Shmups

[strawdonkey]

I fucking love Darius and its boss names. TRIPOD SARDINE indeed.

 

--

 

Just to let off a bit of steam in here, I finally fucking put together the 1-ALL on ZeroRanger, I've been struggling to put a run together despite being able to crush any individual section on demand, so I'm really glad to have that off my back. Grown really fond of it and will be spending a bit of time playing around with the other ship, weapons, etc now. 

 

What's disappointing is that a lot of games that I've been playing don't have a replay mode. My laptop is very basic so can't really deal with anything remotely fancy whilst running screen capture software, so recording runs is probably out of the question. It's a shame as I'd really like to be able to revisit some of these runs later on to learn from.

[ImmaculateClump]

Congrats on the 1-all, strawdonkey!

 

Does your laptop have an nvidia gpu? You might be able to use shadowplay, that has a very minimal performance impact as it uses a dedicated chip on the gpu to encode the video, and it doesn't add any input lag. I think a lot of laptop gpu's are supported, so it might be worth a look.

 

Failing that, dxtory is very performance friendly as well, though the file sizes of the videos will be huge before reencoding.

 

 

😎 I'm pretty good at getting the 16x multiplier on the last stage now, which is perfect timing for me to start having trouble with the penultimate stage.

Taking a hit drops some skulls which can keep your chain going, so I think that's the answer, if I'm panicking just run into something!

If I can get 16x on all the bosses and have a full set of lives for the final boss I can keep suiciding and turning all the bullets into skulls and rack up megapoints. That's the dream anyway. Wish other people were playing this. I seem to be the only for going for score judging from youtube. It doesn't help that the leaderboards are fucked on ps4 and aren't updating

 

This game is the dogs knees! So much fun!

[strawdonkey]

Sadly it's just Intel Onboard Bobbins. I've just done a quick White Vanilla run whilst recording with OBS and I'm pretty sure it introduced a bunch of slowdown, and the gameplay is definitely a bit juddery. Hilariously the recording has flawless sound but visually is a slideshow - we're talking seconds per frame, rather than frames per second.

 

Does DXTORY still have that awful banner across the top?

 

[edit] lol

 

It did do a good job of recording the action though at least.

[ImmaculateClump]

Back in the day, before shadowplay, it was the only option for me really. Fraps was a resource hog and added lots of input lag. Dxtory worked great, and nobody was sharing cracked copies back then, so I was happy to stump up the cash for it.

 

Have you considered going oldschool and just setting up a camera or a phone to record the screen?

 

Ex of this parish, the boston crab/stanshall/Marlew/sheffield wednesday/abnormal palm/crenners/whatever the feck he's calling himself this week used to do that and it honestly looked totally fine.

 

 

I imagine it'd look even better if you turned off the autofocus!

[ImmaculateClump]

 

Got the 16x multiplier on every boss, but I reckon I can still do better. I didn't have all my lives at the end and I was too scared to suicide on the last one.

I should have the bottle to run through it totally unphased now and milk the last boss, hopefully.

This has properly grabbed me. My favourite game this year so far, I think!

[Ry]

Can you recommend the best shmups for DC, PSP, GC and PS2? I prefer vertical scrolling but open to anything. 

 

Basically turning my phone into an emulation machine and can handle up to these systems. Obviously PSP games look the best because of the aspect ratio. 

 

 

[Jazz Glands]

Dreamcast - Zero Gunner 2, Psyvaria 2, Ikaruga.

Cube - Shikigami No Shiro 2, Super Star Soldier.

PS2 - Espgaluda, Dodonpachi Dai Ou Jou, Mushimesama, Gradius V, Ibara

PSP - Gradius, Salamander and Parodius collections, PC Engine collection with the Star Soldier games 

[Triple A]

Put Under Defeat on the Dreamcast list as well - Border Down too if you fancy a hori

[PikaStu]

Psyvariar on PS2 for sure. I actually prefer it to the new port (HD graphics look weird!). I also have a lot of love for R-Type Final and Thunderforce VI.

 

Lord of Thunder on PCE, especially for the soundtrack 😍

 

Dreamcast has Mars Matrix, Gunbird 2 and Sturmwind

[ImmaculateClump]

I wanna get 5,000,000, but I don't even know if it's possible!

 

[Ry]

Thanks for the recommendations 😀

[ImmaculateClump]

Oh, mammy daddy!

