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Dr Seedyman

By Dr Seedyman,
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strawdonkey

strawdonkey

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Happy Halloween everyone! Literally finished this run a minute after midnight so it is either poetic or it doesn't count at all. Anyone else get around to visiting Halloweentown this month?

 

image.thumb.png.44eba35ad2be68da74aae166fb51d65c.png

 

Overall not the hugest improvement due to it winding up being something of a cursed run. It was going great until Port Town 3; took a stupid hit right at the end of the stage, then two more in Volcano 3. This really tanked my bonus meter, and only just scraped the 300mil extend in the final room before the final boss.

 

Current game plan has evolved slightly - I've gone from "laser everything always" to switching to regular shot for the flying eyeball things as they are easy to remember and give about 8x the amount of skulls if you use regular shot. Also the blue reaper guys but I forget more often with those. There's also a good setup in Swamp Wastes 2 where if you time your power up correctly (around the time that the first clay pile monster has fired two volleys of bullets), it expires as you kill the big enemy halfway through the stage and you can get a re-up of 750-1000 skulls instantly. And if you time it wrong you get nothing

 

As always the key to further improvement is getting hit less and using bombs more. I reckon 400mil is easily within reach - I had one run at 320mil earlier where I lost on the final boss, and up until Hades' Castle I'd not taken a single hit, so it's definitely possible.

 

I've not done quite as much practice as expected as I gave Crimson Clover World Explosion a quick go and then suddenly spent all my time on that instead. It's pretty good, and while I'm still quite a way away from the 1CC it is nice having the mid-difficulty option to play as well as all the cool new ideas it brings to the table.

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strawdonkey

strawdonkey

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Another clear at 371mil. I love shmups for that moment when you beat your best score by well over 10% and view it as a disappointment. Bullet got my hitbox maybe a frame or two before I tried to bomb on Volcano 3, which would have made an enormous difference to the score. It can be Halloween all year around if you want it to be.

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ImmaculateClump

ImmaculateClump

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Haha. You can at least use a dishcloth for drying plates.

Congrats, Strawdonkey!

 

Steam page for Schildmaid is up

 

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2154760/Schildmaid_MX/

 

 

Ooh yeah, beat my score in Dead End City normal

 

JtlO3lB.png

 

Second on the leaderboard overall. Really loving this game. It's very unique. I'm gonna try and get a decent score with the cat lady now. She's pretty slow but she gets lots of bombs and flings cats at the enemies.

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Klatrymadon

Klatrymadon

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I've been playing a lot of Deathsmiles IIX recently. The reputation this game has is criminal - far from being some laughable misstep, it's a fairly straightforward smoothing out of the first game's rough edges in terms of its scoring systems (especially the quick counter recharge), and it has a meaningful shift in emphasis with all of the background lock-on targets to exploit. The soundtrack is some of Namiki's best work, too.

 

I'm playing this on both PS4 and 360, as I've recently managed to get an RGH-modded console up and running. While I can't take it online and compete on the (probably dead) leaderboards, it's been a real joy to finally try out some region-locked games which have eluded me for nearly 15 years. Otomedius was a big one, coming out at pretty much the apex of my Gradius obsession. Both Gorgeous and Excellent are as middling as everyone assured me, but I'm still having a blast with them. Another nice surprise has been DOJ BL EX, which is nowhere near as poor a port as I had expected, and has a great precursor to M2's "super easy" modes in the 'X' arrange (in that the only remotely difficult thing to do is to survive for the 2 seconds between bullet-cancelling hypers). Very little about the main modes feels 'off' at first blush, so I can only assume the chaining is fundamentally broken in some way...

 

 

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ImmaculateClump

ImmaculateClump

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Sing it, sister!
Very unfairly maligned, that game. I don't even think it looks that bad.

 

 

Mecha Ritz update oot the noo. Not had a chance to play anything today, will give it a shot tomorrow.

 

https://store.steampowered.com/app/463070/Mecha_Ritz_Steel_Rondo/

https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/Mecha-Ritz-Steel-Rondo-2283163.html

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phillv85

phillv85

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I always thought IIX was probably the best arrange mode on any of the CAVE 360 releases and there's some incredible arrange modes. I still think the base arcade game is a bit poo though 😅

 

There's so many good shooters on the 360, even discounting the CAVE games. Wish I'd bought Sakura Flamingo Archives back in the day though, I think it's the only one that's eluded me and it's so bloody pricey now

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dvdx2

dvdx2

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1 minute ago, phillv85 said:

There's so many good shooters on the 360, even discounting the CAVE games. Wish I'd bought Sakura Flamingo Archives back in the day though, I think it's the only one that's eluded me and it's so bloody pricey now

The ports in it are abit rubbish though - you didn’t miss much!

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ImmaculateClump

ImmaculateClump

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No autofire options.
Hey, mate, you had one job!
Good luck with that on the switch.
I don't have my old joytokey settings for mecha ritz neither so I'm starting from scratch.
5 times a second seems good enough for the red ship. That'll do me for now.

