Gaming Journals

Eventhough I should practice for my exams right now, I feel more like playing Batrider. It’s a free world.

I finally got a D score the other day. While this is not very high it was already enough for #1 over at shmups.com. It’s sad to see so few good Batrider scores. I have to admit though, that playing with a team and triggering the secret bosses is the most difficult challenge I’ve yet encountered in a shmup, Garegga 1cc is a joke compared to this.

It looks like that D was totally luck and that I’m horribly inconsistent at this game. My second best score in the last 3 days was only A,3. I reach stage 5 in every 50th run or so.

Some notes and individual stage breakdown:

Stage 1 – Metro City

-around 800k before boss, no suicides.

-kill Strawman at boss. destroy all parts except the very small turrets at the left and right of the boss. Weaken these and the main body and wait until the fireturrets uncover. Destroy the boss immediately killing the two small turrets (2×30k) and the two fireturrets (2×50k) while he explodes. Sometimes the fireturrets just won’t open themselves, but if everything goes correct my score is around 1,2mill

-I’m not going for his rocket backpack yet. It seems that I destroy the boss too soon if I try. However, with the backpack and some more milking during the stage, I could get around 1,4mill.

Stage 2 – Sky High

-Trigger special shot power up during the very first enemy waves.

-Use a bomb at the missile stream before the boss, Flying Baron’s bomb seems perfct for this.

-1,5mill-1,6mill before boss

-There are two ways to milk this boss. Either you destroy the turrets that shoot the green rings asap and milk the drones for medals or you destroy them asap, weaken the boss until he opens his arms and milk the extensions for 10k each. If I haven’t died during the stage and am still using Flying Baron, I’ll go for the second technique, because I don’t want to destroy drones for the extend. Going from 2 to 3 ships in stock is a huge rank increase compared to 1 to 2. If I’m on my last ship, namely Miyamoto, I’ll go for the first milking technique and collect that extend item. After Boredom I have around 1,9mill-2mill. If Flying Baron is still alive -> suicide.

-Shoot of one side of Bashinet and milk the small rockets with aura. It’s possible to milk the razorblades during his next attack cycle for 3k each, but rather difficult to do with Miyamoto, because of his piercing options that will only give you 300 points each and thus making it worthless. I went for destroying his tail and milking the small cluster bombs earlier, but decided against it in the end. It’s not worth that much and it’s pretty much guaranteed that you lose Miyamoto there, which means, that you can’t milk Bashinet’s last form with his options.

-As already said, milk the last form with Miyamoto’s options. the third option level seems to give the most points for some strange reason. Try to shoot the missiles with shot and not with your options for 1k each. The small pods have to be destroyed with aura if Miyamoto is still alive. With Strawman it’s ok to use shot and/or options to destroy them for 6k each, because they’re both non piercing.

-2,6mill-2,7mill after stage 2

Stage 3 – Sewer

-If Miyamoto is still alive, wait until the first medal appears, collect it and suicide. This way you avoid the infamous dropping 10k medal while you’re respawning – a Raizing classic!

-To make four medals appear for each flipover turret, it’s best to activate (Strawman’s) bomb exactly when the middle turret’s laser is vanishing. I’m still having some consistency problems here and this bit still seems kind of awkward.

-Right after this, a red helicopter will appear, destroy only one of his sidepods and wait until the screen gets crowded with tons of blue helis and the two yellow mechas -> bomb. The red heli is worth 10k if destroyed with bomb. Around here, I usually get my second extend item, giving me back my Garegga character.

-I use another bomb for the three tanks (20k each) and the green house with four medals and of course a last bomb for the houses before the boss.

-Milking the boss is crucially important and it’s damn difficult. 90% of my runs end here. I dodge the first few attacks with Strawman and then suicide to weaken the turrets and get Flying Baron. Set the options to front and milk the turrets. One turret is worth 10k if destroyed with shot and you get 50k if you destroy one hatch. After some milking it’s ok to use a bomb to destroy the remaining hatches. On a good run I have around 4,5mill points before Black Heart.

-Collect the extend from the drones during Black Heart’s first form. Milking the wings with shot on frequency #60 is worth around 200k. When the second form starts, I concentrate on the boss’ weakpoint. Destroying the wings is worth 50k each, sometimes I’m getting one, usually not.

-Around 5mill after stage 3.

Stage 4 – Airport

-Ideally I want to keep Flying Baron through the whole stage, I usually fail at trying so. The stage itself has the obvious hidden medals and is kinda straightforward.

-You can combine uncovering the huge stock of medals in the middle of the stage with bombing the blue helicopters for 10k each. But because I usually miss the two big bomber items at the beginning of the stage on purpose (to trigger another extend item in stage 5), I don’t have enough bombs for this.

