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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.