Since I’m at a wall on the Stage 6 Infant Keeper boss, I’ve been doing random stage select BS. I can almost consistently 1CC Stage 1. Stage 2 is somewhat easier just because it doesn’t have a bitchy endboss like Stage 1.

Stage 3 is weird. I didn’t like sidescrollers with railgun aiming when I played S&P1 Stage 3-2, I don’t like it now. Then you go into a tunnel and it’s like those parts of StarBlade where you have to shoot doors, only you dodge doors instead of dodging them. I think I got to the endboss once, and timing counters is like trying to AAA something in IIDX.

I’ll probably finish the game the credit feeder way later.

I’ve been working mainly in 360 mode, using Broken-Tier Slut Rosa. Unlike many other bullet hell shooters, 360 and Arcade modes are less harsh on mistakes. Whereas Espgaluda II is almost as restart-y as Raiden Fighters Aces, and bombspamming your counter away Mushihime-sama Futari Original can make your face turn beet red (you throw the stick against the ground and start swearin’), vanilla DS allows you to make some errors and still keep raising your score at the same rate. DS’s scoring system may come off as totally dumbshit to people who like their games DOJ-strict or Garegga-strict, but you still need to survive if you want to get far enough to reach your goals.

Up until now I’ve mainly done level 3 only four times to avoid Death Mode, so I can see the entire game. However, I’ve started experimenting with Death Mode, in order to train myself to tame those damned suicide bullets. Having suicide bullets to eat changes the game up quite a bit, forcing you to herd the bullets so you don’t trap yourself into an “IMA DA, HIROW!” situation, while using your familiar to suck up the bullets, which like skulls and crowns add to the counter. If I can master Death Mode, I can turn out much higher scores than I’m capable of without it.

I’ll probably delve into Mega Black Label another time. As for Ver 1.1 (both vanilla and MBL), if I want to be able to easily move my familiar without risking slamming into a bullet (which I’m guessing makes up a majority of the gameplay), I have to ditch my Seimitsu’d FSTE in favor of a 360 controller. And I don’t like using the 360 controllers for shmups. FML.

DJMAX Technika – Beyond the (Near) Future

So DJMAX Technika 2 was released in Korea earlier this month and hopefully will be making its way overseas in months. From what I’ve heard, Technika “1″ players can transfer their data to T2 and use their MAX Points from T1 to buy T1 sets in T2. And that’s where the catch lies: you can only use T1 MAX. So I’ve taken it upon myself to play the crap out of Weekly and Special sets to grind 1,800 MAX per run.

Only one problem at the moment: I lost my card. My card that has 39,000 MAX saved up.

It hit me this afternoon at the arcade, when I went to get my card. I hadn’t bothered to look at it since last Wednesday, the last time I went to the arcade, which means trouble as far as whether I can get my card back or not. I still have one more card, but it’s far behind on MAX grinding (only about 9,000) or so. I’ll see about this data recovery service that I’ve been hearing about, but that means buying a new card. Rawr.

Touhou – Old and New

I got around to obtaining Touhou Seirensen: Undefined Fantastic Object (otherwise simply known as TH12 or UFO). UFO’s…well, UFO mechanic reminds me of Space Invaders Extreme, as they come in red, green, and blue (not unlike SIE’s powerup enemies).

The game itself is not bad, glad to have bombs separated from shot power again. Not a big fan of how one P now raises power by not .05 as in TH11 and 10, but now by .01, meaning you need 400 small P’s to reach max power. Even if there are way more P’s to make up for it, it still makes getting max power a daunting-looking task.

Also been playing the PC98 games. Touhou Rei’iden: Highly Responsive to Prayers (aka TH01 or HRtP), unlike the later TH games, plays more like a ball-and-brick game (like Arkanoid or Break Out) than a shooting game. Good, kinda-novelty fun; I’ve never been a fan of brick breaking due to just how much time I have to spend getting the last few bricks (or in this game, cards).

