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I got into the PCB game a while back and have slowly been amassing boards. One of the ones I got was Konami’s Mystic Warriors, a run ‘n gun with ninjas. That’s an awesome premise right there. And four players can play at once, which is cool, but not all that relevant in my case.
It took me a surprisingly long time to just decide what character to use. There are five available but the practical difference comes down to one thing – the rate of fire vs. amount of spread. On one end is the girl-ninja Yuri, who can shoot across the screen without any pause to her stream, but only in a very narrow stream. On the opposite end are Keima and Kojiro, who can shoot a (slightly different from each other) 4-spread, but there’s a sizable pause in the rate of fire unless you’re right next to the enemy. As anybody even slightly familiar with Konami’s run ‘n guns knows, Spread Shot Is God, so at first I tried playing the characters on that end, only to find myself falling to bullets shot by enemies when they were in the gaps of my shotstream.
Anyway, eventually I decided on playing as Spyros, who does a 2-stream with only a slight pause. Outside of considering the game mechanics, I wanted to play as Yuri so that when I make the replay video, people watching can be entertained by her thighs and bare butt cheeks in all their pixelly glory. Ahem. After choosing the character, progress was swift for a while, with Stage 4 being the first hurdle. It’s an autoscrolling stage where enemies come in from all the four corners of the screen, requiring memorizing some of the bigger enemies’ entry points so they can be dealt with before they become too much of a problem.
(This is my first issue with the game. You want to kill enemies before they can get a single shot off, even a small number of enemy bullets can overwhelm you easily. The character’s hitbox is pretty big and vertically oriented, so when there’s a lot of fire coming in from the left and right…well, that gets problematic fast.)
Second hurdle, and the one I’m currently struggling on, is Stage 6, another autoscrolling stage. There’s a part where from the bottom left of the screen comes two carriages shooting a lot of bullets (there’s, like, 12 bullets on screen at the same time! That’s a fuckload in this game.) and it’s impossible to destroy even one of them before they start shooting, so you have to herd the bullets to one side while moving to the opposite one. A basic shmup tactic, but very hard to execute here. I got tired of taking a hit in this part so I can fired up MAME for some savestate-practicing and managed to do it once after grinding the nine-second bit for a good while. I found a replay by some Japanese player on Youtube that shows the technique. As a sidenote, slashing at enemies (happens automatically when you’re close enough) also cancels any enemy bullets caught in the blade’s arc, but applying it reliably here doesn’t feel feasible.
Getting better at that part is mandatory because the next hurdle comes right afterwards, the Stage 6 boss. If you’ll keep watching the replay, even the Japanese player takes two hits there. On one hand this makes me feel better about my lack of success against him, on the other hand this fills me with dread because goddamn, even the Japanese player takes two hits. The problem are the two respawning turrets. Combined together and with the boss’ main fire they can very easily trap you. Best tactic is to destroy the turrets first as they only respawn five times each before disappearing completely, but this is way easier said than done. After the turrets are gone the rest is easy.
(This is my second issue with the game. This part is clearly designed to be played in multiplayer, so that the enemy fire is less concentrated and more spread towards different players, giving each of them an easier time dodging.)
Stage 7 is very easy, for the first half of the stage you barely have to even move and the rest isn’t that hard. The boss fight against three enemies is fairly easy as well. There’s three enemies, two of which will engage you while the third will stay on the higher plane. As long as you don’t go there, he won’t bother you yet. To kill the first two, just roll past them, shoot/slash a few times, rinse and repeat. After they’re dead the third enemy will jump down and throw his chain at you, which can be dodged by just jumping to the other plane, shooting a few times at the following enemy and jumping down again. Rinse, repeat. Not the first time this pattern has been applied to a boss fight in this game, either.
I haven’t played the rest of the game much, only creditfed through once or twice, but I don’t recall it being that difficult. Stage 6 as a whole might be the hardest in the whole game. Conquer that, conquer the game?
I got the Pulstar no-miss clear!
Having already made it to Stage 5 boss in normal play, I went and savestate-practiced the latter stages because I got frustated over having to play ~20 minutes just to make it to where I’m having problems. Worked wonders. Figured out quick-kill techniques for the last four bosses, though they basically boil down to “get real close so your pod does huge damage”. Still, felt good finding those. Of course using those means points lost, you could milk some of the bosses for spawning enemies, but it’s a checkpoint-shmup anyway, so scoring isn’t really a high factor in the game’s appeal in the first place.
