shmup
n.— «A vertically scrolling shoot-em-up, or “shmup” in gamer’s parlance, Siberian Strike harkens back to classic arcade games like 1942.» —“Gameloft releases Siberian Strike game for iPhone” by Peter Cohen Macworld May 1, 2009. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Sure, there’s winter, spring, summer, and fall. But the seasons in between have even more poetic names. In Alaska, greenup describes a sudden, dramatic burst of green after a long, dark winter. And there are many, many terms for a cold snap...
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...