You are currently browsing the monthly archive for August 2018.
Gallimaufry.
Purged the lingering embarassment of having not completed Mega Man 9. I passed the “no continues” challenge, but that was a terrible lie since it was done through save abuse. A legit 1CC still looms. And Time Attack. And Hero Mode.
I had a strange reluctance to mention MM9 because I assumed it was already in everyone’s pocket, but a glance around the friends’ leaderboards says otherwise. Of course, now there’s a new shame. The only times I do see are top-ten entries, thanks to Tiki. When most of the discussion of the game is among people who are glitch-zipping through levels to put up 1’15″ times, there’s something anticlimactic to “oh hey, I only died once to the danger room in Jewel Man’s stage this time.”
Frankly, not only can I still die to the Jewel Man spike room, I also sometimes hose a few of the easier spike jumps on that level. And there’s a good half-dozen places I can die on Tornado Man’s stage.
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Unlocked Vidmaster Challenge: Annual in Halo 3. There are a set of seven challenges spread across Halo 3 and ODST which apparently unlock a special suit of armor. Not my thing, but this one required 4-player co-op and I’ll help a dude out.
Specifically, we had to clear the last level in 3 (helpfully named “Halo”) with 4 players, on Legendary, with all of us riding Ghosts and the Iron skull turned on. That last clause is the highway to the danger zone. With Iron on, if one player dies, the whole group is reset to the last checkpoint. The way Legendary co-op worked in Halo 2.
Normally, 4p co-op is a rompin’ stompin’, even on Legendary. Halo 3′s stock Legendary isn’t that rough solo, and 4 is more or less an army. Iron makes it a man’s game. With a mixed skill group, Iron actually makes it a brutal slog.
We actually cruised up to Guilty Spark, despite my fears. Grenade jumped to skip the tower climb, and waited for sentinels to mop up all the Flood. Well, one of us did. We were too incompetent to all make the pair of grenade jumps, so we just sent one guy to the top to trigger everything, while we hung out in the snow.
That only left the escape sequence on the Ghosts. Easy enough on the Warthog, and Ghosts are even faster. It’s the stock game-ending self-destruct escape bit, as we race along to reach the Forward Unto Dawn while the Halo collapses around us. Oh god, the collapsing. The horror.
The various dramatic destruction sequences are all triggered by your progress. So it mostly falls behind you when you’re racing along with all the players in the same vehicle. But with each of us driving our own Ghost, the player in front triggered everything. So if I was far enough behind, the stage just fell out from beneath me. Fiery plummeting. And Iron’s on, so we all restart. And repeat.
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Still jamming with Jet. No progress, really. I’m incompetent at the secrets in sim5. Well, incompetent at surviving once they’re triggered, anyway. That makes 3 triggered’s in one post, which is probably my queue to wrap this up.
Hey. I’m Adam, known on the internet as szycag. I’m going to write on the internet about video games that I play, like these other dudes are doing. I’ll jump right into that then.
I love Virtua Tennis 3 so much; got it for $7 on Ebay, brand new in the plastic even. Virtua Tennis 2018 came out a couple months ago, which I guess makes this game obsolete and thus cheap. Not really though. Unlike most sports games on the market, I’m pretty sure many of the fans don’t even follow the sport and won’t care about the new roster. For people with short attention spans such as me, it’s just Pong with way more strategy thrown in. It’s also one of the few Sega properties left that hasn’t been totally dragged to hell yet. 2018 does add a few features that sounded interesting, but everything you need to be absolutely addicted is right here. It’s also in the first two really, it’s just that here it’s in 1080p. Hi-res cardboard cutout crowd goes wild!
So for this, my first post, I was going to announce my first victory against the AI on hard in Exhibition mode, but that hasn’t happened yet, despite all my hard work. I’ve gotten so close numerous times. I always pick that Dent guy as my rival because I don’t like his chin. Sometimes I’ll catch him slipping and get him off to one side and smack one in he can’t possibly reach, but I swear he’s just doing this to lure me into some false sense of security. I sense so many things from the AI in this game- things that I’m just imagining of course- but like the computer is getting mad at me or trying to spite me, lead me on even. The great thing about a game as simple as this is how complex the AI can truly get. I see it starting to pull the same shit that I’m trying to pull, like lob shots that go just an inch over the net then running right up against it and mashing A. Stuff like that. That’s MY dick move, and he stole it. Double dicked.
