I’ve capped off somewhat with Futari at the moment.  I’ve moved on from 1.5’s Original mode where I reached 336mil with Palm and have been trying out Black Label’s Original mode.  It’s really fantastic.  It’s such a treat to get to play it and I was ready to throw down $15 for it.  The aesthetic changes are really swanky, the 2nd stage’s icy waters now have a pristine blue hue, stage 3 looks distinctly different, baring a darker forest tune.  Then stage 5 set at dusk, it’s really awesome.  BL Original mode is even more addicting than 1.5, the stakes and scores are higher… it’s faster, bigger and stronger.  The original modes are the most fun I’ve had with any shmup, I have become feverishly greedy for those aura’d gems.  My BL Orig score is at 650mil right now, but I would like to come back to it, and 1.5 to improve yet more.  I hate to say but I do feel sore about not getting a 1.01 DLC card with my copy, reserving it from Play-Asia.  Think I could really appreciate that mode, enjoying Mushi1’s original mode as I did (an Lx3 clear.)

I’ve tried the Arcade mode of ESP Galuda II more than a few times now and it’s pretty fun too.  Still haven’t tried any of the other modes but I think I’ll learn to enjoy them.  Arcade’s tough!  Kind of a slap to the face compared to the original’s difficulty.  Wanna go back and clear Galuda I though at some point, nabbing Galuda 2 has made me appreciate the whole ESP series more overall.  I enjoy the world(s).  My Hi right now is about 54 mil.

Anyhow, NOW I’ve changed my focus to Raiden IV.  Damn tough stuff, but an oddly rewarding game.  Been running the boss-rush gamut a lot and practicing the latter stages a bunch.  I can reach 1-5 in both 360 and Arcade modes so far, but I don’t do many real runs because I know how brutal the game is with memorizing the boss’s patterns and knowing what to expect in the latter stages when things get pretty hairy at times.  Without getting to know the stages and bosses, don’t dare to expect to clear it in a random fluke.  It’s that kind of game and I embrace the difficulty.  Can almost finish the first loop of the boss rush but I’ve got a ways to go yet.  I’ll update a bit about my progress.  I made a little page of notes about what power-ups to change up at certain points of the game.  Tinkering with the idea of switching to Laser for most of one of last space stages… I think it’s the last one.   For the most part the Vulcan takes care of business… toothpaste is shit.

Overall, great stuff all around! The 360’s been getting it’s due time.  It’s nice to be able to post my scores on the leaderboards.  BTW: I have a XBL account now, I’m DJ Aquazition. Add me up!

It’s an honor to be ranked 30th (something) overall in the world for 1.5 Original Mode with Palm! But I will strive to be yet higher!  There are some BL Original scores over a billion (one at almsot 4 billion) and I think it’d be crazy to get even half of that.  Such depth!  Mushi1’s Maniac scoring had a great depth to it, too, as far as scoring huge.

Oh yeah, been playing a bit of the new Lunar remake on the PSP.  It’s enjoyable and nostalgia-tastic so far :D… and I’m done.

It took a bit of playing around, but I am happy to say I came up with the appropriate sacrifice! To recap, his combo I’ve been trying is:

[Standard Combo]->Launch->Jump(AA,BB)->Jump(B)->DP->(wait)->Hyper Grab

All I’ve done is removed the double-jump(B) right before the Dragon Punch near the end. This small change has made it so much easier (I would have to estimate at least 10x easier in fact – as in, I can execute it 10 times more often). In exchange for this ease of execution the only drawbacks are:
-The damage is slightly less. Slightly being the key word here. Even though it’s at double-jump height, it’s also only one medium-strength hit near the end of a combo. Very negligible.
-The timing of the hyper grab at the end is very weird now. But not weird enough to make it tremendously difficult.

All in all (these are my extremely loose estimates), my combo is now about 50% more damaging than it was before and about 10x easier to execute than the “ideal”. I haven’t played with it enough to be sure yet, but I think my success rate is a bit over 50% with it (failed attempts are just less damaging, not punishable). By contrast, if I were to execute my ideal combo, it would probably be about 53% more damaging as opposed to 50%… Great sacrifice.

In retrospect, it almost seems foolish that I spent so much time chasing such minor additional gains. But I can’t blame myself. I wanted to maximize my efficiency and I put forth a lot of effort trying to achieve it. Only after a true effort did I come back and make the decision that a slightly less efficient combo was well worth the sacrifice. I’m quite pleased. Of course, this will all disappear in a few days when my fightstick arrives :) Actually though, I’m very glad to have this issue under wraps before it comes.

P.S. It has occurred to me that in my last post I misused the term “mixup”. What I meant to express was just a highly different attack plan.

