There are a decent variety of shooters, but I distilled them down to four essential types.  First-person shooters (FPS) like Sega’s upcoming The Conduit, on-rails shooters like House Of The Dead Overkill, Shoot ‘em ups (SHMUPS) like Gradius ReBirth, or scrollers like Metal Slug 7.

Vote and then tell us which game is your favorite shooter in comments!

Sometimes, the best games are the ones you didn’t see coming.

Those games are special. Without media hype or a franchise to which they can attach, they fly under the radar, and no one seems to notice.

Big Bang Mini is one of them.

I’ll be honest. After the game cartridge made that satisfying, springy click into my DS, the last thing I expected was to be blown away. The game’s generic title didn’t exactly help matters, either.

Big Bang Mini? It’s like one of the developers pulled a handful of wooden letters from a Scrabble bag and did the best they could.

But then I started playing.

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Fireworks get me pumped. When you include them in a video game and let me shoot them, you become an instant winner in my book.

SouthPeak Games, a winner is you.

The good folks at SouthPeak were kind enough to send me Big Bang Mini last week, their colorful new fireworks-shooter for the Nintendo DS. This game is literally a blast, a polychromatic particle party you’ll definitely want to try. It’s colorful, addictive and best of all, original.

Big Bang Mini ships to stores tomorrow at the attractive price of $19.99, and we’ll have a full review to celebrate the release.

GameCube faithful will finally be able to get their hands on Radio Allergy, one of the system’s cancelled 2007 swan songs.

Only they’ll be playing it on Wii.

Ultimate Shooting Collection, the aptly named shooter compilation, will include Radio Allergy.

The localized version of Japanese shooter Radilgy, Radio Allergy was planned to be one of the final games released for GameCube before being cancelled in June 2007.

Ultimate Shooting Collection also includes 2005 GameCube shooter Chaos Field and Karous, a shooter that has never been released beyond Japanese shores.

The hardcore three-shooter compilation will be priced modestly at $29.99, and it is set for a November release in North America.

The Milestone Shooting Collection, previously a Japan-only collection of three shooters, is coming stateside on September 23 courtesy of UFO Interactive.

The title was initially announced last May (as in, 2007), and with only one title to its name, Karous. Now the title is a collection, and will feature Chaos Field and Radilgy, the former being a GameCube title back in 2005. The others are brand new for U.S. shmup audiences, however.

I still play Life Force from time to time (among other titles), so this is welcome news for me, at the very least.