There’s a Whoops-moment just before the fourth boss, when I accidentally detonate the pod when I was just trying to lock the bits back in place. Oh well. Luckily that boss can easily be done without the pod and I just played Stage 5 a bit more carefully until I got powered up again. Come to think of it, I imagine the first five stages could be done without the pod completely…but from Stage 6 onwards there’s quite a lot of enemy fire coming your way, I don’t know if those are possible without the pod’s frontal protection.
I really like the C powerup, which increases the shot’s charging speed and allows you to hit rapid max faster with fewer button taps. It’s like the developers saying “Fuck that constant tapping, here, take this so your fingers won’t fall off”. And even then the game is roughly 50% about applying charge shots, I do almost the whole last stage with that alone.
Anybody else notice that the first boss is like a garbage-version of the final boss? Looks kinda the same, has similar attacks…it didn’t occur to me until this last run.
I don’t think it was five credits after my previous post that I got the 1CC in GunForce: Battle Fire Engulfed Terror Island. While having the no-miss clear would be nice, I think it’d be more annoying to go for than its worth to me. I’m not really getting the”must get a perfect run!”-vibe from the game like I did with Shattered Soldier, for example. So I think I’m just going to move on.
It was an okay run overall. My fight against the first boss didn’t go exactly according to my usual battle plan, instead I kept jumping around like a moron, but hey. My first death was in the ladders of Stage 3. Real bummer that one, probably could’ve been avoided. It takes two bullets to take those guys down, and you’ll notice I did shoot him twice, but the second bullet hit him while he was still in the last frames of his invulnerability period which allowed him to take a shot off.
I’m very pleased I didn’t die again until the latter part of the last stage. The game’s all about finding the right pacing for each situation, sometimes you want to take your time and kill every enemy on screen, other times you want to just run past as fast as possible since enemies themselves don’t hurt you, only their bullets do. The hallway of lasers is certainly of the latter variety. The last two deaths were just unfortunate timing, especially the last one. Echoing my first death, the last death happened mere frames after my own invulnerability period had worn off.
I’ve been playing Pulstar lately. I do love me a good R-Type clone and Pulstar is certainly that, being that it was at least partially made by the same staff, I believe. The pre-rendered graphics aren’t really to my liking, but I’ve slowly been warming up to them. At times the screen gets a bit messy and it’s hard to see what’s going on, but that’s what the Force-like-device is for. Can’t move it around in this game, but you can detonate it to damage enemies. Of course that can leave you in a tricky position, I haven’t really found any use for it so far. Maybe against the end boss?
But that’s still a long way ahead. Out of the game’s eight stages I’ve only seen the first five. I’ve one-lifed it to the fifth boss a couple of times and every time I do he seems to have a new attack waiting for me. And as per usual in this subgenre, dying once means you’re pretty much fucked. Not that it’s terribly hard to get back to the boss from the checkpoint, I’ve done it, but the ship’s so underpowered it’s difficult to put up a good fight. Actually, in large part that’s due to lacking the C powerup, which simply accelerates the rate at which your cannon is charged (and also makes it easier to reach max. rapid firepower). With C you can really dish out the firepower and bosses tend to fall very quickly.
Instead of letting the fact that the game is best cleared on the first life bother me, I’ve taken it to mean that the first life is when I play serious and safe, the rest are for experimentation. Figuring out if there’s space to squeeze through that spot, if that route is better, stuff like that. It’s a long process to be sure, I just hope I can keep at it.
Also, I finally crossed over that final line in arcade gaming and got into PCBs. There was a lovely supergun for sale (made by the very talented RGB, who also made me my CMVS) and I jumped on it. As an added bonus, all the hacked Saturn controllers I had for the CMVS also work with the supergun perfectly. Very awesome. And yes, that means I’ll be using autofire with those games as well.