I think what plays into all that is the body language. When I trip over my own shoes with a sloppy return, then see the other guy rearing up to smack it back just a couple feet out of my reach, I have to step back a bit and wait a few seconds before I serve again. Stare him down a bit. He’s looking a bit cocky. Picture that, then the next set he’s going all benevolent and botching what was otherwise a pretty boring rally. The never-ending rallies aren’t what gets me though, it’s tying up at Deuce again and again, sometimes up to six and seven times. By that point I’m just too nervous to be clever. If it’s match point and I’m that nervous, I’m hoping if I hit A at just the right moment when I serve it’s going to hit him right in his mongoloid chin. Even in fighting games I don’t get that desperate. It’s just the nature of the game I guess. Oh, here are the two unlockable TRUE LAST BOSS characters:
King and Duke
Look at these douchebags. Case in point. Cocky bastards. I turned the tournament settings to Very Easy, 1 match, so I could keep getting to King without any undue stress, but it was hopeless. Can’t get a single point against him. I’m not even gonna try matching up with Duke. Look at those handlebars. I’m trying to figure out which mini-game in the world tour mode levels up my pompous prick attribute.
There should be a mini-game where you hit baby seal clubbers with tennis balls.
Some stuff I might talk about next time:
Shadow Complex
Shooting Game Tournament 2018 bitching
Gears of War 2 unless I end up reselling it (I’ve had it for a month and it’s still in the plastic. Can’t stop playing VT3)
Sega Saturn stuff
HOW WAS THAT DAN
So as of last night, I have surpassed level 300 in TAP’s T.A. Death mode. Upon crossing this barrier and triggering the tribal-Wild Western hybrid background music, I stopped locking pieces manually, instead letting the drastically-decreased lock delay take over for me. A few blatant mistakes and 21 levels later, I topped out dead. Now, give me maybe 6-8 months before I can reach 500, about 12 to reach 500 in under 3’25″00 and trigger the M rank, and maybe 5-7 years to reach Grand Master status.
I’ve also been playing Thunder Force IV (which I refuse to call Lightening Force). I’m slowly getting better. My usual order is Daser-Strite-Air Raid-Ruins.
- Daser allows me to get a Blade from the get-go, as well as a shield, and gives me time to warm up as it’s not too terribly difficult.
- Strite offers an easy 1-up and two chances to get Craws. However, I tend to die to the claw-like thing preceding the boss due to not knowing its movements well.
- Air Raid is a pretty fun stage; it’s so far been the only of the four initial stages where I bother to use 25% speed, necessary for me to weave Gradius-style through the tiny gaps between ships. There’s a Free Way to be had in this stage.
- Ruins is the trickiest of the initial stages IMO, and for that reason I select it last. Those self-replicating enemies that remind me of Trauma Center‘s Deftera, enemies that almost suddenly pop out of the background, and the laser spears. However, this is where I get Snake (no, not Super Smash Bros. B**wl‘s second-highest-tier character) and Hunter. I’ve read there is a hidden shield to be had here.
Stage 5 is simply a breather level where I get the Thunder Sword upgrade. Stage 6 has more enemies that come in from all sides, making me pussy out and switch to Hunter. This is also where I get to use the Thunder Sword on a boss for the first time (though usually not without dying).
Stage 7 is a labyrinth-like cavern, and it’s somewhat fun to play. The boss’s first form is nothing, it’s the second form that I have to be careful on, lest a stray laser that I didn’t hit come around and hit me. On the plus side, downgrading from Blade and its all-red hit explosions to Twin Shot means I can actually tell if I’m hitting the boss.
Stage 8 has my favorite song in the game, “Metal Squad.” The first midboss isn’t very difficult once you know its attacks. I ended my credit shortly thereafter.
I’ve never gotten into using stage select or savestates to practice later stages, at least not since I played Gradius V regularly about five years ago. I just start from the beginning and learn the later stages when I can get to them easily.
I promised Dan that if he put me on Gaming Journals I would write about JRPGs until he banned me, or at least deeply regretted it. Well, he did anyway, and now I’m going to write about a JRPG. Since I’m playing Mana Khemia I’ll go ahead and talk about that.
Mana Khemia is about a guy and his cat. The guy is studying alchemy because he can’t think of anything better to do, and the cat might be his dad. I haven’t been paying much attention to the story because, really, who cares about story?
Here are things I like:
- It’s turn-based. RPGs should be turn-based. Turning them into low-grade action games is stupid; there are already plenty of real action games that do it much better (Final Fantasy 12 gets a pass because the Gambit system lets you strategize almost as much as a turn-based system would.) Mana Khemia also makes use of all the modern features a turn-based RPG should have: You can see whose turn is coming up, you can see monsters before you encounter them, and you can call in your reserve characters at (almost) any time.
- Fairly streamlined stuff-getting. Although you have to spend a lot of time gathering ingredients for your various alchemical endeavors, there are no asinine minigames, nor do you have to breed any goddamn Chocobos. You simply find them lying around while you’re out killing monsters, or you cut down grass with a simple half-second animation, or you harvest them in various ways with other simple half-second animations.
- Prevents overleveling. Your characters’ levels are determined by what items you’ve synthesized, and what items you have available to synthesize are largely determined by where you are in the story. This means you can’t ruin the game for yourself by accidentally overleveling, something that has happened to me in other games without even trying.
