You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Games’ category.
I haven’t been doing much gaming lately. What I have done is mostly… Tetris, and contemplating what fighting game I want to goof off in next.
In the (fighting game) news, we have Daigo Umehara losing to YHCMochi horribly. Daigo tried his usual tactics which weren’t so successful for more than HALF of the set. Then he finally tried something new, and was somewhat successful, but lost anyway, and to a double KO.
But what’s fascinating about this is that the Daigo apologetics were quick to defend him:
Man, if Daigo wins this hes undoubtedly the best in the universe, if he loses, as far as skill Daigo is better than mochi, by a good margin. Dhalsim to me has always been a bit broken, majority of his attacks take, but one button to keep u at bay. As where others have to be twice as fast to compete with him. I say Daigo was still the better player just a kinda cheap character he was fighting.
http://www.eventhubs.com/news/2010/jul/16/live-stream-godsgarden-daigo-yhc-mochi-ssf4-match/#c108661
Wow. At first I thought this was weeaboo-ism but then I realized that it might be worse. Far far worse. Either way, this is still the sort of thing coming from people who say that Melty Blood, a game that is about as Japanese as Street Fighter, somehow panders to weeaboos.
Got the clear! One death, but I can accept that since it was against the Stage 4 boss. All in all it was a very smooth run, things went pretty much as planned. Some fumbling with weapon changes here and there but luckily nothing fatal. Even managed to skip most of the refights against bosses before the final boss. I think those doors are semi-random, sometimes going through the same door gets me to the same place as last time, sometimes not. Ah well, I think I’m done with the game.
Didn’t even realize it before I started thinking about what I’ve been playing lately, but I’ve been focusing on, semi-seriously, several run ‘n guns.
Contra (Arcade)
Bought it on XBLA when it was on sale because it’s Contra and I’m stupid like that. The fact that I already had the game in a technically better form for PS2 in Hamster’s Oretachi Geasen Zoku Sono 16-release just accentuates my twisted loveaffair with Contra.
How did Konami ever think that a game scrolling mostly horizontally but using a vertically-oriented monitor was a good idea? It’s such a clumsy game compared to the NES port. And a bit shorter at ~10 minutes and maybe even a bit easier. Already 1CCed it a few times on PS2, might as well try for a no-miss. Basic Contra-strategy applies: Get spreadshot and don’t lose it. Oddly random at times, sometimes you get certain power-ups (like the invulnerability one), sometimes you don’t.
Neo Contra
Already have the S-rank clear. But I had to restart a stage or two for it, and like in Shattered Soldier the game doesn’t care whether restarts were used or not. I do care, so it doesn’t count. Unlike in SS, you can actually die or miss an enemy and still get an S-rank clear. While in SS the requirement for S-rank was 100% in Neo it’s 98%. And each death just penalizes you for %1. So it’s possible to die twice in a stage and still get the best possible grade.
I’m aiming for a 100% S-rank clear. With no retries, obviously. I’ve already got 100% in each individual stage in practice. Doing it all in a single run is made more difficult annoying by some stupid design decisions. Sometimes the camera angle just gets in the way and you get hit by something you didn’t think was a threat. To balance this there’s the invulnerability-granting spin move. But really, the designers should’ve seen that if they need to include such a thing, something more fundamental is wrong with the game.
That said, there are only few troublesome spots left. There’s the Lucia boss battle during which the camera is at 30-40 degree angle behind you. Easy to get accidentally hit there. And then there’s Stage 6′s boss’ second attack pattern, where he throws his sword around and it’s pretty tricky to dodge. The last boss is easier, all his attacks either have safespots or are pretty clearly telegraphed.
Cyber-Lip
The pre-Metal Slug Neo Geo run ‘n gun. It’s rough around the edges but has a nice charm to it. I like being able to select the weapon to use at any time. And most of them even get used at some point.