So, this time around, I decided to play around with new Saki stuff. Ippatsuman/Saki is my main team, but I hardly ever talk about Saki here. The reason for that is Saki is primarily a zoning character and I feel pretty good with my game with her. She is not a combo machine by any means and so I basically ignored the combos she can do in favor of other skills (again, primarily zoning skills). BUT, needless to say, I want to fully flesh out my game to the highest degree possible, which means continuously learning more and adding (what works) into the game plan. In this case, yeah, Saki is great at zoning, but there are some players who just know how to push the action up close where she sucks, and getting some close-range solutions would definitely flesh her out some more.

I’m really going off on some tangents, but anyway, the point is I played around with some combo ideas with Saki and one of them is really nice. Not only is it pretty decent damage, but it’s actually MUCH easier to pull off than Ippatsuman’s combo (at least in training mode). I repeated it a number of times in training mode, and damn it was easy to pull off. At this point I realized that Ippatsuman’s gotta have one of the most difficult combos ending in hypers in the game. After all, I can pull this off (in a more limited fashion, but still ending in a hyper) with most secondary characters I play, with whom I’ve never even entered training mode (Ryu, Morrigan, Batsu, Soki). It’s because Ippatsuman’s only viable hyper at that point is a 45-degree angle air grab. But I digress again…

The combo goes like this, first you’ve gotta load up some special ammo: 2,2B then at VERY close range you do:

(5,2)A, 5B, 2B, 3C, (jump) B,B (jump) B,B, C(shoots the special ammo, which juggles the opponent), Hyper-45-Degree Particle Beam

So this was great, the only iffy thing about it is that it requires loading up special ammo before hand. While this is not difficult to do, it doesn’t jive with the rest of my keep-away game. It removes my ability to use my regular C shot (until I shoot the special ammo). It’s semi-unsuitable for me to use the way I would most want to use it: in response to a breach of my personal space. It pretty much needs to be loaded up before I decide to go in close-range for the combo. Still, it is a good combo and having a mixup certainly never hurt anyone. It was time to test it out.

So after nailing this down in training mode and finding it very easy, I hopped online and could not have been luckier. I got matched up with a rank novice (absolute button masher, it’s easy to tell) and unlike most novices, he rematched me probly 10 times. Unfortunately, this is not a happy story. Pretty much all I did while I was Saki was load up the special ammo and try to go for it… I’m slightly embarrassed to admit, I did not accomplish it once. The two main reasons for this are (1) she has nearly no range on her jabs (or most of her regular moves) and (2) it does take a while to become natural in an actual fight. First off, towards the end I decided to ditch the 2nd move (5B), although that reduces its damage slightly, it seems well worth the sacrifice as it’s more forgiving with the spacing and even easier to pull off control-wise. I think this is a good move that helps point 1 a bit. Point 2 obviously will take a bit more practice.

So, as it stands, this is basically theory right now. It’s proven that it CAN work, but whether or not it’s viable to become part of my game is still questionable. Again, the main issue is that it requires loading up special ammo beforehand, in anticipation of close-range combat. As Saki, I see little reason for ME to ever initiate close-range combat and if I’m not initiating it, then it’s difficult to predict when it’s coming. On the other hand, it may well be worth it to load up the old special ammo at semi-random times in the game. I can still throw grenades without limitation and it’s good for mixup purposes. Also, I reckon there’s a lot more I can learn to do with the B-shot special ammo, so it might become a much more versatile preparation later on. Time will tell. In the very least, I’ve learned an ok no-hyper combo for her (the combo before the special shot), which is better than nothing when the pressure is on.

Turns out learning how to play fighting games is really hard. It’s like learning to play the damn piano or something, except you have to play the piano against other dudes, and they’ve all been playing for fifteen years, and they whip out Rick Wakeman shit on you while you “Three Blind Mice” as furiously as possible hoping it does something (it doesn’t.) I can’t do combos or special moves for shit so my strategy is to pick Chun and attempt to c.MK my opponent into submission. It rarely works, but I can take rounds off of guys from time to time so maybe that’ll turn into actual victories at some point. Right now my biggest obstacle is my shitty Internet: Nobody wants to fight a guy who lags all the time, so my playing time is limited to the very few times of day that my connection behaves itself, and as a result I can’t get many matches in. Unfortunately it’s the only provider in this area, so I’ll just have to stick it out and hope it gets better eventually.

