PC shoot 'em ups

Oh hey, forgot to mention, Humans Must Answer is a pretty fun side-scrolling shooter. You can get it on GOG and probably lots of other places.

Yeah that drove me nuts with Hydorah. I also didn’t get very far with that game. So damn hard. I think I got to the fourth or fifth level and felt like a champ at one point, but just never had the willpower to try to get there again after that.

I downloaded Crimzon Clover last night (might just be a trial version of it?). Look forward to playing it tonight if I have time.

Did anyone play the game - I think it was called somethingstar 3, but it wasn’t demonstar 3 and I’m probably wrong - that was a sort of Asteroids game however it had an unlimited or “get to the last stage” (of many) “campaign”. Defeating all enemies ended the current sector. The ship had various parts you could equip and they, like the enemy “bosses” were procedurally generated. A gun had attributes for: # of projectiles, speed of projectile, life of projectile, damage, directions, energy cost, and often other effects as well (like projectiles that forked once they impacted something). You could get a lot of crazy different types of weapons. It was pretty hard. It also allowed you to pick what stage you started on to a point (giving you better, randomly generated, gear than what you got at the start).

I don’t remember that one, but I did play one of the Demonstar series a long time ago. It actually supported force feedback joysticks, which I thought was fun.

I really understand this Kamui scoring system now after watching STGWeekly. It’s pretty cool, almost like resource management. It does take a little memorization. I also don’t know how to kill the bosses the right way, so I can’t make it past stage 3 on easy without continuing. It’s still fun to play over and over to get better. I get it now.

Japanese Santa showed up early tonight. STG, crazy Asian Kit-Kat bars, and ads to local J-pop concerts (I assume).

I say early, when it was actually 20 days shipping time! I didn’t realize the sk8tokyo importer guy actually lived in Japan. Oh well, looking forward to trying it this week.

I got the strawberry kit kats last time I ordered from him. Those we’re amazing. The green tea ones, not so much.

My last order through rancor included a huge pile of KitKats, because it was a larger order (box of Super Famicom games) and he basically put in as many as would fit within the weight limit for SAL shipping; I got pumpkin, wasabi, and green tea, but have only tried the pumpkin so far. I also have a few other varieties from previous orders sitting in the freezer.

I also have a pile of those Akihabara flyers from various previous orders. He sometimes throws porn ads in there. :|

Anyway, enjoy Crimzon Clover, Tim! It’s easily one of the best doujin shooters, and better than a lot of arcade originals.

I’m more concerned that it says they are 67 kcal. That seems like a lot.

Anyway, I’m having a little trouble with the game. It hitches with vsync on, and looks very choppy with vsync off. The framerate reads around 58.5, which seems strange. The demo has a barely perceptible stutter but it’s much less than the full version. I’ll try asking for advice at the system11 forums.

kcal is the same as calories. Don’t worry, those kit kats don’t have 67,000 calories in them. If they did, I am pretty sure all of Japan would be dead.

Indeed, “calorie” is short for kilocalorie.

You guys are bringing me back to 10th grade health class.

I was probably playing UN Squadron back then.

Shmups forum apparently doesn’t want to approve my stupid gaijin account anytime soon, but fortunately someone else complained about hitching in Crimzon Clover. (I bet a recent Windows update changed something.) The fix is to play the game under the Japanese locale. You can use AppLocale to play it without switching locale permanently in control panel. Smooth as glass now.

[EDIT] Based on some other posts on the forum there, it’s possible the fix was merely to reboot my PC. I don’t think I needed to go through that process above. Oops!

I’ve played Crimzon Clover for 10 hours now. It’s definitely my favorite shooter. I like that I can make steady progress in both survival and scoring. In either case, I don’t feel like I have to be perfect and I don’t feel like I have to memorize much. At most I have to remember which boss attack pattern comes next. The game gives out plenty of extra lives, and if I die or drop a combo, I can still score billions of points later.

The progress feels satisfying too. In the demo I barely made it to stage 2. But in my last game, I got all the way to the “final” boss on one continue. My 61 billion points (610 oku) would be enough for 27th out of 37 on the shmups forum high score list. Hey, better than nothing! I haven’t tried for high scores much yet because I’m still having fun with survival.

I mentioned the motivation from buying continues in the item shop. Simple mode is another great motivator for less experienced players like myself. The ship can’t enter its superpower mode, but there are a lot fewer bullets. That lets me focus on dodging, survival, and learning the flow of later stages (and feeling the joy of a one credit clear). I can transfer those skills to make more progress in Original mode.