My plan is to only own a couple of PCBs at any one time. Buy a game, reach the arbitrary goal I’ve set for it (1LC for most, I’d guess), make a video, sell it, repeat from step one. We’ll see how spectacularly that plan fails. For now, I only have one PCB, Irem’s GunForce: Battle Fire Engulfed Terror Island, a pre-Metal Slug run’n'gun. It was a good purchase as it was fairly cheap, it’s made by my probably favorite gaming company and it only received a what I understand is a not-so-great SNES port. It’s a pretty fun game, too.
It’s certainly flawed, though. Though there’s several vehicles to jump into, you don’t really need them and many times it’s even better to ignore them completely. Even though the vehicles have their own hitpoints, enemies can still hit the player character directly as well, and it’s much harder to dodge a shot you see clearly coming your way when you’re on a tank. So it’s not like the Metal Slug where you just hide inside and take a pounding.
The biggest problem with the game, however, is its absolutely bonkers off-the-asylum-wall player hitbox. I made some gifs of my recent fights against the first boss to demonstrate:
<– This doesn’t kill you…while this does –>
Quite insane. I think I’ve once made it to Stage 4 on my first life but that was a rare occasion indeed. My best credit has been midway into Stage 6, the last stage. But I’ve only made it to that stage twice overall, a good part of my runs end already at Stage 4. I should be able to manage a 1CC, but I’m not sure I want subject my sanity to trying to one-life this. Interestingly, when I credit-fed through the game to get a bit more acquainted with the later stages, I actually killed the last boss on my first try, without dying. Yet I still get killed by the first boss way too often because the nutty hitbox. (Actually, I guess it could be that only that boss’ that particular attack has a bugged hitbox, I haven’t noticed such ridiculousness with my deaths elsewhere.)
On the plus side, the game’s very short. A full playthrough only takes around 15 minutes. This makes it much more comfortable to start a new credit, when you know you can be back at your problem spot very quickly. I often end up playing 5 credits in a row which takes me around 40-50 minutes, yet I usually only play one credit of Pulstar at a time because currently it takes around 20 minutes to get back to my problem spot…and I’m only barely over the halfway point in that game.
I do have some other PCBs coming in (and I’m on the lookout for a few more) so hopefully I can keep working on these without being terribly distracted.
After a week or so of playing Ocean Sprint (R) I managed to get sub-1:42. First I just shaved off tenths of seconds, went from 1:42,099 to 1:42,050 and 1:42,016, until I finally hit 1:41,783. Then I tightened it up a bit and got 1:41,633, which is my current best.
Almost immediately after my last post I went and tried a Dualshock 2. I had previously tested only the first Dualshock model, and the analog sticks feel and handle quite different there. Dualshock 2 fares much better, it still has a slightly larger deadzone than the Hori Anashin pad I used at the beginning, but it’s so much smoother and I feel have much better control with it. So I went and bought a brand-new Dualshock 2 and that’s my weapon of choice now.
I also revised my line going through the tunnel. My previous line was fast, but only if nothing went wrong while entering the tunnel. Nine times out ten something went wrong, either I missed the very narrow gap between wall and civillian car I need to squeeze through, or the said car happened to spawn as a semi-truck that time, making the gap nonexistant. So it became rather frustating. My current line is safer in that it gives me a better view of the tunnel going in, so I quickly see if there’s a car I need to avoid.
I’ve now spent almost ten hours on this one track that lasts under two minutes. Oddly, I still haven’t gotten bored with it, but I am annoyed at not knowing how to significantly improve my time. I could still tighten up some turns, but I think that would only get me to a low 1:41. At 1:41,633 I’m still over three seconds away from the WR 1:38,216. I’m gonna be really pissed off if I discover the owner of that time did it while playing the game at 50hz. For some reason the game’s leaderboards are mostly filled by Europeans.
I should probably test that, actually. Play the game in 50hz and see if my times are consistent with my 60hz times. Just to put my mind to rest. If it turns out I get better times that way I can drop the game. If not, maybe I’ll play another track for a while. Still got two other point-to-point (plus reversed versions) tracks to attack.
I’ve returned to playing Burnout 2 which I still consider the best in the series. It was a bit of a learning (or unlearning, I should say) curve to forget about the 360′s lovely analog stick and triggers and go back to PS2′s stick and using the face buttons for acceleration and brake. The deadzone on the PS2′s analog stick felt huge so I opted to use my trusty Hori Anashin 2 pad with a more comfortable one. I got the hang of it now, but my car’s movements aren’t nearly as smooth as they were with the 360 pad.
