Monthly Archive

Between the whole video games being hard thing and the nice weather I got a little bit burned out on serious gaming.  Lately I’ve been screwing around with playing games for fun (sorry sik) during downtime.  On top of the stack has been the deeply flawed budget-label near mindless zombie hack and slash Simple2000 Series Vol.101 THE Oneechanpon ~THE Oneechanbara 2 Special Edition~.  The game is a bit hard to take seriously–  the main character runs around in a bikini and a cowboy hat, the secondaries include a schoolgirl, a leather-clad biker chick with a shotgun, and some cameo characters from D3 Publisher and Tamsoft’s other games including a reimagining of Sofia from Battle Arena Toshinden named Eva.  Oh yeah, also the ridiculous level of violence wherein you slash your way through hundreds of zombies at a time, pausing only to sling the blood off your sword or throw knives/energy waves/shotgun blasts in the direction of more distant threats.

It’s easy to see why the game was a budget release.  The game has slowdown in densely zombie-populated rooms that screws with the timing-based combo system.  The experience system is basically broken once you’ve fully upgraded the main character’s combo stat, which is okay because the game is actually way more fun once everyone’s stats are maxed out.  There are exactly 6 levels (plus True Last Boss), of which the later ones take around 30 minutes to push through when starting out, but are actually really fun to speedrun/time attack (the game keeps track of time taken to clear each level) once you’ve levelled up your characters.  Since the game has a map to tell you where your next objective in a level is, exploration is good for… well, finding more stuff to dismember/decapitate/rip the heart out of, etc.  Actually, there are hidden areas in each level that require a combination requiring a certain combo stat (and the skill to perform it) to enter.  The reward for clearing all of these is an extra costume for the main character; the journey is far more satisfying than the destination.

Oh yeah, I’ve also been testing the latest Xeno Fighters EX release.  It plays really well so far, I can’t wait for more levels and ships to be added.  In the meantime I’ve been abusing the custom soundtrack feature to make stupid videos to put on Youtube.  Too bad I can only capture the window at the default 1x size, playing in a 240×320 window in the middle of a 1200×1600 display is almost the definition of eyestrain, and SnagIt hates it when I maximize it like I normally would to play.

Right now I’m Betatesting the already released game DUX aka the biggest failure ever. Since I got used to like games everyone hates, I thought about how it would be fun playing this nonstop for the next few days.

I’m talking to RHE on a daily basis now and besides the obvious stuff:

-counterstop

-you can not not continue

I’ve made several other suggestions, like:

-lower the hitpoints of some enemies (especially stage 2 and stage 5)

-disable checkpoint milking (there’ll be a bonus for each remaining life after 1CCing the game)

The scoring system consists of two parts. The first one kinda reminds me of Psyvariar’s and is all about collecting bullets when being in hyper soaking mode. The more bullets you collect, the longer you’ll stay in this mode. While small bullets give you more points, big bullets give you more energy. When you soak up multiple bullets at once, the points are multiplied (small bullets) or summed up (big bullets).

The other half of the scoring system was borrowed straight from Last Hope: Hold fire button and release to shoot a bigger shot. With this shot, try to destroy as many enemies as possible and the values of each enemy will be multiplied with depending on when the enemy was hit.

I had two ideas for making the first part of the scoring system more interesting and challenging.

1. When you enter hyper soaking mode, every bullet’s value will be multiplied by the number of bullets already collected within one hyper mode time. If hyper mode is over, the multiplier resets and drops to 0 again.

-> Having it this way, one would try to prevent ever getting out of hyper mode. That means you would’ve to carefully soak up all bullets, shoot every energy-container at the right moment and chain through whole levels. This would’ve been a mix between Psyvariar and Guwange/Mars Matrix.

2. When you enter hyper soaking mode, the number of all bullets absorbed in this mode will add to a seperate counter. Now the points from each enemy destroyed, will be multiplied by this counter. Once you leave hyper mode, the multiplier resets and drops to 0 again.

-> Similiar to my first idea, one would want the hyper mode not to stop and build up a high counter first, before destroying bigger enemies. With this scoring system the regular enemy chaining could be ignored.

Both ideas would, in my opinion, add great depth and a lot more strategic planning to the game. It’s not a rare case that I find myself trying to stay in hyper mode for the whole first stage, would be nice to get a reward for that…

Unfortunately both ideas will not be used for the re-release of DUX.

Apparently a week or so is enough time to forget RF2 stage 7.  Died horribly.

I also took a few seconds to learn the scoring secrets on stage 3.  So far, my “scoring” runs have just been based on the secrets in stage 1, plus the first miclus in 2.  My ambition is paltry.