I have well over 1000x more experience with dpads and classic console controllers than with a joystick and arcade controls. A console controller feels second nature to me, while arcade controls feel anything but. I am basically taking a huge leap of faith here based on the fact that the fighting community swears by these types of controls. There is no question that my game will take a HUGE hit in the short-term. Estimates I’ve read project ~4 months of frequent gaming before you start to become accustomed to the new controls. 4 months… Damn that’s a long time. By the way, this works for any wii game, it’s not limited to TvC.

In meta-video game news: All this arcade talk inspired me to take another look at my (currently nonfunctional, but it used to be) Double Dragon arcade machine. The issue was it was completely dead (meaning, no power of any kind). I don’t know anything about electronics really, but I tried rearranging some power wires around haphazardly (let this be a lesson to you, kids). I was able to change its status from no power at all, to a clear “on” sound followed by a low humming noise, but no video or sound. I’m not sure if that means the change was a success and there is a secondary problem as well or if that low humming noise is the sound of improperly wired electronics frying. In either case, I made no further progress and gave up at that point. Perhaps I should try reading up a bit on the issue.

Yesterday, I randomly had an itching to go play Super Mario Land. I was not able to play yesterday because VBA was being a bitch, so I switched over to BGB today–less functionality, but hey, it actually runs, and at 60 FPS to boot!

Having mainly played SMB, SML’s physics threw me in for a bit of a loop. Mario is more sensitive to button presses, jumping feels a bit faster, mushrooms are harder to catch, and superballs in open-air stages are useless unless I jump first. On the plus side, thanks to the extra stages you get for taking upper exits and clearing the 3rd stage of each world, you get a lot of extends (though it wasn’t enough to get me through the whole game).

Points of fail include:

• All: There was a time when my dad and I knew where all the secret elevators that would take you above the ceiling were. Well, that time is no more. Also, stupid cut-and-paste segments.
• 2-3: Hey, this thing moves faster moving backwards than in any other direction!
• 3-1: Stupid rocks, and stupid Christmas lights spikes
• 3-2: Stupid tricky jumping sections involving stalacites of doom and spiders
• 4-1: Stupid jiang shi-like enemies that respawn after being “killed”
• 4-2: Stupid moving platform segments where I fall to my doom because of the finiky controls

I plan to make a comeback this weekend and 1CC this shit.

also why oh why does windows not reset the screensaver timer on controller input

1. Execution

This has improved greatly, and considering that it was my #1 sub-priority, I’m pretty happy about that. Long, punishing combos are the centerpiece of my Ippatsuman strategy (I will further discuss overall strategy another time) and I have become highly aware of this fact. A combo is nearly always the best move when the opportunity presents itself, and my gameplay has come to reflect this.

2. Effectiveness

This is now my biggest priority, I will go into more details after this list.

3. Aerial Raves

This is basically a subset of the previous point. Again, I will go into more detail momentarily, but long story short: I have improved a lot here. I rarely miss launches anymore and semi-rarely miss the jump afterwards. However, I usually don’t fully complete the AR before finishing.

4. Consistency

I will spare you the details on this issue. Once again, we have serious improvement, although not perfection. This is now a very minor point for me.

5. Equal Opportunity

It wasn’t fair in my last post to say that this only affects Morrigan, it affects a few players, her more than most. This has improved slightly without really trying. It’s still really not a pressing issue for me. I believe that once Ippatsuman’s combos are nailed down, translating it into other characters should be fairly easy.

Ippatsuman’s combo (that I’m writing so much about) goes like this:

[Standard Combo]->Launch->Jump(AA,BB)->Jump(B)->DP->(wait)->Hyper Grab

Because the very last part of the chain is an unscaled Hyper Grab, the difference between pulling off the full combo and pulling off 90% of it is very significant. At this point, I generally have little trouble pulling this off until the second jump. After that, the DP after it is difficult as well, and the Hyper at the end is more difficult still. So I have a pretty strong beginning, but very rarely complete the sequence and that has a huge impact on the effectiveness. The most troubling part is that despite all my improvement, I have actually regressed a bit in the end part of the combo and I’m not sure why. Even in training mode, I have a lot of trouble with this. The fact of the matter is, I’m not really sure what is breaking down when I go for that second jump and I think this is something that really just needs to be perfected in training mode. At least my recent improvements are quite encouraging. Once I can get the full combo under wraps, it’s going to greatly improve my overall game and I’ll be able to move onto some more interesting topics to write about :)

first 15 or so attempts: die on stage 3 barrel rolling into missiles
next attempt: die on stage 6 barrel rolling into missiles
final attempt: make it to canyon, get first extend (the only non-secret code extend in the game) and then barrel roll into a missile in stage 9

babby steps!

by the way this has absolutely nothing to do with after burner climax coming out for xbla/psn and is most certainly not one of my prospective video capturing projects. nope.

