Been a while since my last posting, so here’s what amounts to a situation report:

I’ve been wandering from one game to another trying to find The One that I’d feel motivated to properly work on. I’ve played a bit of G-Darius for score. It’s really fun. Beam battles against the bosses are an awesome visual reward for doing good. I’ve gone all-lower route and made it to Stage 4, though Absolute Defender ends my game more often that not. Damn him and his pool of random attacks. He can be either a wuss or a total bitch. And I always mess up right before he shoots his twin beams out, leaving me feeling stupid when I have no captured enemy to counter them with. I’ve been playing the game on Taito Memories, which I understand runs fast. I have mixed feelings about that.  On one hand, it’s cool to play a game’s slightly harder variation. On the other hand, it kinda sucks when there’s no slow-down at all and there are some patterns that it’d be really nice to have on. I guess I could just get the PS1 version to play and practice on and move back to the PS2 one if I feel like getting a bigger challenge afterwards.

I’ve also been re-visiting R-Type Delta and seeing if I could do a No-Force run. I think I could do it, though practicing it is painful. When you have to avoid the Force power-ups, recovering from death is waaaaay much harder. I’d really have to rely on emulation for practice so I wouldn’t go insane. Regardless, I’ve made a No-Miss, No-Force run to Stage 3′s boss on a credit. It’s actually the part right before the boss fight itself that’s so far the biggest obstacle. Those blue spinners shooting destructable blue bullets take a lot of punishment. But it’s really interesting to play the game this way. Parts that are barely noticable during normal play suddenly become deathtraps (the beehives in Stage 2 are a good example). And when the only equipment at your disposal are the normal gun, two bits and missiles you really start to appreciate them a lot more and figure out exactly what they can do.

And finally, I’ve been dabbling with Contra: Shattered Soldier. After a few attempts I S-ranked the train stage. The other three stages open at the start don’t feel quite as much fun as that one, but I think I’ll at least try to S-rank all of those and see if I feel like pushing further.

Next week I’ll be getting Shock Troopers for my MVS. Maybe I’ll get addicted to it, maybe it’ll stay in my shelf for years before I get in the right mindset for it like has happened many times before. We’ll see.