I’d be up for it. I love playing scrolling shooters though I generally kind of suck at them.
I’m in.
Good, I was starting to think this was an elaborate plan to get me to buy WarpRattler a videogame. My prize was going to be a choice between One Finger Death Punch, Aces Wild, and Unity of Command, because I wish more people were playing them. Or a copy of Kamui on Desura (or wait a few weeks until it comes out on Steam).
If you don’t like any of those choices, you have to bitch and moan enough until I give in.
Guess I’d better look at the guide to scoring posted earlier.
Anyway, I liked the first two because I’ve never played a Touhou or a caravan game.
I’ll gladly grind out one of these games to get a free copy of Unity of Command. (And give second place a $10 Steam game.)
However, I just finished playing a credit of Galaxy Frontier, and…it’s not a caravan after all. I have been deceived! Fortunately, it’s still quite cool, and would be great for a competition; it’s relatively easy to play for survival (I cleared on my sole credit), so you won’t get frustrated by running into a brick wall halfway through the game, and it’s short enough that you can 1CC five times in an hour.
I definitely like Galaxy Frontier more. The Touhou fan game felt too floaty. (Maybe it’s the lack of turning animations?)
I thought it was way too hard to dodge things in Galaxy Frontier until I realized you are supposed to build your meter with the wide shot (Z) and cash it in at the right moment with the nuclear attack (X). I picked up 672M on one credit but died to the last boss. The beam doesn’t seem to build much meter so there’s a tradeoff there.
I might need to cheat a little and bind the beam shot (rapid fire Z) to a joystick button. I don’t want to make my hands sore a weekend before Dark Souls 2! That happened a few months ago after a hard week with OFDP and Aces Wild…
Also it looks like it keeps counting score after you continue? The replay has the right score for your first credit, but the high score list doesn’t. Let me know if I have that wrong.
I’m not sure how to test the Galaxy Frontier issue, because I can’t imagine getting a game-over in this game if you’re using nuclear properly; I played a second credit before writing this post, and when I finished the final battle, I still had something like fifteen lives remaining (estimated, since the game stops showing them past nine, but they’re still there). (Replay here, if you want to see what I’m doing; just throw it into the replay folder in the game’s directory.) Judging from my score for that run, I fear a counterstop might not be out of the question; if it is, and if multiple players somehow do so during a competition, we’d need to rank them by clear time or something.
As far Fantastic Danmaku Festival, characters do have turning animations! They’re not very obvious, though, especially when you’re busy focusing on not getting hit. Speaking of, remember that you can hold Shift to focus, which focuses your options forward, slows your movement (very useful for the level of precision you often need to move through gaps in patterns), and perhaps most importantly for this level of play, shows your hitbox. (In this game, it also changes attack and bomb properties for a couple of characters; Sanae, the green-haired shrine maiden, has an alternate bomb when focused, and Patchouli, the purple magician, has a charge mechanic that fires a different special shot when you let go of the button, based on whether or not you’re focused at that time.) After playing the game a little bit more while writing this post, something definitely feels off compared to real Touhou games; specifically, it feels like the bullet hitboxes are wrong, and I’m getting hit by attacks that would be grazed at the same distance in an official game.
I too, lived through many of the older shooters: Rygar,In the Hunt,Sinistar,Ninja Spirit, Gradius, Sky Shark, Gunsmoke, Legendary Wings, etc. Though, many were very tough bound by the the 3 minute rule of gaining the player’s quarter. I feel, that many of today’s shooters don’t have that same feel as yesterday.
What are these doing in an STG list?
Another potential competition game: my good friend and STGT teammate Sasupoika’s long-term shmup project, Aero Chimera, is finally finished, and planned for release sometime next week. However, by all accounts, it’s got the opposite problem of Galaxy Frontier, in that it’s incredibly difficult, such that just clearing stage one is giving the test players trouble.
If you are looking for more ‘classic’ feeling STGs, check out Eschatos, Ginga Force, or Raiden Fighters Aces on the 360. On the PC there are SITER SKAIN’s games (Reflex, Kamui, Alltynex Second), ETHER VAPOR Remaster, Satazius, and Locomalito’s games (Hydroah, Verminest, Viriax)
http://www.locomalito.com/
http://nyu-media.com/category/shooting/
http://www.playism-games.com/games/ethervaporremaster/
http://www.playism-games.com/games/satazius/
No, should I be getting ready?
I love how the scoring system is entirely composed of styles I hate.
Not only that, but by all accounts, the game itself is incredibly difficult. Even Jaimers (one of the best players in the western shmups community, with numerous high-level clears and scores, including a world record) was having trouble with it in the prerelease builds.
Should be perfect for a bunch of inexperienced STG players in a scoring competition!
My Internet-bro trap15 is running a shooting game tournament over on shmups forum. Starts in a couple of weeks, though he might be pushing back the start date a week for personal reasons.
Also, we need to decide on a start date and a game for our mini-tournament here! Ideally, I’d like to start prior to the tournament linked above, but if people still aren’t available at that point, I’m fine with overlapping with that; as for the game, I could compile a list of freeware shooters (so we don’t have to deal with MAME or with people not owning a game) for people to vote on. I still haven’t tried Aero Chimera myself, but judging from the reactions from good players, I’m not sure a game where most of the players can’t get past stage one would make for a fun competition.
Unfortunately I’m out of commission for a couple weeks while I play Dark Souls 2.
Also, where the hell are the Japanese game journalists to tell me what’s going on at Yotsubane?
Yotsubane’s a doujin dev, and JP games news doesn’t follow that scene. We won’t have any details about the new CC thing until he gives us updates himself.
No Rock, Paper, Shuriken then?
(I’ll see myself out.)
They just showed a trailer at Stunfest (big French arcade-gaming event) for Crimzon Clover: World Ignition, which appears to be the PC port of the NESiCA version of the game. More importantly, the trailer was fully in English.
More details as they come in.
EDIT: Steam released confirmed. GET HYPE.
I was going to post an image of an explosion in response to the subtitle, but it looks like the trailer has that taken care of:
I’m pissed. I wanted a 3.5" disk X68000 release shipped from Japan.
Post the trailer when it goes up. I still don’t understand how stream archiving works.
I know you’re joking, but the shmups IRC channel has been a bitchfest for the past half-hour since the announcement, because apparently people are so against moving into the present and using Steam that they’d rather spend three times as much on a disc copy…which would require Steam anyway, because of Steamworks leaderboards.