Reet, I'll shut up about Z-Warp for a bit now. Sorry everyone

 

 

If you turn off the "show score numbers" in the settings menu it stops a lot of the slowdown occurring when a lot of skulls spawn during bosses.

Leaderboards are still fucked. I don't think my score has been updated for the last 15 games or something.

[strawdonkey]

Congrats on the five million! The comment on "I don't know if it's even possible" has not aged well considering you're nearly quarter of the way to 6mil now :)

 

Another 1CC in the bag for me too - while I take a short break from bashing my head against the ZeroRanger true last boss (which is making that 2-ALL look a little less aspiration and a little more impossible), I've finally gone for Exceed 3rd. It's a real breath of fresh air after playing ZeroRanger and Schildmaid; it has grazing, it has a lot of bullets and they all move very slowly, and it has a damage bonus the closer you get to enemies which encourages not hanging around at the bottom of the screen which I definitely don't ever do. This is on Easy mode, but the 1CC came on only my fifth or sixth run through despite not really being easy per se, more just that some of the patterns give you enough room to drive a bus through. I got to the final boss without taking a hit in the end, and it gave me the room to lose two lives in quick succession in a panic and still make it through comfortably.

 

It also has a replay system which seems to be extremely picky and keeps going out of sync on the first boss when using OBS, so Dxtory may get my money yet...

[edit] OBS lives to fight another day, the replays just break halfway through the first boss regardless of whether you're recording or not.

Just spotted @Jonsterhas loaded this up too 👀

[ImmaculateClump]

Oh yeah, Exceed 3rd is brilliant!
I love how the risks you take with the bullet grazing are almost instantly rewarded with the special weapon.
It was definitely the game that made me love grazing.

 

Game is responsive as fuck, as well. Worth mentioning, I don't know if any of the nerds have checked the input lag, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's something silly like 1 frame with vysnc off. You feel so directly connected playing that.

 

"Kit-kat, hotdog!"

"Lenny Henry!"

 

2 hours ago, strawdonkey said:

Just spotted @Jonsterhas loaded this up too 👀

 

Ugh. Sickening, isn't it?

I bet he wasn't gonna say owt, just quietly murder your score and nonchalantly mention it in passing.

[Jonster]

13 hours ago, strawdonkey said:

Just spotted @Jonsterhas loaded this up too 👀

 

I've got most of the shmups that I have on Steam installed atm, saw you playing and thought I'd give it a go. Needed a break from relying on RNG to make sound effects

[PikaStu]

I “need” a new Shmup for my new OLED Switch. I’m loving playing it in TATE mode! I recently upgraded from a Lite model and detaching the screen for some vertical Shmup action is brilliant! Particularly when I’m lying in bed. 

I’m thinking Espgaluda 2… I already own Mushi on Steam and iOS but might grab that too. 
 

Has there been any hints of EspRaDe coming to the UK eshop?

[Triple A]

Nope.  Just get a JP account?

[womble9]

1 hour ago, PikaStu said:

I “need” a new Shmup for my new OLED Switch. I’m loving playing it in TATE mode! I recently upgraded from a Lite model and detaching the screen for some vertical Shmup action is brilliant! Particularly when I’m lying in bed. 

Layer Section is out soon if that perhaps works for you? 

[strawdonkey]

I'm a big fan of Danmaku Unlimited 3, and it looks great on the OLED too.

[Spoonman]

9 hours ago, strawdonkey said:

I'm a big fan of Danmaku Unlimited 3, and it looks great on the OLED too.

I actually really like it but am not a huge fan of the in-game sound, but moreso, the OST. Not a fan of it at all, but I appreciate it’s different. I guess I’ll just put on some other music when playing this…

 

Shame it’s not like the xbox 360 where we can play MP3s through the system menu etc. Sometimes/often, I feel we’ve taken steps backwards, but I digress.

 

Who picked up Andro Dunos II? Which platforms? Pixelheart are a bit sneaky with their “left in stock” counter, which isn’t the full stock in the slightest.

[strawdonkey]

You don't like space metal? Incomprehensible

 

Great point on playing your own MP3s though, that felt like the future at the time.

[Spoonman]

I should get into it, though. I bet it looks mint on the OLED, too!

 

Yes, it felt like the future... and now feels like a better past. I still miss this on my PS4; having Spotify there is fine but it's not the same.

[ImmaculateClump]

The most recent shmupjunkie video talks about the various version of andro dunos 2.

