As of about 2 hours ago, it is Christmas here on the Pacific Coast, so Merry Christmas to all.

I went out and bought a VGA cable for my 360, looking to put my nearly-3-year-old secondary monitor, an Envision H170L with a native resolution of 1280×1024, to good use. After a little setup, I decided to use Mushihime-sama Futari as a guinea pig. Even in yoko mode, playing Futari in 360 mode was mindblowing–everything looks much clearer.

And, I can more easily tell the difference between the pixel hell that is Arcade mode and 360 mode (or as I like to call it, Futari HD) than I can on a horizontal CRT.

I’d like to put the LCD in a vertical position and experience true vert awesomeness, but I have no easy way of doing it at the moment, and I bought my monitor with no regard to tate. *sigh*

In the midst of playing around with my new setup, I, about an hour ago as of this writing, decided to kick off Christmas by taking a 1CC on Black Label’s Original mode, using Palm; I’ve always been more of a fan of fast movement coupled with concentrated firepower than slower movement with a wider spread.

I could’ve easily no-bombed Stage 5 (Cave, I’m really happy for you, I’ma let you finish, but Raiden had some of the best fast bullets of all time!) up to the indoor area like on a previous run, but I have trouble replicating the lines I made that made bombing unnecessary. This was also the run where I finally had the scoring system under control (A-shot with blue counter, and C shot with green counter); I was able to pick up two extends (and the Stage 5 1-up) and finish with a little under 210 million and a life left (lol, Larsa bomb spam).

Next up: Figuring out how to make playing for survival and playing for score go hand in hand in BL Maniac. And maybe more 1.5 because it’s starting to collect digital dust.

p.s. The record for Rez HD Area 5 is 9 million. I have the replay file, and it clocks at over 99’59″999 and I stopped watching about 1 boss form in, so maybe it’s not really a falsificare so much as GOOD OLD FASHIONED HOURS LONG MILKING geez fuck this game