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Dictionary

Words, grammatical forms and meanings linked to the ontology.

shoot 'em up en · NOUN

Pronunciation

Meanings

  1. (idiomatic) A piece of media which depicts considerable gunplay.
    • The arcaders have it easy. All they need to do is drop a quarter into a machine to find out how good the latest shoot 'em up game really is. But for the home computer owner, it's another story. 1983 August, Popular Mechanics, volume 160, number 2, page 88:
    • An unmissable shoot 'em up. 1989, Duncan Macdonald, R-Type (video game review) in Your Sinclair issue 37, January 1989
    • My wife won't watch this movie; it's a shoot ’em up.
  2. (idiomatic) A piece of media which depicts considerable gunplay. ▸ A video game in which one plays as a character moving and shooting in an autoscrolling two-dimensional world, with emphasis on dodging bullets and predicting enemy movement patterns.
    • It is surprising nowadays to see so much silicon dedicated to a "niche" feature [starfield rendering], but the extreme popularity of shoot em ups like R-Type, Gradius, or Darius at the time made a good case for it. 2022 November 5, Fabien Sanglard, The Book of CP-System, Sanglard Publishing, page 88:
    • Bullet Hell: DoDonPachi exemplifies the term better than any other shoot 'em up, providing a snowstorm of fiery pixels to both simultaneously dodge and eliminate. 2011 December 5, Tony Mott, 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die: You Must Play Before You Die, Hachette UK, →ISBN:
    • In a shoot'em up, the player usually looks from above on her player character (most commonly in the form of a spaceship). The spaceship is constantly moving forward, but since the perspective is relatively fixed on it, the traversed space is actually moving from top to bottom or left to right, and the player has no ability to influence that movement. 2013 August 28, Sebastian Domsch, Storyplaying: Agency and Narrative in Video Games, Walter de Gruyter, →ISBN, page 65:

Forms

SpellingFeaturesLabelsSource
shoot-em-up alternative lexicographic
shoot 'em ups Number=Plur lexicographic
shoot them up alternative lexicographic
shoot-'em-up alternative lexicographic

Deriveds

cute-'em-up

Hyponyms

bullet hell · cute-'em-up

Relateds

beat 'em up

Synonyms

shmup

Translations (4)

nl shoot 'em up (video game in which one plays as a character moving and shooting in an autoscrolling two-dimensional world) · cmn STG (video game in which one plays as a character moving and shooting in an autoscrolling two-dimensional world) · cmn 飛行射擊游戲 /飞行射击游戏 (video game in which one plays as a character moving and shooting in an autoscrolling two-dimensional world) · cmn 打飛機游戲 /打飞机游戏 (video game in which one plays as a character moving and shooting in an autoscrolling two-dimensional world)