Twin-stick shooter

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Twin-stick shooter is a subgenre of shoot 'em up video games. It is a multidirectional shooter in which the player character is controlled using two joysticks: the first for movement on a flat plane and the second to shoot in the direction the joystick is pushed. Usually shots are fired as soon as the second joystick is moved, but in some games there is an additional button which must be held.^[1] Keyboard and mouse or touch input may supplant one or both joysticks.^[2] A few games, such as 1981's Vanguard, don't have a second joystick for shooting, but provide four buttons arranged in a diamond to fire in the cardinal directions.

The twin-stick control scheme was used in arcade games starting with Gun Fight in 1975, but came into prominence with the high-action Robotron: 2084 in 1982. The ubiquity of gamepads with two thumb-controlled sticks overcame the difficulty of playing twin-stick shooters at home and eventually led to a resurgence of the genre following the release of Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved in 2005.