I think the only thing that keeps it from being a personal 5-star all-time classic is the screen resolution. Depending on my mood, I switch between 1:1 (at 640x480 I think) and scaling it up by aspect ratio to fit most of my screen. If they ported the arcade version to support high resolution, it’d be perfect. Well, global leaderboards and Western digital distribution would be nice too.

In other news, I’m an hour into Hellsinker and it hasn’t grabbed me. I understand the mechanics enough to beat a couple levels, and yeah, the music is cool. But I hear the crazy stuff happens later in the game, and there seems to be only one continue. This is a major hurdle I mentioned before. I have no incentive to push forward because I don’t know whether the rest of the content is worth it. In cases like this, I usually spoil myself by watching some videos. It takes away the benefit of surprise but at least gives the game another chance.

Presented without comment.

I must know how you scooped the shmups forum.

I see Yotsubane has a blog post that doesn’t add much. Google Translate says the project status is “development intensive.” Okay then!

Shmups IRC (#shmups on EFNet) and @shmups both tend to be faster sources than the forum itself, though the latter doesn’t always cover everything (this CC thing isn’t on there, for example).

Other recent news:

-I recently bought LASERREIMU, a Touhou fangame released back in December. It’s based on the sixth official game, but it doesn’t play much like a Touhou game, and it’s got a lot of Cave influence. It’s quite good, and I’m finding it to be worth the $15 rancor sells it for.

-Touhou 14.3: Impossible Spell Card was announced this weekend (trailer), to be released at Reitaisai (big Touhou-only festival) next month. Similar to previous side games Shoot the Bullet and Double Spoiler, rather than being a full-length shmup, ISC is about bite-sized challenges in which you fight specific boss patterns; however, unlike StB and DS, you’re actually fighting bosses, rather than taking pictures of their attacks. The gimmick this time is that you get a choice of several different bomb types, including a standard bullet-clearing bomb, a teleport, and…okay, I lied about the photography, because one of the bombs is the camera from StB and DS.

Sadly, even though the game looks pretty fun, the western shmups and Touhou communities are butthurt about it, because apparently everyone expected ZUN to release another main game less than a year after TH14 (which came out back in August). Never mind the fact that he writes for two ongoing manga, is married, has an actual job completely separate from Touhou, has recently been active in the growing Japanese indie scene (including discussing finally bringing his games to the west), and surely still wants to have time to do other stuff.

I clued them in. I’m pretty pumped. The NESiCA version looks so smooth – assuming that’s what we’re getting.

Speaking of rancor, he wasn’t kidding about Crimzon Clover going out of print. It’s been completely gone from his page for months. People are asking around for it. I had to go check to make sure I still have the box. If they really do port the arcade version, I’d be glad to sell it along to some collector who cares more about original copies than I do. I did that recently with NES and SNES games.

Speaking of which, I just had a scary thought that maybe this will be some sort of console release. I can import, but I don’t own any consoles. That seems highly unlikely though, especially with this turnaround time.

While we wait for this Crimzon Clover announcement to happen, would anyone be interested in a scoring competition in some sort of freeware STG? I looked through @shmups for recent stuff (i.e. stuff I haven’t played) and found some good options:

-Touhou Makukasai ~ Fantastic Danmaku Festival, a Chinese-made Touhou fangame. Plays very much like an official game. Download links here, since the official download is on Baidu, which is slow and painful to use.
-Galaxy Frontier, a caravan (timed score attack) shooter with some slick-looking screenshots. Official page with game and soundtrack download links here.
-Hakubi no Onabe, some sort of bullet-hell hori. Official page with download link (it’s the one that says “OneDrive”) here.

There might be a prize involved if we get enough participants.

The timing isn’t great for me right now. I have Wargame and Dark Souls 2 lined up. But if you get a group to magically appear out of the QT3 woodwork, I will put a night into it. The first two look intriguing.

I’ll be ready for some friendly competition in CC starting day one. Well, day one plus 3 weeks shipping time if it has to come from rancor. Western digital distribution and integrated leaderboards would be amazing, though I’m not getting my hopes up.

I’ll throw in a prize for this or a CC competition if you can wait that long. It will probably be some other game I love that no one else is playing. :)

I was thinking of offering a choice of a $10 game on Steam, but if you throw in a prize, then I can still get something if we get enough players and I win. :D (And if someone other than one of us two wins, then they get DOUBLE PRIZES.)

I’ve got a bunch of (mostly non-shmup) games I’m playing right now, but I can set things aside to put a few hours into a scoring game every day for a week. I was leaning toward one of the first two games I linked; we’d need to agree on a difficulty for the Touhou game, but I figure most people here who would participate would be fine with Normal.