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I reached the stage 4 boss (train stage) a few times in RF1, so that’s progress. Still scoring under 10M, but it hardly matters what I’m scoring until I can approach the clear. Boss seems easy, but I haven’t practiced his attacks yet, so I had no idea what was coming.
As for getting past stage 3 in the first place: cowardice ho! I timed out the boss. His hard patterns only come out when he’s taken a bunch of damage, so the girltactics mean easy dodging. They also mean an embarassing replay, but that’s just pride fucking with ya.
Finally started to play the game today. I didn’t do that well, 22,687,120 was my best, but I’m learning the chains of stage 1 and 2 at least. I’m going to stream while I’m playing from time to time. It’ll be at the following address: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/DDPDOJ
Well, that didn’t take long. My first full run of the day resulted in a very fine clear of the game. It was a no-miss up to Stage 6, where I didn’t manage to destroy a large enemy and therefore cancel his bullets quite fast enough. Need to revise my strategy there a bit so I can do it 100% of the time. Final boss hit me three times, only one of which was of the “d’uh, I should’ve been able to dodge that”-variety. Overall, I’m pleased with the run, no stupid mistakes at all in the early stages. Hopefully that means I’m starting to get my game together and the final boss is all that stands between me and the no-miss.
Still, I gotta do some tweaking here and there. Outside the final boss, there are few attacks that can still catch me by surprise, and all of them have to do with the homing purple shots. They start out by NOT homing at you, only starting their hunt after they’ve gained some speed. Messes me up.
Replay of the clear available at http://www.ghegs.com/movies/Ether_Vapor_ALL_4miss.mp4
Cleared Boss Rush in quite the spectacular fashion – had no lives left going into final boss’ last attack patterns, but made it through safely. Rather oddly the game counted this as a clear in the statistics. Oh well. I beat the final boss again in practice immediately afterwards. I now have the means to 1CC the game, so I’d say that’ll happen sooner rather than later. The game gives out a fair amount of extra lives to do it with. You start with two extra lives and get one more for every 1m points. And the 5m barrier will be broken at final boss if not before, so that’s a whooping seven extra lives to work with.
Seven! Thinking about it like that, it sounds quite pathetic that I haven’t been able to 1CC the game yet.
And yet, the 1CC will only be the stepping stone to my true goal – the 1LC. That’s still a distance away – not a terribly long distance, though. Aside from Stage 7, I’ve no-missed every stage on practice (I plan to make videos of those runs available at some point) so I do have teh skillz. It’s just a matter of doing that one run where everything comes together. And like I agonized in a previous post, I do make stupid mistakes. Practice, practice, practice. And figuring out better ways to do things. I’m still not quite happy with how I’m dealing with some bosses’ attacks, which partly counts for the stupid mistakes.
Once I cleared stage 3 on RF1, I figured it would be worth practicing the boss’ patterns so I wasn’t just bombfesting every time. Fired up training mode for the first time, set it to stage 3 boss rush and cranked rank to about 75% or so. My logic: I know rank plunges when you die, and I pretty much always die on stage 3 at least once.
Well, apparently rank recovers quickly. Very. The next time I reached the boss in actual play, his third pattern was way worse than the variation I’d practiced. Obviously I need to learn the full rank versions of the attacks.
Meanwhile, big tanks keep killing me on the train stage.
could see a lot more improvement (300k) if I took advantage of all possible grazing spots.
i’m guessing it’s possible to get a 5.4m score with judge spear due to the extra bomb and weapon power, but grazing would be very difficult.
So, I did manage to find a way to deal with Stage 6 boss. Twice in a row I managed to do the whole stage without taking a single hit. Trick in the boss fight is to dodge the homing shots at the last moment, and sort of curve around the screen’s edge so it gives you enough room. This is good. I’ve now reached the final boss’ final form with a single credit. This is very good.
So why is it that during all three of my runs, I got hit not once, but TWICE on the second stage boss. This is very, very bad. It’s utterly ridiculous. Reviewing the captured footage afterwards revealed that I just hadn’t seen the bullets that hit me. I just navigated directly into them from the side. Though in one case, a single missile just barely managed to get through my cover fire, so that one was just bad luck. There is a 100% safe strategy that I could use with that boss, but it’s slower and it would annoy me to use that when I’ve successfully killed him without ever taking a hit so many times before. The attack that catched me is just random bullet spam, no real pattern to it…makes a it a bit annoying to deal with.
At least I can start practicing Stage 7 now, which is nothing but the final boss. A bit perspective/big lasers silliness at the start of it, but that doesn’t look too hard to figure out. First form is easy. Second form, the final one, is the I need the most practice on, but even that doesn’t look terribly difficult…it’s a fairly clean pattern, some aimed shots, some just to mess with you.
“Do u just enter the matrix or sumthing to play raiden like that? Seriously what is the secret?”
88m on RFJ arcade today. ugh. here’s what’s killing me:
stage 30. tap dodging. does. not. work. with. this. shitty. controller. so instead i need to get into the habit of conserving bombs for the boss patterns i need to touhou through but can’t because the 360 pad likes diagonals.
real battle 1. with the additional health of the striker planes, i’m going to have to actually memorize the second half of the stage as opposed to letting sweep do everything for me. time to run through some additional trials on this stage in arcade mode! yay! (oh god)
not going to think about real battle 2 for now. UGH.
I really don’t like them either. In the end, the weapons all seem prioritized for larger enemies and bosses, for whatever reason.
- The red weapon has some power, but it’s angled to the right (sort of like the red weapon in Musha Aleste) so it’s hard to hit with, though I think very close pointblanking to be possible.
- The green weapon seems to be my favorite so far, and I’m not afraid to do anything with it. Maybe because I can hit anything, despite the lack of *oomph* behind each shot.
- The blue weapon proves just as useful as in the original game, though I think it’s a bit better here. I might use it in the future, but I don’t like how certain attacks are completely covered up by it, especially when fully powered up.
I’ll call you when I get 400,000 or something. Somehow, you can still get a Toaplan amount of points, even with the ridiculously low point values of enemies, because stages are so long.
got a cool flat 130m out of the deal. there were a few scoring mistakes (lol lost fairy) and i just went and fucked the medal chain at the very end of the game, but i squeezed through to the large hovertank boss with 2 lives in reserve, and only died at the penultimate pattern of that boss. then bombfested the TLB because fuck if I was going to lose 10 million points.
you can watch the replay if you have the US version of aces and have an active xbox live account. no way for me to record an offsite video without yanking now-unreachable cords, sadly.
next, arcade mode.
(help me)
Dan Haigh
Ghegs
[DRZ] OTL-TIW
sikraiken
Alice
victoly
plasm0
Aquas
Raydere
szycag
BDA
bloocloud
Kollision