Like some parts of arcade Contra, it’s just so random. Like the stage 3 boss (which reminds me of Stage 5′s boss in Shattered Soldier, actually) which sometimes just decides to ram up at you, and unless you’re in a position where he can’t hit you before he starts the attack, you will get hit. Even after checking my replay footage I’ve been unable to find any hints that tell the attack is coming. Best bet is to just kill the boss as fast as possible (and he can’t be hurt by the most powerful weapon, weird bug?) and hope for the best.
Between certain stages you have to decide whether to go up or down an elevator. Which choice is the correct one is random each game. Getting it wrong puts into you a small ministage (three different ones, picked at random) before you can proceed to the actual stage. Not very hard, just odd ‘n random.
Stage 5 boss is the hardest boss by far. Rock-spewing alien ballsacks at top, alien head at right which also spawns lil’ facehuggers. Destroying the leftmost ballsack makes the battle far easier, problem is doing it. Probably going to lose a life or two here.
The last boss is a total pushover. Not once when I’ve practiced the game by creditfeeding have I died to him. A small unknown factor is the room before him, where there are several doors which you can go through. Most doors lead to fighting the previous bosses, one or two to an ammo room and one to the last boss. I actually think these aren’t randomized, which would make the whole thing quite simple. And silly. Gotta doublecheck that.
I don’t think I’ll aim for a no-miss in this one but a 1CC should be within reach.
And lastly, I went and picked up Sin & Punishment 2 for the Wii. Seems pretty fun but I need to play it more. Very chaotic at times. I think it’s too long to bother with a proper arcade-style one-sitting playthrough but score attacking individual stages might be fun. Scoring seems to be governed by the multiplyer which increases as you destroy enemies and lowers when you get hit yourself. Simple enough, probably some tricks in there with the melee attack and deflecting enemy shots back at them.
Last time (all two months ago) I talked about Mana Khemia, so naturally this time I’ll talk about Mana Khemia 2. It’s a pretty typical JRPG sequel: Largely identical graphics and gameplay, a few gratuitous recurring characters, very little to do with the original game. This doesn’t bother me much because that story didn’t have anywhere else to go anyway (frankly, by the end I was getting a little sick of it.) This time around the Al-Revis academy from the first game has both metaphorically and quite literally fallen back to earth, and oh fuck it who cares. On to the gameplay:
Stuff that’s better:
- It’s still turn-based. I wasn’t expecting them to change that, but I’m still glad they didn’t.
- Item creation has been streamlined a bit. Now if you try to synthesize a item but have run out of one of the ingredients, it’ll automatically take you to that item’s synthesis screen instead of forcing you to do it manually. This was a major problem towards the end of the first game because the endgame equipment required lots of powerful ingredients that, in turn, also required lots of powerful ingredients. You might end up having to synthesize 9 or 10 items just to make one weapon. This was made even worse by having two separate synthesis locations, another thing the sequel has fixed.
- New “Camp” option makes the day-night cycle much less of a pain in the ass. Now if you find a save point out in the field you can opt to rest until morning, noon, or night. This means you no longer have to stand around waiting for the time of day to change if you want to get a particular fruit from a tree, or if you want to not get slaughtered by considerably more powerful night enemies.
Stuff that is dumb and bad:
- Goddammit they added fucking minigames. I praised the first game for not having asinine minigames be an important part of item-gathering, so naturally they fixed that for the new gaming. It’s nothing too heinous, but goddammit I do not want to play the fucking slots for my items stop it
- Nested locations make map navigation a little bit more annoying. This is a minor thing, but you spend a lot of the game here so even minor things can grate after a while. Most of the important locations in the academy are now on submenus rather than the top menu, meaning you have to click twice to reach them rather than once. This bugs me more than I thought it would.
I admit I was reaching a bit on that last one, so there is a pretty significant net gain here. Nice job by Gust of incremental improvement.
I decided to play Batrider again. Why I switched from RFJ, a game that punishes mistakes upfront, to a game that punishes mistakes but doesn’t tell you that you fucked up until after the fact is beyond me. It’s a change of pace at least.
1- I don’t have my head wired for Raizing medal chaining. Medals can appear anywhere, not just predictable places like Raiden Fighters, and that’s the reason why I can’t keep a medal chain at all.
