cute-'em-up
cute-'em-up noun: a shoot 'em up game with a cute, cartoonish aesthetic.
Noun
cute-'em-up (plural cute-'em-ups)
- A shoot 'em up game with a cute, cartoonish aesthetic.
- It's a parody of Gradius (geddit?) and as such, is a fully-fledged “cute 'em up.” The hectic sideways-scrolling action is every bit as intense as its namesake, but instead of battling spaceships and futuristic hardware you have sunny levels filled with cartoon penguins, giant clowns, flying pigs...2012, Matt Fox, The Video Games Guide
- Fantasy Zone was not a game meant to be taken as seriously as other shooters, and together with Konami's Twin Bee, it is credited by many for pioneering the cute shoot-'em-up, or “cute-'em-up sub-genre of shooters” (Kalata, “Spotlight”).2018, Ken Horowitz, The Sega Arcade Revolution: A History in 62 Games, page 102
Forms of cute-'em-up
| plural | cute-'em-ups |
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Origin of cute-'em-up
Blend of cute + shoot 'em up.
Questions about cute-'em-up
- What does cute-'em-up mean?
- Cute-'em-up means a shoot 'em up game with a cute, cartoonish aesthetic.
- What part of speech is cute-'em-up?
- Cute-'em-up is a noun.
- What is the plural of cute-'em-up?
- The plural of cute-'em-up is cute-'em-ups.
Words near cute-'em-up in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: cute-'em-up (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “cute-'em-up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cute-%27em-up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.