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Now-a-days I usually find myself cycling between a few games that I’m currently playing. Lately, I’ve also found myself gaming somewhat fervently like I used to when I was a teenager. It makes me still feel like one, that’s for sure. On my plate I’ve got Dragon Spirit, Gradius I, Persona 4, Phantasy Star IV and Metal Gear Solid 3. Gonna break down my thoughts on these games, go!
Dragon Spirit (arc): This game has such a classic feel to it. The fact that there’s 9 stages is kind of cooky, but it seems to go by fast. Love the sound effects and fantasy theme. I like its gameplay, it’s kind of a memorizer. Specific positioning and knowing enemy placement to make ambushes and knowing enemy patterns come into play. It has the feel like, oh, if I wouldn’t have died from that one thing, or that other thing, then this stage is kind of easy! Kind of like Gradius… it’s fun to play with ground targets in a vert, anyway. I can get to St. 5 on one credit, so far, but with a bit of luck to 6. Haven’t seen St. 7 or above, I won’t spoil myself (you can’t credit feed this game, but in the new version you can select a stage to start from, a nice feature.)
Gradius (arc): The last stage is the hardest of the stages in this game, for sure. I’ve been trying to devise an approach for scoring, as far as how many options I should get and when. The higher the rank, the more cheerios the maoi heads will spit out. Moai doesn’t scare me anymore after dealing with Gradius IV’s Moai. Also how to milk the blue cell stage’s boss effeciently, that is pretty fun. 2-3 is a pretty big hurdle of the second loop, I can’t pass it. Bullets quickly overwhelm you if you’re not ontop of ambushing enemies. An amazing game, honestly don’t see why people on shmups think R-Type is the better game. The gameplay trumps R-Type up its anus.
Persona 4: I’ve put about 50 hours into this game, it’s not a bad game. I didn’t play P3 and decided to jump to this one for a somewhat ignorant reason. That being that you can’t select your allies actions in P3, but that doesn’t even make much of a difference in P4, sans the bosses. So I was kind of stubborn about that. The thing is, I played Nocturne before P3,4, so I was grouping Nocturne with the new Persona games. While they are similar games, Persona doesn’t share the tactical strategy and difficulty of Nocturne, which I loved. The interaction with your friends and stuff that isn’t dungeon crawling is just as fun as dungeon crawling. Overall though, I prefer a more traditional RPG with you know, an Overworld, and different towns to visit, etc. Suffice to say, Persona 4′s dialogue and voice acting made me laugh sincerely many times, Atlus is keen on their humuor. I haven’t picked this up for a couple weeks or so, though.
Phantasy Star IV: This game is jrpg CRACK! Having a blast with it.
MGS:3: Playing it a third time through or so, don’t have the patience to watch the cutscenes much this time around. I just wanted to take the time to explore the game more, because in my previous playthroughs I was always panicking and rushing to the next area. Taking the time to attempt the stealth approach is rewarding, but most of the time I get spotted and end up wasting 15 guys. Oops. I’m at the Fear now, and I don’t have the Thermal Goggles, so essentially I’m fighting him under his terms because of his stealth, it has made the battle a lot more interesting, however. Beautiful game.
Well, see you guys around!
My new hobby: abusing systems for comically easy 1-credit-clears. Not “easy” games, rather, games that offer plenty of challenge when played respectably but allow some leeway for craven strategy. The newest entry: Raiden Fighters Jet. ALL1 clear with a miniscule score of 13M. Thanks go mostly to Twiddle and ycw for details on managing the stage selection.
The salient bits: suicide against the sim15 boss to force sim20, then avoided medals in sim20. I also let various tanks leave the screen unharmed in 20, but I think the medal dodging would have been sufficient. That gave me sim35 as a final stage with one life and a respectable bomb stock, without having faced anything like a challenge. I had never learned sim35 at all, so I still managed to die, then reached the boss with 6 or 7 bombs, subsequently spammed.
If anyone ever tries to suggest that there’s some inherent merit in 1CCs, pee on their shoes. Anyone could do this.
Jet actually has a few awesome stages, so I’ll aim for a manlier route. Tolerance is waning for the whole hidden bonus system, so I don’t know that I’ll actually try scoring well.