Story of Eastern Wonderland (TH02) is the first shooting game, and seems like the weirdest of the bunch. Much milder bullet patterns, enemies are all sorts of oddities, and holy shit ground enemies in a Touhou game. Haven’t played Phantasmagoria of Dim Dream (TH03) as I’m not really into the whole versus shmup thing, but Lotus Land Story (TH04) is good and is where the series finally gets good. Managed to take a 1CC on it; there’s only a few attacks that make me go wtf (namely, Reimu’s homing attack thingy, both versions of Yuuka’s Master Spark, and Yuuka’s fake explosion thing). I’ll probably get around to Mystic Square (TH05) some other time.

Patriot Dark – Mashup

Patriot Dark is what you get when you take DoDonPachi, Ketsui, and Espgaluda, breed a child out of the three, and baptise it with a little Raiden Fighters. You have DoDonPachi comboing, Ketsui‘s God-knows-what cashing in thing, and Espgaluda‘s bullet cancelling. So you’re trying to juggle two scoring systems at once; not as bad as it sounds (the combo meter is fairly lenient). You also have these spots to hover over to make point cubes show up. Thankfully, if you find one of those spots, instead of not knowing there’s something there unless you hover over it, a circle of sparks will appear, so you’ll know “oh hey, I better remember this spot for next run”. Graphics and sound aren’t that hot, but it’s a doujin shooter so I’ll shut the fuck up about that. Overall a fun number, I just might make a serious attempt at it.

Ninja Gaiden (NES) – GAI DAMMIT!

Ninja Gaiden aka Castlevania with ninjas and on steroids. I was at my friend’s house a few days ago and, too lazy to switch from my FSTE to my Saturn pad, decided to play on my FSTE. Not as bad as it sounds; I was able to play normally. Managed to finally defeat the Act 4 boss, which is a simple act of ducking under a pillar and waiting for the gargoyle dual bosses to come my way so I can stab them.

Currently on Act 5-2. I need to memorize/memorise/memorisize where all the bats are so I don’t get knocked to my death when I try to make so and so jump. This game is quite unforgiving; post-damage invincibility is near-nonexistant, bats pop up with the intention of bitchslapping you into a pit, and enemies regenerate if you destroy them the wrong way. Doesn’t make this game stupid though; just need to know how the enemies spawn and regenerate, and to try to keep moving forward.

Except this part.

This jump. THIS FUCKING JUMP.

Recently I’ve gotten around to re-doing my file. Whereas last time I focused on the more gimmicky drones like Ram and Snipe, this time around my main drones are Sweep and Attack. You really don’t appreciate Attack until you get it to level 6 or 7, when it starts to do triple sprays.

A high-level Sweep is still good, but Attack provides offensive power vital to clearing out thick clouds of enemies. Especially in the Bat- sages, where you can easily milk many hundred thousand points off a charliefoxtrot of mooks by sitting in a corner and hammering away.

I’m looking to get the DS version through questionable means, so I can unlock Lambda. Then I’m deleting the DS version because I don’t give a crap about a horribly watered down version of the Wii version.

I’ve tried a few Cave arranges in the past; Mushihime-sama was basically just Maniac mode with 6 starting options, real-time weapon change, auto-freaking-bomb, and the TLB. Futari‘s isn’t much better: now you have to deal with a somewhat annoying tag-team mechanic (“Reco-chan, ikou yo!”) and some really boring strategies. Oh and there’s STILL autobomb.

Espgaluda II‘s arrange is somewhat interesting and seems to promise actual replay value rather than a bore-fest. My own analysis so far:

You start with 5 lives instead of 3. This is offset by the lack of autobomb and the extend requirements that are difficult to get unless you take advantage of a certain mechanic.

In normal mode, bullets come in two colors and can be canceled out, not unlike in Ikaruga. Except unlike in onechainruga, you don’t cancel bullets by running into them with the correct color on; instead you shoot them; 1P focus and 2P rapid cancel red bullets, and 1P rapid and 2P focus cancel blue bullets. Most regular mooks’ bullets will convert into gems, but with bosses, they seem to give out less gems until eventually the gems stop. To prevent constant shot switching to keep the screen free of bullets, there’s a little gem penalty every time you start to fire one of your shot types.

