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Rail Shooter

A variant of either first person or third person shooter, in a rail shooter the computer controls most of your movement and you control the shots. May or may not be a Light Gun Game. Will score very low on the Sliding Scale Of Linearity Vs Openness.

Compare/Contrast No Sidepaths, No Exploration, No Freedom (where you control your own movement but are given only one route to follow).

First Person Rail Shooters:

Child of Eden, the Spiritual Successor to Rez.
Knife Edge Nose Gunner
Starblade
Star Wars arcade (and at least one level in the Lego prequel games)
Many standard first person shooters have a level or two of this type.
- A great example of this was in the United Offensive expansion for the original Call of Duty, where a mission consisted the player shooting down German fighters with a B-17's 50. caliber turrets.
Deadly Tide

Third Person Rail Shooters:

Aces Of The Galaxy
Afterburner series
Asura's Wrath switches to this during Random points in the game, certain bosses included.
G.I.Joe
Galaxy Force II
G-Loc (a spinoff of Afterburner)
Kid Icarus Uprising (half this and normal Third Person Shooter)
Little Red Riding Hood's Zombie BBQ
Metal Gear Solid Touch
Night Striker
Novastorm
Panzer Dragoon
Paperboy
Space Harrier
Star Fox series
- Star Fox
- Star Fox 64, though averted this for some boss fights and a few levels.
Thunder Blade and its Genesis Porting Disaster, Super Thunder Blade (alternate with vertical Shoot 'Em Up levels)
Blue Lightning
Omega Boost
Rez
Forbidden Forest
Some minigames in The Legend Of Zelda Spirit Tracks.
The climactic end-boss battle in Devil May Cry.
Red Faction: Guerrilla has Rail Shooter missions; popping rockets off at EDF assets from the back of Jenkins' game-controlled trike-car.
For a very brief moment at the end of Dirge of Cerberus.
Tin Star, though it has some First-Person sequences.
Star Wars The Old Republic Uses a 3rd Person Rail shooter for its space combat system. Fan opinion on the decision not to use a free roaming system is... divided, to say the least.

Light Gun Game:

Alien³: The Gun
Carn Evil
Crypt Killer
Dead Space: Extraction
Deadstorm Pirates
Elevator Action: Death Parade
House of the Dead
Jurassic Park tie-in arcade games are these.
Lets Go Jungle
Ninja Assult
The Ocean Hunter
Pokémon Snap though it's a camera and not a gun you're shooting, which is one of the more known Better Than It Sounds Video Games stories around.
Sega's latest Rambo arcade game.
Razing Storm
A number of Resident Evil side games:
- Resident Evil: Dead Aim, Dead Aim 2
- Umbrella Chronicles
- Darkside Chronicles
Revolution X
Sewer Shark
Target Terror
Terminator 2: The Arcade Game (which is the spiritual predecessor of Revolution X)
- Terminator: Salvation: The Arcade Game - a true successor to Terminator 2: The Arcade Game
Time Crisis
Spoony discovered several of these in the FMV mystery game Ripper.
Sin and Punishment switches into a rail shooter on occasion.
The Gummi Ship segments in the Kingdom Hearts games are a minigame version of this, as well as part of the final boss sequence of the first Devil May Cry.
Yoshi's Safari
Virtua Cop
BIT.TRIP FATE is a literal execution of the gameplay concept — the game takes place on the Side View, you control your character on a "fate line" (a rail, in other words), and you aim with a cursor.