Time to put RF2 on the shelf. I got the top score on the US Live leaderboards for Arcade difficulty. It has a bit of a feeling of being the only guy at the track, but it comes at the right time. My love was waning fast. The game really has long stretches of not much going on, even into stage 6 and 7. I never quite crossed into the zone where playing felt like work, but I could see the signs at the border off in the distance.
It’s an improvement of over 5 million from my previous best. The gain came from an unexpected quarter. I’d been hammering away at stage 3, thinking a few of those flatbed tank miclus would be the key to a big jump in my score. There are four or five of those, each worth a million points and I’ve been within 3 million of the top score for weeks. Harder than I thought; I never did get them all in a run.
The actual breakthrough was avoiding my common chain breaks at the end of st3 and throughout st4. I bombfested through 4 to keep my medal chain intact. I did accidentally discover a miclus on stage 5 that I was completely unaware of for a little gravy.
Jet is next, I think. I need to learn stage selection conditions, but I imagine a no-score clear should be just this side of trivial.
Back from a somewhat pleasant couple of weeks during which I completely failed to do any gaming. In order to rectify this situation, I finally picked up a fightpad for my XBox 360 so I could start playing Shooting Love 200x again without worrying about having to get my wrists unlocked with a crab-cracker from mashing buttons on the stock 360 pad. The shmups skills test portion (obviously designed around a joystick, which makes sense considering the arcade heritage of the title) is suddenly much less frustrating and painful to play, although there are a couple of parts where autofire is just completely abusive.
I’m slowly recovering from being crippled everywhere, so I’m sort of back to playing actual games instead of various MMORPGs that take the brainpower of a fly to play.
More rank theorycrafting on Batrider, of course, but I’m also making serious attempts. Serious attempts that have trouble reaching 3m, of course!
So I’m back to creditfeeding practice (don’t knock it, it’s actually pretty good) to relearn the stages I have completely forgotten, especially Highway.
RFJ will be tackled again when this nerve problem completely goes away.
Been playing the game (still on Normal) with R13 few days now. The tactics aren’t that much different, obviously the vastly different Force and charge shot require some modifications to the tactics I used with RX, but it’s pretty simple. The most difficult part, I’ve noticed, is getting used to the smaller area R13′s Force covers. RX’s Tentacle Force can be opened up so it blocks more shots. Most of my deaths with R13 have come from a lone bullet slipping past the Force, a bullet that RX’s Force would’ve blocked. I’ve still made it to Stage 6 to the game’s hardest bit, so getting the clear shouldn’t be far off. After that I’ll clear the game with R9, bump the difficulty up to Hard and clear it again with all the ships. And then do a No-Force run. Maybe not on Hard but Normal instead.
Or that’s the plan, anyway. We’ll see how long it takes before I’m distracted by another shiny game.
Well that was entirely unexpected. Did my usual run, was happy to see that my tactics for Stage 6 worked nicely, was a bit surprised when I even killed the boss (first time for that) and then my jaw dropped to the floor when I went and beat Stage 7 despite not having seen it before. So…yeah. R-Type Delta cleared on Normal using RX and it was a no-miss, no-bomb.
Huh.
Stage 6 was much more difficult than the last stage, in which the only part where I felt some worry was at the very end where you have to dodge the sperm without the Force. There were few very close calls there. Reviewing the replay I see the ship’s hitbox is very small, in Stage 5 there’s a bullet that passes through the back of the ship and in Stage 6 I end up trapped inside the boss’ coiling tail and almost the entire canopy is inside the tail for a frame or two. So the hitbox must be in the very middle of the ship. Or maybe that tail has its own hitbox smaller than its graphics, who knows.
So…what now? Do I go forth and try to beat the game with the other ships, crank the difficulty up to Hard, go for a No-Force clear or move on to something else entirely? I’m still in a WTF-just-happened state of mind, I really wasn’t expecting to clear the game yet. According to the game’s timer it only took me 8 hours and 20 minutes.
Video available at http://www.ghegs.com/movies/Ghegs_R-Type_Delta_RX_nomiss.mp4
I have the first part of the sixth stage down, it’s the latter part that’s still giving me problems. Starting from the moment the Armored Giant Space Poop pushes you to the open space it’s mostly improvisation mixed with knowing you need to be in other part of the screen but not exactly sure how to get there safely. I’ve taken on the habit of recording my every run though, watching the replays afterwards really helps out in finding the correct path and figuring out your mistakes. I know which tactic to try next time there.