2- Why am I playing as Carpet when she’s horrible for stages? Familiarity, I guess. Strawman is way better for survival and stage learning in every respect, but I find his firepower a bit lacking.
3- Fuck WordPress for eating the contents of this post the first time I submitted.
could see a lot more improvement (300k) if I took advantage of all possible grazing spots.
i’m guessing it’s possible to get a 5.4m score with judge spear due to the extra bomb and weapon power, but grazing would be very difficult.
So, I did manage to find a way to deal with Stage 6 boss. Twice in a row I managed to do the whole stage without taking a single hit. Trick in the boss fight is to dodge the homing shots at the last moment, and sort of curve around the screen’s edge so it gives you enough room. This is good. I’ve now reached the final boss’ final form with a single credit. This is very good.
So why is it that during all three of my runs, I got hit not once, but TWICE on the second stage boss. This is very, very bad. It’s utterly ridiculous. Reviewing the captured footage afterwards revealed that I just hadn’t seen the bullets that hit me. I just navigated directly into them from the side. Though in one case, a single missile just barely managed to get through my cover fire, so that one was just bad luck. There is a 100% safe strategy that I could use with that boss, but it’s slower and it would annoy me to use that when I’ve successfully killed him without ever taking a hit so many times before. The attack that catched me is just random bullet spam, no real pattern to it…makes a it a bit annoying to deal with.
At least I can start practicing Stage 7 now, which is nothing but the final boss. A bit perspective/big lasers silliness at the start of it, but that doesn’t look too hard to figure out. First form is easy. Second form, the final one, is the I need the most practice on, but even that doesn’t look terribly difficult…it’s a fairly clean pattern, some aimed shots, some just to mess with you.
“Do u just enter the matrix or sumthing to play raiden like that? Seriously what is the secret?”
88m on RFJ arcade today. ugh. here’s what’s killing me:
stage 30. tap dodging. does. not. work. with. this. shitty. controller. so instead i need to get into the habit of conserving bombs for the boss patterns i need to touhou through but can’t because the 360 pad likes diagonals.
real battle 1. with the additional health of the striker planes, i’m going to have to actually memorize the second half of the stage as opposed to letting sweep do everything for me. time to run through some additional trials on this stage in arcade mode! yay! (oh god)
not going to think about real battle 2 for now. UGH.
got a cool flat 130m out of the deal. there were a few scoring mistakes (lol lost fairy) and i just went and fucked the medal chain at the very end of the game, but i squeezed through to the large hovertank boss with 2 lives in reserve, and only died at the penultimate pattern of that boss. then bombfested the TLB because fuck if I was going to lose 10 million points.
you can watch the replay if you have the US version of aces and have an active xbox live account. no way for me to record an offsite video without yanking now-unreachable cords, sadly.
next, arcade mode.
(help me)
There are two bosses in Stage 6. The first one is pretty simple after a bit of practice and I haven’t lost a life there since figuring the pattern out, but the latter one…dear god. You have to dodge the boss’ big lasers and homing shots while just keeping your own homing weapon button down. But all of the battle happens in a tilted perspective. And the perspective is the only reason it’s hard. That’s not good game design there, Edelweiss. Go stand in the corner and think about what you’ve done.
That said, there is a safespot in which you’re safe from the big lasers. But that still leaves the homing shots to deal with. There’s a bit leeway in the safespot so you can move around and dodge the homing shots while still staying safe from the big lasers, but it’s very tricky to actually pull off. Move too much, you’re smacked with a big laser – move too little, and the homing shots gets you. It might actually be easier to just learn the big lasers’ pattern and dodge them, avoiding the homing shots in the process.
The earlier parts of the game are pretty much in the bag…if I don’t make any stupid mistakes I can reach Stage 6 boss without trouble. Last time I had four extra lives going there (should’ve had six, but did those stupid mistakes), kept fumbling the safespot and promptly lost all of them. Argh.
Dan Haigh
Ghegs
[DRZ] OTL-TIW
sikraiken
Alice
victoly
plasm0
Aquas
Raydere
szycag
BDA
bloocloud
Kollision
