Mars Matrix absolutely, it's simply stunning.
GW2 is nice but nothing outstanding, I'd go with Zero Gunner 2, Under Defeat (if you haven't got a ps360 which I doubt), Border Down, Psyvariar 2, Shikigami No Shiro 2 and Gunbird 2 (doesn't work on Vga Box tho!) waaaay before that one. Not a proper shmup but I always loved Cannon Spike.
I don't know, I like Giga Wing 2 more than a bunch of those games you mentioned. It's not better than Under Defeat certainly, and probably not Border Down, but the rest? I don't know, I'd probably rather play Giga Wing 2 than any of those. They are all good games though, yes.
On another note, people often mention all those Dreamcast shmups we didn't get, and for good reason (stuff like Ikaruga and Under Defeat are some of the best games in the genre!), but we actually got most of the shooting games released during the systems' actual life. I mean, of games released by the time of the systems' death in early 2002, there are only a couple not released in the West... Zero Gunner 2 and Twinkle Star Sprites are it, and that latter one wasn't released outside of Japan on any platform (even though the Neo-Geo and Dreamcast versions both have a full English text option, it wasn't). We did get the rest of them -- Giga Wing 1 and 2, Mars Matrix, Gunbird 2, and Bangai-Oh. Also Cannon Spike as well, for arena shooters. Rail shooters was more mixed though -- Rez of course was Europe/Japan only, and Rainbow Cotton Japan-only, though if you count Charge 'n Blast as one we did get that one -- but the other kinds of shooting games mostly came over.
What happened, of course, was that they kept releasing shmups on the DC for five plus years after the systems' death... it's funny that a system that bombed as hard as the DC did in Japan had enough of a hardcore market to keep the shmups and dating-sim ports coming for years, but it did. Of course the DC got virtually nothing other than those two genres after spring 2002 (three KOF games from SNK, Puyo Puyo Fever, and that's about it), but it had the shmups... but of the ones released while the DC was actually alive, we actually got almost all of them. There just weren't all that many in total.
Its funny how cheap I picked this up for years ago. At least its normal game prices and not insanely high...yet.
EDIT: Scratch that...100 bucks complete x_x
At least the import is half that. Guess I better look into how to play DC import titles.
It's easy to play backups/copies, of course, but not so easy to play actual other-region discs... it might require a hard mod? I'm not certain.