1. Execution

Starting the combos I already know. Simply put, a lot of times I end up poking someone 2 or 3 times instead of initiating a combo. I should, in fact, be comboing nearly every time the opportunity presents itself. I think the biggest problem here in I have such an ingrained automatic response of poking opponents with 2 consecutive jabs. I think the best way to address this issue is simply to be more conscious. Think “now I’m starting a combo” the second I see an opening rather than “let’s try to open him up a bit and then do a combo”, which rarely works. Another part of the issue, I think, may be a (valid) fear of getting my combo blocked, leaving myself wide open. Again, I think greater consciousness while playing will help with this. When there’s a clear opening, initiate combo immediately, when there’s a questionable opening, poke.

2. Effectiveness

The combos I currently have under my belt are extremely basic. This is not a coincidence, I intentionally started with only basic combos as the subject matter was new to me. However, there’s no question that my combos could be a lot more powerful. Most combos should probably end in hyper moves, currently I only have such sequences with Ryu and, to a lesser extent, Soki. I think this is best tackled in training mode, experimenting with new ways to extend started combos to increase the effectiveness. Important as this issue is, I doubt I will be focusing on it much right away as I have some more basic issues to attend to first, such as..

3. Aerial Raves

Extending one’s combos with ARs seems like the natural second step in learning to effectively combo. I can sometimes land these nicely, but often I will miss the jump. Also, I could probably do slightly longer ARs when I do land them. This skill is almost more important as an exercise than as a practical means of ending a combo. I think this is another skill that would be best honed in training mode.

4. Consistency

Failure to combo, apart from failure to execute. Sometimes (fairly often?), I will land for instance, a 2-hit combo hopefully followed immediately by a 4-hit combo, instead of a proper 6-hit. While this doesn’t matter when things pan out (and is, in fact, slightly advantageous) the problem is that it’s a break in my attack string, which could be exploited by good or lucky players. Once again, training mode is the place for this.

5. Equal Opportunity

Morrigan, in particular, I like choosing on occasion, but as her combo is not standard I really don’t know how to pull them off with her at all. This could be remedied by looking online and, once again, with a little time in training. This is not a huge priority as it mostly just affects Morrigan and it’s not like I play with her all the time, but still it should be addressed sometime soon.

So that about sums up my issues with combos. As mentioned, I believe this is currently the most pressing issue for me to improve upon. Looking over my notes, it would seem a majority of this would be best improved upon in training mode. I don’t particularly enjoy training mode, but I think a few sessions of repetitiously digging a groove for myself would pay off. The most important improvement, however, is more of a matter of being conscious of starting combos cleanly. I tend to be pretty aware of what’s happening during a match, so hopefully keeping this in mind and putting it into action will not be terribly awkward.

While practicing I also noticed there are plenty of small differences between the Dimensions and the R-Types version of the game. The latter is a bit faster and harder (the back-cannons in Stage 3’s ship being more eager to fire, for example) so I guess I’ll need to clear that version of the game as well. But since I’ve done most of my practicing on the R-Types version anyway it shouldn’t be a problem.

And though there’s still a small desire to 2-ALL the game, I’ve also started playing R-Type II. Damn that’s an awesome game. The stage designs and bosses are much more complex and devious. I’ve made it to the Stage 4 boss on a credit, but I still need to practice Stage 3 boss before I’m really comfortable with him. I beat him most of the time but it always feel a bit too much like luck. Took a peek at Stages 5 and 6…fifth stage feels hard, but the boss is probably the easiest of both games. Sixth stage is pretty hectic with a fairly high bulletcount for an R-Type game. I’d say the game is definitely harder than the original. Yet in sgronblo’s opinion the first game is easier. Wonder if my opinion will change once I get more into it.

R-Type II I’ll be playing on the R-Types version. The differences between the Dimensions version and R-Types  version are much more pronounced here – while in the first game they’re noticable if you look for them, here they whack you in the face with a hammer right from the get-go. The enemy dispensers seem to spew less enemies in the Dimensions version, which also has some enemies missing (like one of the medium-sized crafts that jump out from the water after entering the base in Stage 1, few enemies creeping up from behind right before the boss and in Stage 2, bosses seem to take a bit less damage…) compared to the R-Types version. Also, while the first game’s graphics (especially the backgrounds) are a bit bare and the improved graphics in Dimensions were pretty nice, they don’t seem to work in II as well – the game already had more detailed graphics to begin with and they’re still nice to look today. So that’s even less reason to use the Dimensions version when I have R-Types to play it on.

(The title of this post…how come Irem never did a typing game like Typing of the Dead? It’s already in the name! I should make mockups of it for the heck of  it.)