My long-term goal is to time attack the point-to-point tracks in Burnout 2 and beat the best times I can find on the Internet. The best times I’ve found are listed on http://www.cyberscore.me.uk and http://www.vgr-fr.com so those two sites will act as my benchmark.
First target: Ocean Sprint (R), my all-time favourite track in the game. Not sure why I like the reversed version more. Best time is 1:38.216, my time is currently at a hair over 1:42. I’ve been playing the track seriously for maybe a week now and have improved my time almost every day.
First improvement came from just remembering how to do the boost start again. It has been a while since I played the game last. Second came from switching to manual transmission. Thanks Outrun Online Arcade, I used to avoid MT before you came along. The biggest improvement which shaved off whole seconds off my time came from figuring out how to boost my way through the tunnel located at roughly the midpoint of the track. It requires taking a slightly unorthodox line in order to avoid both the cars and the walls, with the boost on it’s quite easy to hit either otherwise. Now I can boost my way through the whole track.
My best run still had some small issues with, mostly how I lose time in some corners so hitting 1:41.xxx shouldn’t be a problem, but with my current approach I can’t beat 1:38.216. I do have some ideas on better lines at few places (the last three corners, mainly) so I’m going to have to start trying those. The difference between #1 and #2 times is pretty huge (1.6 seconds) so there might be something big I’m still missing.
Links of possible interest:
Track records @ VGR
Track records @ Cyberscore
Ocean Sprint map, the reversed track I’m playing goes from left to right.
Having the traffic sort of randomized even in Time Attack mode is a bit annoying. There’s usually always a car in the same spot every time, only sometimes it’s a normal car and other times a semi-truck. There’s one point in particular on this track where this is an important factor. Also, the tunnel I mentioned before is really harsh in this case. After the first cars (which are always there) there can be 0, 1 or 2 cars inside the tunnel, one of them in the oncoming lane hidden behind the corner. You either take a risk or a safer line at that point. Kind of a bummer, but I guess the best players will get the best times regardless.
Also, there’s a weird timer-related thing going on. When checking my recorded footage I noticed that the final time is a bit different from what the timer reads when I cross the finish line. I’m not sure if that’s a bug or if the game just doesn’t do the real-time timer correctly or what. Haven’t found any mention of it anywhere. If somebody else has the game and the possibility to check this out, lemme know how your game handles it.
Cleared Gigantic Army on Insane and aside from taking absolutely stupid hits in Stage 1 it was a solid run. I still say Beam Cannon is kind of overpowered, with just one shot (and a few from the Assault Rifle) I took down the TLB before he managed to even attack me. Beam Cannon is like a skip-the-bosses mode, with the Assault Rifle as main weapon you get three shots of it for each stage and that’s just enough to take down every miniboss and boss comfortably.
Almost makes me wish there was an even harder difficulty, but sadly clearing Insane didn’t unlock such a thing. I could, of course, try to beat Insane without using any secondary weapons at all. Could be an interesting challenge, actually having to fight the bosses properly. But I also have Gunhound to sink my teeth into…we’ll see.
I’ve been unable to dedicate myself into one greater gaming project lately. Instead I’ve taken on (and completed some) smaller ones:
- One-lifed Ganryu for Neo Geo (video at my site and Youtube)
- Got all Gold medals in XBLA’s free game Doritos Crash Course. It’s pretty fun, kind of like the TV show Sasuke / Ninja Warrior. Videos at my Youtube channel. Yeah, I like making videos…
- Beat Gigantic Army’s full version (the quite awesome doujin mech game) on Normal and Hard. Working on Insane now.
- Trying to 1CC Fast Striker’s Original Mode. Almost had it already, got the last boss down to maybe 15% health before biting the bullet. No doubt I won’t even be able to get to the last boss in several future attempts, there was stupid amounts of luck involved in that run. Gotta learn how to use the shield, most of the time I forget I even have those.
In addition to those I’ve also played a bit of Donkey Kong Country Returns (very nice) and Sonic Colors (also nice, but not quite as much) and I’ve got the other quite awesome doujin mech game, Gunhound, coming in the mail along with some other stuff. Busy times.