I'm liking it, you have to get up close and personal to the bosses to take out the sweet spots, and if you bomb, the sweet spots don't take damage for a while.

They've fixed the milking on the final pattern of the last boss.

 

It's good! Feels very different, they've left the previous version as a launch option which is nice.

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ImmaculateClump

ImmaculateClump

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Yeah. Not that I'm the biggest fan of the platform, but his discord is way better than all the other shmup discords combined, as well.
No noncery, no weird in-fighting. Just chill groovy folk helping each other out or having friendly competitions.

 

Here's a working invite if anyone fancies sticking their head in - https://discord.com/invite/KXwzNPQFge

 

Elixir is bowing out of posting shmup news on twitter. That's a shame, it was always a handy resource - https://twitter.com/shmups

I think a lot of people are jumping from that sinking ship since it got a little too musky.

 

This Japanese guys blog is a great alternative for keeping on top of new releases - http://blog.livedoor.jp/indie_shooting/

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Yasawas

Yasawas

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Any of you guys heard of this PC Engine console you can only buy in Japan? I suspect yes :)

 

Bought a Mini last week rather impulsively and I can't really believe how much I'm enjoying the shooters. Every now and again I get obsessed by one (most recently M2's GG Aleste collection) but assumed most of this selection would be a bit aged, and either too basic or just 80s-hard to enjoy today. Wrong! I've sampled a few at random and been impressed by literally all of them so far - Star Soldier, Spriggan, R-Type (full disclosure - I have somehow never played this, despite being over 40) and completed Star Parodia which was just lovely. I noticed Compil's fingerprints on a few of them straight away having been so into GG Aleste recently so I will probably pick one of theirs to focus on but really happy with my personal discovery thus far. I wanted a PC engine since I was about ten, seeing one in CVG and now I can pretend I've made it.

 

Related-ish - with this Mini being made by Konami, and so shmup-heavy and largely for an audience of fans of the genre, makes it even more baffling there's no Parodius. Is there a reason other than "Konami lol" they haven't done a collection of them, similar to the Castlevania and Contra ones maybe? Potential musical copyright issues? I had Jikkyou Oshaberi for the SFC and remember some wonderful rip-offs of KC and the Sunshine Band amongst others.

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ImmaculateClump

ImmaculateClump

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Yeah, I thought they were all coming out at the same time, but this makes more sense. They can catch any bugs and weirdness on pc and make sure everything is rock solid and patched up all nice before coming over to console.

 

I won the game for coming third in the high score competition, but I've already had hours of fun in the demo alone and feel like I should pay it forward.
If any of you lot fancy it on steam, give me a shout. You might have to add me as a friend, but you can fuck me off straight after.

Edit: This has been taken.

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PikaStu

PikaStu

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Two things I've seen on Youtube this morning...

 

Great review of Gunvein! I'm gonna hold off for the Switch version I reckon...

 

 

This LG monitor looks awesome for retro and TATE games. The aspect ratio is 16:18 2560 x 2880 (or 18:16 if you rotate it ;) ). Pretty pricey at around £600 (Currys) but if I still had my MAME cabinet I'd have been saving up for this! I wonder if we'll see more 4:3 (or close) monitors in the future? 

 

 

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spatular

spatular

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^ nice one!

 

got gunvein too, really impressed with the game it's super fun! started off annoyed with it because i couldn't get it to work with the saturn pad, gave up and used an xbox pad which worked fine and the recent xbox pads actually have good d-pads so it that didn't work out too badly. got a 1cc on the easy mode but it was a really close run thing, much harder than i was expecting, great fun. the normal mode is really good fun too - but checkpoints, man i hate checkpoints so much - i mean the game doesn't use checkpoints on the same continue so again it could have been worse - but if you continue you have to go back to either a checkpoint (1 try) or the start of the level. there's like a continue shop you can buy more lives/checkpoint retries to help. i guess i hope i can somehow unlock being able to continue normally?

 

so yeah actually playing the game is amazing so don't want to be down on it but some stuff around it is not to my liking. hopefully will stick with it.

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ImmaculateClump

ImmaculateClump

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I think a lot of shmup devs have been trying to move away from the infinite continue system, and trying ways to gently funnel newer players into the mindset that these games aren't to be credit fed through and ditched.

Sounds like he's lifted that whole earning continues and starting at checkpoints thing from zeroranger.

 

There is an achievement called "Freeplay - Unlock 9+ continues." which nobody has gotten yet. So I think you can stack up a good amount of continues at least.

 

If you're someone who's always credit fed to practice then I think you're supposed to just use the practise mode instead and jump into arcade when you're ready.

 

I really like the slower ship. It starts to feel underpowered once you get to the final boss on intense though. I really want to get a clear with that ship since I'm scoring better with that one at the minute, then I'll try and do the third one.

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