The bulk of the secrets in stage 3 are miclus triggered by flying over the tanks that appear on the flatbed cars of the train.  Seemed simple, but I blew it every time by killing at least one of the tanks before I noticed they were on-screen.  Guess I’d have to learn the cues that they’re coming up and guard my fire in advance.  Or you know, just not get those bonuses.  Which seems more likely.

The easiest way to clear Raiden Fighters 2, given my prior run which ended on the way to the TrueBoss, was to fail to earn the TrueBoss, thereby winning without actually accomplishing anything new.  This could also be described as the coward way or perhaps the pussy way.  Naturally, that’s what I did.  You need 100% destruction on each of the stage 3, 6 and 7 bosses to earn the TLB.  Easily avoided.  RF2 1CC’d, with a score of 13M and change, and no TLB.  The least possible 1CC.

I’ve already spoiled the sight of the ALL on the Xbox Live arcade leaderboard.   I was curious to give scoring a spin, and quickly racked up 31M.  The game is marginally harder with the rank increase that comes from scoring well, but the difference isn’t dramatic.  Perhaps “scoring well” oversells what I’m doing.  Better than 13M, anyway.  It’s still straightforward to bomb every potentially hard bit.  Stuff just fires from the very edge of the screen more often, which aborted my best scoring run on st6.

It might be worth trying for a clear with a 30M+ score, so I’ll toy with that for a bit. I’ll abandon the cause easily enough, though.  Hopefully it comes quickly.  Not yet sure which I’ll migrate to: Jet or 1.

I’ve been toying around with a couple of my XBox 360 shoot’em ups these past days.  Mostly because all of my moving around and preparing for future moves has left it so the 360 is the only machine I keep permanently hooked up.  Raiden IV I’ve made a pretty large temporary regression in since the last time I attacked it in February.  Getting aced by something that you KNOW HOW TO AVOID JESUS CUNT MCSHITNUGGETS HOW DID I DIE THERE FUUUUUUU- is an extremely frustrating experience.  This kind of frustration has limited me to a few runs a day at best, which is not actually helping me to improve.  Why you gotta make me mad, baby?

Triggerheart Exelica is even worse.  Some backstory: I bought the XBLA version because I absolutely adore the original Arcade version and subsequently put many many hours into the Dreamcast port with its gameplay-perfect Arcade Mode, slightly expanded Story Mode, and bullet hell + modified score system Arrange Mode.  The XBLA version of the game, however, was heavily tweaked from the original– with a simplified scoring system and somewhat rebalanced characters.  I far and away prefer the classic version but I’ve finally started taking the revision seriously.  The game is fairly tame f or a modern shooter and I have enough time in that it’s usually an easy clear (or even no-miss, as reflected by my old gamertag).  Not lately, though.  Despite putting up respectable scores I’ve been suffering strings of embarassing or downright stupid deaths.  Or rather, in spite of completely sucking ass I’m turning in decent scores.  Which is all the more frustrating knowing I’m a good run away from 250M+ clear on the leaderboards.

I promise vengeance and domination when I get my groove back.

I am not proud.  Scoring systems are important because they’re what keeps you entertained on stage 1 when you’re really working on beating stage 7.  My immediate goal was just to clear any of the Raiden Fighters games on Aces (arcade difficulty).  Through some combination of deception and misperception, I thought 1 was the place to start.  Naturally, this was entirely wrong.

Raiden Fighters is the hardest of the three for a no-scoring clear.  By a huge margin, if we allow for a Sim 35 clear of RFJ.  In keeping with the aforementioned lack of pride, I am abandoning it entirely.  So now 2.  Jet might be easier if I were prepared to deliberately earn Sim 35, but that seems annoying.  2 has really passive enemies, weak bosses and the ludicrously powerful Fairy.

Two serious plays later and I’m on the final stage.  Passivity is out the door once the ground enemies show up in 7, so I die rapidly.  I took a few passes at Training and learned enough to no-miss the stage reliably, including a single bomb at the boss.

Back to the real game, I reach stage 7 with my last life and a single bomb: exactly what I need to clear it.  All nerves, but I pull it out, bombing all the boss’ spam for the clear.  Well, no.  Seems I had failed to notice that just beyond the “Stage 7″ selection in Training mode is “Stage 7 + TrueBoss”.  I thought the game was over, because this is where all my training runs ended.  Instead, there’s a pair of turrets, a few drones and then a much tougher boss.  All of which was moot, since I died to the very first attack from those turrets.  Expertly done.

I tried Ring of Red today. Looks to be entertaining, at least for a little while.

Virtua Fighter 4 and Soul Calibur II on the way, DOA2 now. Getting used to it is easy enough.

Still grinding for shit in Super Smash Bros. Melee. Maybe I should get some mini-tournament going, or something.