Kakusei Shikai is mostly same as before: bullets slow down and can only be cancelled by shooting the enemies that fired them. Kakusei Zesshikai is also similar. The main difference lies in the slower gem decrease rate and that bullets turn glowing purple (as opposed to plain purple) to show that no, you can’t shot-cancel them.

Now Kakusei Shikai Over is where things get interesting. In this mode, gold is used up and bullets turn glowing red and can be canceled out by either shot type. Shooting bullets will yield gold and, as you collect more gold, the value of each gold gets bigger until you get the max-value gold that has green crystals. This completely changes Kakusei Shikai Over from a high-risk mode into a mode not unlike Futari Arrange’s Fever mode. On burning up all gold, mode switches back to normal automatically.

Every time you 1CC Arrange, you “level up” your character. 1CC’ing on the 1P side levels up normal mode bullets and 1CC’ing on the 2P side levels up kakusei mode bullets. The idea behind leveling up is so you can summon more bullets and thus get more point opportunities. This sort of level grinding is similar to GHOST Squad‘s (the carded and Wii versions, not the horrible 4-level version or the Apology Evolution version), only instead of 16 levels, each level goes to 99. So to be able to use the highest level, 99*99, you have to clear the game 188 times with one character; thankfully I almost exclusively use Ageha so I don’t have to worry about leveling up other characters.

I’ve already ALL’d the game once with 1P Ageha, so I’m at level 1 right now. Looking to play this mode every now and then, but not so much that I spoil 360 mode. Having gone from Tetris TGM3 clones to TGM2 and Futari BL Maniac to Futari 1.5 Maniac, I know that staying exclusively in Esp2 Arrange and BL modes is a very bad idea.

When I learn scoring systems that seem fascinating to me, I try not to read strategy guides too much, instead only using them to give myself some direction as to how to tackle playing for score, then I dive into the game and experiment to see which strategies will milk me the highest scores. This is what I know (or at least think I know) thus far:

Xbox 360:

• Killing enemies in Kakusei Shikai mode cancels their bullets and produces gold from the bullets.
• In Zesshikai mode, enemies release more bullets, and will release suicide bullets upon death.
• When killing an enemy in Zesshikai, suicide bullets of other enemies will cancel out. Also point-milking ensues.
• In Kakusei Shikai Over, enemy bullets turn red and go faster, and killing enemies releases small amounts of gold.

Black Label:

• Killing an enemy in normal mode cancels its bullets and turns them to gold.
• In Kakusei Shikai, killing an enemy releases suicide bullets.
• When killing an enemy in normal mode, suicide bullets of other enemes cancel out, also hueg numbers.

I’ll post my (mostly) self-done analyses of Arrange and Omake later. For now I wanna focus on 360 and BL.

I should probably focus on surviving as well; it would be good to actually see stages 4, 5, and 6 instead of losing 3 lives in 10 seconds trying to crank out 15 million points in that time interval.

I got to try DS and Esp2 at Fanime, a week and a half ago, though me playing Esp2 on any serious level dates back to Sakura-Con two months ago. I tried vanilla Esp2, then went on to try other modes like Arrange and Black Label. Esp2 Black Label is even more hilarious than Mushihime-sama Futari Black Label; any enemy killed will now cancel bullets, and killing enemies in Kakusei/Awakening mode will cause them to explode into more bullets (that can be canceled out as well). I also really want to obtain the iPhone port despite getting the 360 port anyway; I tried that at Fanime too on my friend’s iPad and it beats the snot out of Ketsui Death Label as far as a portable Cave game goes. Sadly, I don’t intend to get an iPhone any time in the coming years, and I’m a bit strapped for cash to be getting an iPad (which would be a little un-portable anyway) or a new iPod Touch; my current one is a first-gen 8 GB model. Since it’s almost maxed out, perhaps that could be an excuse to get a new one.