-5,8mill-5,9mill before boss

-It’s difficult to milk Bazzcok with Miyamoto, milking him with Flying Baron is a cakewalk though. Destroy one of his turrets first and then milk the drones for around three attack patterns of the other turret. Then destroy the other turret and milk some more. The 6mill extend should appear. If I’ve already lost Flying Baron, it’s best to collect not more than one option item or maybe even none at all for milking. 6,3mill-6,4mill before Gob-Robo.

-I’m luckily getting a bit more consistent at destroying Gob-Robo’s arms for ten 10k medals, but sometimes he still refuses to spin them.

-Around 6,5mill after stage 4 and I’m happy.

Stage 5 – Colosseum

-One of the biggest walls in the entire game

-If I have no bombs left, I’ll lose Miyamoto early on, which means that I won’t be able to fight Tsumujimaru in the highway stage. I just have to pray for an easy first form. The big green rings, the exploding snake pods – his first form is pure horror, nearly as hard as Envy.

-The second form is quite a relief in opposition to the first one. If you get lucky, you can get around 1mill points from this boss only, but I’m glad with everything above 7mill

Stage 6 – Highway

-I get a lot of extends in this stage which means that I can suicide a lot and still have all 3 characters in my team for the three rivals. First I get a score based one at 7,5mill, then I get one from a third dropped big bomber item (either from the yellow tank or from one of the Ninjas) and maybe the extend from the blue hovercraft, which I usually try to destroy, but sometimes fail at.

-Breaking my medalchain is very likely in this stage. There are a lot of really difficult places. The problem is, that you lose a lot of points in the opening bit of Zenovia City if you don’t have max medals there. There are around 30 (!) medals there. On top of that it’s difficult to build up a new chain in the highway stage (because there are close to no medals), making a chainbreak even more regretable.

-Blunt is easy, Sobut is easier, Envy is the killer.

-9mill after this stage, but I jump for joy, no matter what my score is each time I clear it.

Stage 7 – Airport2

-My favourite boss of all time just got an update and got even more dificult as he is in Garegga.

-From here on it’s all about survival, though milking this boss can give you a lot of points, maybe around 3mill.

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It’s a huge problem that I don’t have a fixed suicide distribution for stage 6 onwards yet. I need to work on that. Hoarding lives only makes Zenovia City even harder, as if it wouldn’t be hard enough already…

On another note I could easily improve my Normal mode score, but I don’t really care anymore for that, Advanced mode has to be my priority first.

101/128

Latest addition was the exit from F27 to F36.  That’s what, 18 new ticks in the last 2 months, 6 in the last month?  Zipping right along.

Progress will only slow further, as the feats remaining are yet more daunting.  The third exit of F27, for instance:

Umihara Kawase presents merciless skill checks.  “To reach this door, you’re going to have to master long toss swings*.  You’ve used long tosses a bunch, and you were able to muddle through on stages where you could retry repeatedly on failure, or take 20 swings back and forth to build up momentum.  But now you’re going to do it right, on the first try.  Master the skill or die.”

This is something that goes on in most any deep action game, but I feel like it’s more discrete in Umihara.  THIS is the spot where you need to learn the basics of boost jumps, and THAT is the spot where you need to master them.

* Don’t try to find a definition for “long toss swing.”  If there’s a lexicon for UKS, I’ve never seen it.  I make up all the names I use for techniques.  If this were something anyone actually discussed, we could hammer out common definitions.

I bought Persona 3 FES back when it first came out but, for some reason or another, I never got around to actually playing it much. I had already sunk about 80 hours into the original P3, and while it was a great game I guess I didn’t feel particularly motivated at the time to play through it again. A few days ago I hit a gaming lull, having just beaten a couple mediocre old FPSes I had never gotten around to beating, and figured it was finally time to dig out FES and give it a try. Maybe I’d try out this Hard mode thing. I mean, it’s a JRPG. How hard can it be?

See the title for the answer to that one. When Atlus says “Hard” they aren’t fucking around (ask anyone who has played Nocturne on Hard and brace yourself for ranting.)  Enemies now do something like 4-5x their original damage and you can be killed by random mooks in three or four hits. Bosses and strong normal enemies can one-shot characters easily with critical hit, or sometimes even with a special attack that hits normally. Dumb or unlucky moves are almost inevitably disastrous, and your party members no longer get automatically revived after a battle.

Funnily enough all of this doesn’t make for a radical change in your playstyle.  P3 was always primarily about exploiting your enemies’ weaknesses while doing your best to safeguard your own, and Hard mode simply reinforces that by not letting you get lazy and tank hits if you don’t feel like playing strategically. I’ve always enjoyed how combat was generally a fast-paced, high stakes affair in SMT games, with both you and the enemies doing large amounts of damage to each other rather than grinding away. Since Hard mode just heightens that feeling, I’m going to press on with it.