As an aside, I was playing Tetris with the missus on some crappy plug ‘n play system and thought I’d get a better version for us to play. Tetris is on every possible system (and even on some well-equipped buildings) so it shouldn’t be a problem to find a decent version for 360, right? Imagine my surprise when I discover I’m in a position where no good alternatives exist. I have a japanese 360. There’s Tetris Evolution – but it’s regionlocked to US/PAL and was never released in Japan to my knowledge. There’s Tetris: The Grandmaster Ace which is Japan-exclusive – but it’s hard to find and apparently all the really good stuff is available in online multiplayer only. And finally, XBLA has Tetris Splash – but for some utterly unfathomable reason it’s not available in several countries, including Finland, so I’d have to make a US account just to try it and buy US MS points to purchase it.
Inconceivable.
And that’s a no-bomb clear of the game. Practicing the game on emulator with savestates paid off, the last boss is appropiately the hardest thing in the game. Even when I figured the patterns out I would still sometimes lose against him, he’s rather tricky. This run has quite possibly my best fight against him, I don’t take a single yet until the very last pattern. When he does his four orb attack there’s a small window in which you’re supposed to jump from a platform towards the other side – too soon and you hit the earlier explosion’s tip, too late and you hit the later one’s.
I sort of want to play the game as the other character as well, her weapons act differently enough that new tactics would need to be devised. And her flamethrower is just awesome, it cuts through bosses like…a flamethrower through most things, I suppose. But to balance it out her homing weapon is far worse. We’ll see if I get around to it.
Now to take care of Silver Surfer. And I realized that 2010 is far along and I haven’t started on Street Fighter 2010 yet. Promised myself I’d clear that in its proper year.
Been playing the quite cool PS1 run ‘n gun Gunners Heaven for a few days now. I’ve actually owned the PAL version, Rapid Reload, for many years, but I got the japanese release a while back since naturally the PAL version is lacking the ever-important 60hz.
The game has bosses up the wazoo, most stages have three bosses altogether. They’re very much pattern-based, they telegraph their moves and always do the attacks in the same order so technically once you learn their patterns you shouldn’t have any problems beating them. I still take way too many hits against Stage 2 last boss though, his last attack where he shoots two lasers in quick succession aimed at the player is a bit annoying. I usually try to time a jump and go over the lasers while moving enough to the right so I don’t land on the laser’s lingering scorchmark but not too far so I don’t hit the second laser. The timing’s rather tight there, gotta practice it some or figure out a safer way of dealing with it.
Yesterday I got to Stage 4′s last boss for the first time. After some creditfeeding (the game’s checkpoint-based) I managed to learn his patterns and more importantly, the area leading up to him. The game’s slightly odd feature is that your guns, all four of them which you can switch between at will, aren’t always up at their max level, you have to collect gems dropped by most enemies. As long as you have at least one gem, weapons work at their maximum strength. But the collected gem count keeps dropping constantly (except during boss fights) so you have to keep moving while also killing enough enemies to keep your gem count up. It’s pretty easy to always have your weapons working at max. strength until Stage 4 where after the first boss there’s first a long elevator ride, the second boss and a long corridor without any gem-dropping enemies. If your gem count is too low after the first boss you might have to fight the second one with low-powered weapons. That’s not too bad though, but the corridor afterwards took some tries before I figured out the safest way of dealing with it. You get some gems right before the stage’s last boss, luckily.
Stage 5 is actually a shmup stage. It’s sorta fun, though really easy until the boss, the stage’s only one. Couldn’t beat him after five or so tries. Need to practice and I think I’ll do it on an emulator with savestates just to save some time. The game’s bit on the long side, I’d guess a full run takes around 50 minutes.
I’ve also been playing a bit of the one NES shmup that the Internet calls “utterly crap” and “utterly impossible”. Guess we have AVGN to thank for that. I find Silver Surfer to be fairly fun, though disappointingly easy. After only a few runs I’ve already made it to the last stage. To be fair, I am using autofire which helps a lot here. After I’m finished with Gunners Heaven I’ll return to the Surfer and go for the 1LC.
Dan Haigh
Ghegs
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