Also at Fanime, I stopped by Aksys’s booth to play DeathSmiles, which I had already preordered. It shows that Cave can definitely do horizontal just as well as vertical, and that I should probably try Progear no Arashi sometime. I haven’t played such a fantastic sidescroller since Gradius Gaiden; bidirectional firing, colorful graphics, freedom to choose how hard or easy you want the game to be and what stages to pick, and a scoring system with a good learning curve (I couldn’t break the default high score) contribute to my anticipation of getting my own copy. Unfortuantely, on the 3rd day of Fanime (of 4), the stick for it was removed because apparently people were messing around with the stick. As someone who refuses to taint the beauty of Cave shooters with a stock 360 pad, that meant no DeathSmiles at all for me for the remainder of the con.

And now, I wait. Hopefully I come home from the arcade tomorrow to a package from Play-Asia with my name on it. And if that happens…I just might be up until 6 AM. I love having summer vacation this early.

I finally got around to taming Boss!Reimu, thanks to focus mode hiding the yin-yang shots, learning how to deal with Reimu when she’s in fly-off-of-one-side-of-the-screen-at-high-speed mode, and learning that on the “Duplex” spell cards that I can go across the bullet portals (for a lack of better term) safely.

The Stage 5 boss, Reisen, still gives me trouble. I often bomb spam when the bullets go back from being red, out of fear that I’m on top of a bullet and I’ll have lost as many as 3 bombs.

Overall, the Boundary and Magic Teams are the only ones worth using; the other two are too gimmicky for me. I don’t use Youmu/Yuyuko because I’m baffled by the idea of having a wider shot in focus mode, and I don’t use Sakuya/Remilia due to Remilia’s difficult sentry gun-like focus attack.

I’ve mainly been playing Parsec47, as well as its antithesis rRootage. Whereas rRootage is boss-oriented and about careful slow movements, Parsec47 is about waves of enemies and zipping around like a Scout on five cans of Bonk!, especially in Extreme difficulty where everything–bullets, point items, and you–move around at very high speeds. I do like that you rack up craploads of points in P47 rather fast; compare to NOIZ2SA where it takes longer to accumulate items and it’s all too easy to slingshot items through the top of the screen, forcing me to build back up my multiplier.

Survival in P47 seems to be about, in addition to finding gaps in patterns, moving sideways as well as resisting the urge to pick up that cluster of point items in order to tap-dodge through a wave. Unfortunately, my brain, being the piece of shit that it is, likes to do what is the least sensible tactic in any given game situation, whether it be prioritizing score over survival, trying to melee Pyros in Team Fortress 2, and barging into a goal zone defended by 6 players by myself in S4.

Back to rRootage. I’ve mainly been playing IKA, GW, and PSY modes, and am currently stranded on the eighth tier of stages on each of these modes. In the past I almost exclusively played PSY mode because I liked the graze shield mechanic (except when the shield meter builds up during mercy invincivility causing me to waste it), but I’ve also warmed up to IKA and GW modes. GW’s reflect attack, like that of Giga Wing and Mars Matrix, turns dense bullet clouds into opportunities to take several thousand HP off the boss; as a balance, the main shot is weaker. IKA mode, like Ikaruga, is an exercise in tuning one’s eyes to distinguish what bullets are currently absorbable and what bullets mean instant explody death. Thankfully, unlike Ikaruga, I don’t have to chain enemies to get an optimal score.

Which reminds me: Radiant Silvergun, like its spiritual successor, has that annoying “shoot 3 enemies of the same color” chaining mechanic. So why do I want RSG so much?

I just unlocked the Smash Rifle, think I’ll get the Gauss Rifle later to see what it’s like.

Also, the License Test for Shield can go die. You don’t even need Shield to clear it.

On another note, inspired by twiddle’s post on After Burner (II), I decided to give it a shot. I decline to state how well I am doing lest I get banished to the depths of Hell for committing the mortal sin of being a noob, but I will say that there’s no point to the whole barrel roll mechanic, especially with how easy it is to accidentally trigger it.