The boss itself needs a bit more work too. I can deal with his first form but the second one, which I just reached for the first time, caught me by surprise. Again, reviewing the replay footage helps in figuring out what to do and where to be. That’s basically by approach to the game now: do a run, study the replay, revise tactics, rinse and repeat.
Stage 5 still has one part of which I’m uncomfortable with. It’s shortly after the metal bars start spinning around. There’s a moment where it’d be really nice to have the Force at your back, but changing it there is hard because you need it at front just before and launching the Force out easily leads to it being trapped behind the rotating bars. Regardless, I (almost) always make it unharmed anyway, but it feels so unrefined. And watching that bit on the replay later on I often notice there was way too close a call there. I gotta try and find a better tactic there.
Just for a change of pace, after my normal run I went and tried playing the game without the Force. It was a very different experience, parts that are child’s play normally turn into deathtraps suddenly. I surprised myself by reaching Stage 3 before my first (and subsequent) death, and even that was due to a controlling error causing me to crash into an enemy that posed no danger. Stage 1 wasn’t all that different, but Stage 2 was waaaayyy harder. The part with the beehives was nerve-wrecking but I survived it with some luck. I was playing with the RX which probably isn’t the best choice for Force-less play…R13 with its homing-capable charge shot might be the best…or R9a with the second-level charge shot that covers more ground.
All my RF2 problems are on stage 3 right now. Oh, and 6 sometimes. And then occasionally 7 when I pass 6.
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Last stage of Nikujin before the final boss fight. I never would have cleared it as designed. For some short definition of never. The whole stage hinges on impale-jumps. When you jump on an unalerted enemy ninja and press down, you impale him with your sword, for an instant kill. If you immediately jump, you get extra height. Reading over that description, I find it fails to convey the giddy joy of the act. Try it, see if I lie.
There’s a section of the stage where you’re expected to drop into a room, do an impale-jump to hit a switch, then a second to leave the room. The tricky bit about it is not alerting the second guy. Once alerted, the jump is sabotaged and you have to retry the stage. Or at least I assume that’s how it was designed. As it is, I found that you can both trigger the switch and escape the room using wall-bounce jumps instead. So I just kill the dudes, sparing countless retries.
On clear, the game scores you on the time to clear each stage. There will be no further discussion of the matter. I imagine most readers passed over the phrase “countless retries” earlier quite casually. If you have not played Nikujin, or similarly designed infinite-lives games, you may lack a frame of reference for recurrent doom.
For those who do pursue the game beyond the clear, there are a number of speedrun videos out there, including one faster than this that played like hell for me.
Since I don’t really have any time to devote myself to one shooter these days, I tend to play Bemani games, if I find maybe 30mins in the evening to play videogames.
I’m not really good at these type of games, but I find them very enjoyable for some reason. So after a few weeks of not playing, today I finally played some Beatmania IIDX again (6th style). IIDX is one of the most brutal games ever created, it seems like the ultimate challenge to me. If you thought it was difficult to get into Ibara, try playing IIDX, you won’t clear anything even after hours and hours of playing. Seeing Rubbinnexx clearing V on Expert at some german Bemani meeting was one of the most impressive feats I ever saw.
So for myself, I finally got the Clear on Colors (Radio Edit) on Light7 today and cleared my first two diff 6 songs on Arcade mode. Right now I’m missing maybe 4-5 Clears on Light7 and everything on Arcade with diff 6 and above is simply ripping me apart. Right now I’m only playing for the Clears, getting an A or better is just not my cup of tea. I can’t see myself getting any better at this game, but I guess it’s all about persistence and willpower again. This game is just so much fun, I’ll just keep playing it till forever.
Regarding Dance Dance Revolution, I can now consistenly get a B on Max 300 (no bar, of course), but I’m not really motivated to jump around when it’s like 30°C outside.
EDIT:
Just got a Full Combo on Starmine Light7, yay.
Dan Haigh
Ghegs
[DRZ] OTL-TIW
sikraiken
Alice
victoly
plasm0
Aquas
Raydere
szycag
BDA
bloocloud
Kollision