DS space shooters

I've noticed that there have been very few space shooters, or shoot'em ups released on the Nintendo DS through out its lifetime. This puzzles me as it seems those types of games would do pretty well on a hand held. Sure there have been ports of R-Type, Space Invaders and the original NanoStray, but for the most part no game truly makes use of the controls and what the DS has to offer, at least not the way I see it.

While its secret that shooters have been around for decades now, their formula for game play rarely changes. Some are more hectic than others, some are more flashy, but few have done anything with the controls and how the game plays.

With the release of touch screen and other pointer devices I would have thought that people might have jumped at the occasion to take an old genre and give it a fresh spin. Move, aim, shoot: this has been at the forefront of my own shooter idea for the DS, and more recently the Wii.

While I know this control scheme isn't new and has in fact been done on the Xbox and PS3, it has been surprisingly absent from the Nintendo consoles. Maybe there is far less market for shooters on those consoles, but that kind of control scheme is far easier to pull off with touch screen and pointer devices.

Now that I've started diving more and more into C# and XNA I've taken the initiative to realize my dream of creating my DS shooter for the PC. If only a proof of concept, I fully intend to take this as far as I can in hopes that others will see the benefits of what an old genre can play like with new and innovative controls. Of course, new controls is not the only thing I have in store with that game. Do people remember Rez? How about other beat games? Think of that in a shooter, but not quite so beat driven.

Maybe it's my obsessional with audio / video synchronization, but I need to have some harmony and synchronicity with what I hear and see. Let the gameplay drive the audio, and let the audio design the gameplay.