiders is a kind of spiritual sequel to Taito's breakout arcade game (and legitimate cultural phenomenon), Space Invaders. Though you would certainly not know that by watching the intro cutscene.

A city is attacked by insectoid aliens.
A cop mourns his fallen colleagues.
A woman on a motorcycle races across the city to her dead lovers apartment.
A street tough is attacked and his friends are torn apart in front of him.
Now the game asks you to choose one of these characters. To choose who will save the earth.

This game is:
Relentless
Deafening
Amazing

It's an arcade-style shooter that has the same basic controls as Space Invaders. It's a single screen game where your character (here a person with a gun instead of a spaceship) can only move left or right and fire at enemies that are shooting at you and moving closer. That's about where the similarities end, as here you are in more generic urban settings instead of space (at least early on in the game). To its credit, the game also introduces a large variety of enemy types, each with different attack patterns, and they are generally fun to engage with. The game is broken up into extremely short waves (10-30 seconds) and this really helps with keeping the flow going. Bosses had way too much health and took too long to kill, but were pretty fun before they got boring.

The shooting is basic, but solid. My main gripe is that you can hold down the shoot button to auto-fire, but the auto-fire rate is a decent bit slower than if you are mashing the button. I really wish that auto-fire was just the maximum speed and that there was a separate shoot button. Dodging enemy shots is fun, as there are 2 dedicated dodge buttons and the slight overhead view combined with varying types of enemy shots does give a bullet hell feeling. The game focuses on getting hit streaks on enemies without missing: this is how you upgrade your weapon and get power ups. I don't super jive with this because I just want to get right to the fun (blasting, power fantasy) in this type of game and this requires me to get good to have maximum fun. Still, even the basic experience was entertaining enough that the negatives didn't put much of a damper on my overall good time.

Space Raiders predates Earth Defense Force by a few years, but I think it's safe to say I can find the fun in any game about shooting space bugs.

4/5, way more bombastically fun than the original Space Invaders, if much less elegant