 

 

He's wrong about that "scoring bug" he mentions. That's the "digit of shame", an old school way of showing how many times someone continued. You get to keep your score, but the final digit tells all.

 

When you get it, spoony, green weapon all the way, my guy. It's OP as fuck

He says the console ports were outsourced and have a few minor issues, barely worth mentioning, which won't effect your enjoyment, so just go with the system you most like playing on.

 

You can adjust the volume of DU3 and play whatever music you want on pc, if you have one. More's to the point, you can play the superior second game instead

 

I reckon the music is fun and suits the game, but I can understand if you just straight up don't like that sort of thing and it's giving you a headache.
It's often something that comes up as criticism of the game.

I've realised that you can milk some of the bosses something rotten in Z-Warp. I tried it on the first boss and got something like 1,800,000.
It could be easily fixed by adding boss timers, or having their health ticking down at a steady rate even if you're not hitting them.
Guy on youtube says the dev knows about this and is working on it, but the publisher wants to keep the switch version how it is :S

Do nintendo still charge and make you wait a month before approving patches or is that all in the past? It would certainly explain the publisher considering it a cute feature rather than a problem.

Anyway, we'll see how that pans out. Game is great, but if I'm gonna be spending half an hour milking green skulls out of every boss, I'd sooner slit my wrists.

 

Steam page is up for ∀stralbringer -Shaded Arkarium-, upcoming game from Endless Shirafu.

 

Quote

STG has reached a new frontier! 2D bullet-hell sci-fi action shooter with mouse control and multiple buttons!

 

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1863300/stralbringer_Shaded_Arkarium/

[ImmaculateClump]

The dev just commented on one of my youtube videos. Looks like they're gonna leave the console versions as is and release the game on steam with the milking fixed.

 

Quote

Hey hey, to address this - doing stuff on console is complicated and patching is always monitored. A patch that resets leaderboards has a high chance of not getting through, and it would take weeks anyway. Enough for people to spend countless hours exploiting the score. In the end it's probably better to learn from my mistakes and move on, instead of potentially infuriating who already put their time into the game. This also means that the game will get a steam release, with fixed scoring :)

[strawdonkey]

Figured out what I was doing wrong with OBS (full-screen recording is hilariously slow) so please enjoy this horrendous Exceed 3rd 1CC:

 

 

[strawdonkey]

Oh god. I'd played ZeroRanger for 17 hours before realising you can map a button to make the ship go slower.

[ImmaculateClump]

You played it oldschool! They added that in a patch three months after launch because people had asked for it.
I learned to play without focus, and the game was designed around not having it, so I don't think I use it myself, though it's been ages since I've played so I can't rightly remember.

They added the option for analogue movement as well in the same patch, for the heathens. The 3rd weapon autofire they added is great though. Nobody likes mashing.

 

There's a secret stage on exceed 3rd. Here are the things you have to do to get there

 

Quote

Play on Normal difficulty or higher.
Auto Bomb must be turned off.
At no point may continues be used.
Defeat the stage 2 and 3 mid-bosses without dying and without bombing.
If you made it this far, Remedy, the 6th stage end-boss, will challenge you to a duel in the middle of stage 4. She has two attack phases, both of which share the one life bar. This battle is relatively easy. Again, you must defeat her without dying or bombing.
Continue on and complete stage 5. Remember that using continues is a deal-breaker.
If you did all of the above, you will advance to the extra stage. During the extra stage, no continues can be used. Running out of lives will cause an instant game over.

 

Congrats on the 1cc. The video looks great! So is OBS playing nicely, your laptops hanging in there?

[strawdonkey]

I think I'm a long way off the secret boss, there's just too much that I think I can dodge but I'm not quite precise enough to do so. Hopefully some practice on Hard will make Normal seem a lot easier.

 

Regarding OBS, my previous issue was that I was recording the whole screen as ZeroRanger's exe doesn't show up in OBS to select as a window. Recording the screen was resulting in the really terrible performance for me; moving to Game Capture and pointing that at whatever is currently full screen did the trick.

 

And yeah the ZeroRanger slow movement only gets used sparingly (usually on bosses) but it does help to navigate some of the tighter sections, like on stage 2 where there's all the boxes that explode into bullets.

[ImmaculateClump]

Trailer for the mecha ritz 2.0 update

 

 

Ooh, new trouble witches coming this year

 

[phillv85]

Looks like Deathsmiles I & II are getting a full PAL region release now for those who aren’t so keen on importing.