Who else here likes them? For me it is one of my favorite genres, I generally like 2D better but enjoy some 3D ones as well. What are your favorites.

Darius Gaiden
Einhander
Ikaruga
Lords of Thunder
Metal Slug series
MUSHA
Panzer Dragoon Orta
R-Type series
Soldner-X 2: Final Prototype
Space Megaforce
Thunder Force series
UN Squadron

I have bought and played Raptor on here and it's really good but I wouldn't rank it among my favorites.

I think a demo of Raptor came on my Duke Nukem 3D back when Duke 3D was first released. In fact I think there were a bunch of demo's, like for Rise of the Triad and some weird Mario Kart type game.

I own Ikaruga on X Box and have always tried to get into those types of games, but could never really convince myself to play them for more than a few minutes. In theory, it's a genre I should love. In reality and for reasons unknown to me, I just don't enjoy it all that much.

Recently I have enjoyed Shoot 1 Up on XBLIG, and Jamestown that I got in the Humble Bundle.

Jamestown was very good. And the music was phenomenal.

My recent favorites are the Gundemonium Collection series, all awesome. I'm also enjoying making my own very small and simple sidescrolling shooter for the competition Ubivis is running :)

I can't get into the 3D ones. The ones by Psikyo are my favourite, like the Strikers and Gunbird series. I love the thrill of threading my way through hordes of bullets. Thing about Psikyo's games that makes it different than most other SHMUPs is that the hit detection of your plane is just one very tiny dot, so you can see a bullet pass through your wing and nothing happens, but you just know that it's so close to destroying your plane. There's this effect of a blood rush when you just barely escaped a screen full of bullets..

Do you have a SEGA Saturn, Ric1987? Couldn't help but notice that a lot of your favorite shmups are on the Saturn, but then again, pretty much EVERY shmup managed to make it's way onto to Saturn.

Anyway, it's one of my favorite genres too! Some of my favorites are...

Cotton 2: Magical Night Dreams
Darius series
Detana!! Twinbee
DoDonPachi
Life Force/Salamander
Metal Slug series
Panzer Dragoon series
Parodius series
Perfect Cherry Blossom (And most other Touhou games)
R-Type series
Space Invaders Extreme series (Really under-rated, actually. Does a surprisingly good job of modernizing the Space Invaders series!)
Starfox 64
Tyrian 2000

Some old amiga titles:

Stardust
Disposable Hero
Project-X

If you have a Commodore 64 emulator you could get Shoot Em Up Construction Kit (SEUCK), allows you to create them really easily and set backgrounds, waves and everything else. It is really dated though.

Turrican Series - Amiga
Xenon 2 - Amiga
Starray - Amiga
Project X - Amiga
X-Out, Z-Out - Amiga
Space Harrier - 8 Bit Machines (Speccy & C64) - Arcade
Delta, Armalyte & Sanxion - Commodore 64
Retrograde - Commodore 64
Hawkeye - Commodore 64
Gemini Wing - Arcade, C64 & Amiga
Tiger Shark - Arcade & C64
Biohazard Battle - Megadrive (Genesis)
Prehistoric Isle 1 & 2 - Arcade
Katakis / Denaris - C64 & Amiga (Banned due to similar to R-Type, 2 names same game)

All these games are available to play via emulators.

Mame for Arcade (MameUI makes life easier)
WinVice for C64, C16 & +4 & C128 (Just need C64 though)
ZXSpin for Speccy 48 &128 Disc machines (Includes Amstrad as they merged with Sinclair)
WinUAE for Amiga

Agreed with both parts of this statement.

SEUCK was released for the Amiga too, you know. I'm actually surprised that nothing like SEUCK has been made since. Sure, there are lots of different game development tools, but none that are as simple to use for non-programmers as SEUCK was. If you do know of some, I'd love to know.

And yes, the Amiga was a veritable smorgasbord of excellent shoot-em-ups.

I never played a lot of these games when I was a kid. I had UN Squadron and Project X on the Amiga, but was terrible at the latter and didn't play it much. We did complete UN Squadron many times, though, with cheat codes :)

In recent years I really got into playing Metal Slug and especially Contra - Contra 3 and 4 being my favourites.

And during 2011 I've played more games of this type than usual: Radiant Silvergun, Deathsmiles and Jamestown. Rreally enjoyed Jamestown in particular, still working on completing RSG. I can see how it has earned such a reputation, it is quite excellent. I've also played Ikaruga, but don't like it as much (don't like the constant colour-switching much).

I know some people differentiate between these types of games - between shmups and run 'n' gun games. I tend to just call them "I am a tiny space ship" and "sidescrolling Rambo" games, respectively. Basically, they boil down to the same thing, which is the constant shooting of many things.

(I would also tend to lump twin-stick shooters into the same category, as I enjoy them for similar reasons. Super Stardusth HD is a favourite of mine.)

I like this genre very much but unfortunately I suck big time :(
Still, I might have something interesting to try for you. I played it for a while but wasn't able to get too far (I really wish I was better at those games... ). Good oldschool stuff, abstolutely free and on top of that fairly new (2010) and runnable on modern machines.

http://www.locomalito.com/hydorah.php

I played the shit out of Gradius on SNES. This looks really good actually. Also, checked out Jamestown; looks badass as well.

If you like Shmups, then you owe it to yourself to try Radiant Silvergun (the most realistic way of getting it this day is on Xbox live arcade). It is by the same people who made Ikaruga, and while it is a far more conventional shooter, it is still darn good.