You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June 2009.
Spent some time today to clear the game with the rest of the characters and put up the video of my highest scoring clear to my site. I even got a special request for a Tempest replay so I made one of that as well. Clearly I’m moving up in the world…now where’s my falsificare?
Arcade++ could be pretty fun if it wasn’t for the game’s technical problems, mainly the hard-to-see enemy bullets. The extremely short range teleportation gimmick is hardly a proper compensation. It’s sad, the game had some good potential…the characters are different enough (aside from Ruby and R.A.D being mostly copies of each other) and have unique weapons to keep them interesting. The stages aren’t too bad and the scoring system didn’t put me off, I even found myself figuring some of the more simple sections out: “Hmm…if I delay destroying that enemy I can keep the multiplier through this empty section until that power-up box scrolls in…”
Not the first time I’ve run into a game where I enjoy the scoring system but the game itself has issues that make it very hard to enjoy properly. Ah well. I’m sure I’ll get to Death Smiles or Raiden Fighters eventually.
Finished my run through Wolfenstein 3D. I actually got the game to lock up at one point, great port. Episode 6 was huge and has much more complicated levels compared to the rest of the episodes. Which boiled down to more time spent running around and thinning out the ranks of the Nazi party and the SS. Highest score ended up being about 910xxx points in Episode 2… somehow. Looks like the leaderboards are ranked overall by score earned in the level, which is determined from kills and Kill%, treasure found and Treasure%, Secret%, and finally a bonus for coming in under Par Time. Oh and the difficulty level, which affects the score by virtue of more enemies being present on higher difficulties. So, as it turns out, just being thorough and playing at high difficulty will shoot you most of the way to the top.
Next up: I haven’t decided yet. I need to go back and bone up on my Raiden Fighters Jet. I also have a few things I want to do in Raiden IV and Otomedius. Plus I need to break out the PS2 and the Hori Upscan Converter and shake up the Raiden DX highscore thread @ shmupsforum.
P.S. – Change Air Blade PVP is lol.
I recently got a japanese Xbox 360 so naturally I got carried away playing around with it and forgot about Ether Vapor for a while, like I figured would happen. I plan to return to it sooner or later, I’m just not satisfied enough with the 1miss. The little break might even do me some good.
I bought the new console to play the games I had already acquired in anticipation of the event: Raiden IV, Raiden Fighters Aces and Death Smiles. After playing each maybe an hour I’ll probably leave Raiden IV on the shelf. It’s just not that interesting, the graphics are so shiny it’s distracting and the bullet wobble is really annoying. I see little reason to play it when the games in the Aces collection have none of those problems. RF1 has caught my attention the most so far, maybe I’ll start working on that at some point. Death Smiles seems pretty fun too, I prefer horis anyway and the scoring system doesn’t feel overly gimmicky which usually turns me off them.
While those games were the main reason I bought the system, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time playing XBLA titles. Bionic Commando: Rearmed, Mega Man 9, Omega Five, GripShift…all excellent games. I 1CCed Omega Five just today, but it was with the very overpowered Sensei character, so it’s not much of an accomplishment. I do like character-based shmups like this (Section Z, Final Mission, etc) so it’s something I’d like to work on more but sometimes I find the bullets hard to see and get hit without knowing why, so I’m not sure if I want to spend time on a game that has such technical issues. I’m not sure if I’m just getting old or something, but the most often I fail to see bullets is in high-res polygonal games like Omega Five and Raiden IV. But I am playing them on a SD CRT TV, which might be a reason to this.
MEIN LEBEN!
I had 400MSP left over on my US XBL account so I bought and am currently playing through Wolfenstein 3D on XBLA. The leaderboards seem to be based on both score and time. Since I enjoy exploring and killing everything (this was much more satisfying in Doom with the larger variety of weapons, monsters, and level architecture… oh yeah and the automap) I’m doing much better on the score front than the time front. 477000 or so for the first episode, surely half of that came from floor 10. I don’t think any of my friends are playing the game so I don’t really have much incentive to sprint through the levels just to get my leaderboard ranking up.
It’s a lot smoother than the last time I played it. To be fair the last time I played I was a poor gamer with a low-spec 486, which meant shareware episode only. Now I’m getting to enjoy all of the annoyances features added to the full 6-episode version. Zombies that make no noise to alert you to their presence until they’re firing on you, two keys needed to escape most levels. Fortunately, the gamepad controls don’t hurt Wolf3D as much as they did Doom, since the game has far fewer weapons and slower turning. Much lower difficulty in general, actually, even though I’m playing at “Bring ‘em On!”
Despite the fact that I love to complain about whatever I’m playing (this will be a theme) I’m enjoying myself and I’ll probably end up grinding my way through all 6 episodes. Then, back to racing games and shoot’em ups!
The Log is the guitar you unlock for getting 5 stars on every career song on Expert difficulty in Guitar Hero 1 and 2. I forget the names of the equivalent guitars in the subsequent GH games, so I just refer to the same feat as “Log” in those too. I was hitting a wall in GH:M, so I dusted off 2, where I was 4 songs short of the Log. I’m now Log -3, having rocked the casbah on Institutionalized. I’d been away for quite a while, because my previous best only barely earned 4 stars.
All signs pointed to Rock This Town falling before Institutionalized, but the former is more of a rhythm challenge, and the latter a fingering exercise. Rhythm strumming is the weakest part of my game, hence stuff like Welcome to the Neighborhood giving me fits.
For extra measure, I admit it was a pleasure, I passed stage 4 for the first time in RF1. Died horrendously to the snow stage boss in our first ever meeting. Improved my score by a few million, but stayed in 3rd on the leaderboard. I’m only about halfway to Khoa’s #2 score, so I can expect stasis for a spell.
Dan Haigh
Ghegs
[DRZ] OTL-TIW
sikraiken
Alice
victoly
plasm0
Aquas
Raydere
szycag
BDA
bloocloud
Kollision