Here are things I don’t like:
- Fetch quests that are dumb even by fetch quest standards. So far the game has yet to rise above “go to a place, kill a thing, get another thing.” Most of the time it doesn’t even bother with the things and just has you go to a place and watch a scene.
- Unbalanced day/night system. Time passes while you’re out killing stuff/gathering stuff, and at night monsters get more powerful. This is reasonable enough, except they get much too powerful; defense increases by something like a third and attack power nearly doubles. Combine this with their drastically increased overworld speed and going out at night becomes flirtation with death. This wouldn’t be such a problem, except that the sheer size of the maps means that being out at night is impossible to avoid, forcing you to either wait it out in a safe spot or slog on through very dangerous enemies.
- Running away is goddamned useless. I swear it fails 9 times out of 10, or at any rate often enough that I don’t even bother trying. This is especially annoying coupled with #2 above.
On a scale of 1 to pi Mana Khemia gets one thumb up at a 72° angle.
Three months ago, I never imagined I would be able to break the level 500 barrier in Tetris: The Grand Master 2 – The Absolute PLUS (also known as TGM2+ or TAP).
For those unfamiliar with TGM, it’s a series of Tetris games developed by Arika, designed for advanced players. It’s an intermediate between old-school NES / Game Boy / SNES Tetris (well, if you wanna get very technical, substitute that with Sega’s 1988 version of Tetris) and the very lenient “guideline” Tetris that has become the standard in recent years–close enough to the former to provide a challenge, close enough to the latter to have some features that keep the game out of what TV Tropes calls “Fake Difficulty.”
From the time I started playing the TGM series in late October of last year, it took me four months to reach level 500 in TGM1 (“level” being roughly “pieces dropped + lines cleared”, as opposed to the more traditional definitions that are “lines cleared / 10″ or “times goal reached.”), the point at which pieces start dropping to the bottom instantly instead of having any time in the air. It took another five months to replicate the same thing in TAP, partly due to changes in the randomizer, partly due to changes in the internal mechanics, and partly due to how the visuals and mechanics affect my line of thought when I play.
I’ve also been playing what is possibly the most infamous mode in TAP–the “T.A. Death” mode, in which pieces drop instantly right away, and the game gets harder through tightening other mechanics such as the time a piece needs to “lock” in place and the delay between lockdown and the appearance of the next piece. At times, I favor playing this mode over Master mode, the de facto main mode of the game (where you get your grades and stuff), partly due to my shorter average play time (which makes it a good mode when I don’t have a lot of time to kill), and partly because I sometimes find Master mode’s slower initial speeds to be a chore. In comparison, playing at instant-drop speeds turns TGM into a totally different game from playing at higher speeds, and demands a combination of a new line of thinking and more on-your-toes reflexes. Stacking decisions are also more crucial at this speed; a wrongly placed piece can limit one’s options for piece placement, or worse, doom a game to an early end.
My last record on TA Death is level 227. Unlike in Master mode, there are no grades to obtain–it’s a time attack to level 500, with a fast enough time to that level being rewarded with an M grade and a chance to continue to level 999, a feat that maybe less than 500 people throughout the world have completed. I’m very far away from 500 myself; I need to get to level 300 first, at which point the game takes a nice spike in difficulty.
Sometime, I’d like to go to Arcade Infinity, home of one of two Tetris TGM3 machines located outside of Japan. Yes, TGM really is that rare, and that’s because most Tetris players don’t care for TGM (and because TGM is an arcade game series that has never been released outside of Japan); it’s either the Super(-Lenient) Rotation System and newer Tetris games like Tetris DS (hi, infinite spin), or the older, clunkier Tetris games like the one on the Game Boy.
Bemani games are boring to write about, that’s why I don’t.
I improved a lot in Beatmania, I can clear most of the songs on level 8 and a few on level 9, with Quasar being the hardest I guess. iidx is just perfect for a short abstinence from shooters or just to relax a few mins on a busy day. I don’t get so obsessed with them and I feel no pressure. That’s probably because I’m not hunting down these AAA ranks and my gaming niveau is quite low compared to others. Nevertheless, I miss something that only shmups can give me. It’s the theoretical approach, it’s the thinking about the game when you’re not playing it, working out good scoring routes, reading strategy guides. Shmups have (at least for me) much more to offer. That doesn’t mean that Bemani games are less entertaining, they’re just less interesting in general. Does that even make sense?! I’ll keep playing them, that’s for sure, but I’m afraid I’ll never play these games on a high level. Maybe this is actually a good thing, time for gaming is becoming more and more scarce for me…
Or maybe it’s just because I LOVE SHMUPS!
Bemani games are boring to write about, that’s why I don’t.
BATRIDER
I finally got around to aim for my Summer Goal, namely clearing Advance mode with a team instead of the plain Strawman approach. The first day (yesterday) was a disaster, I wasn’t even able to clear stage 2… I figured out that it was probably because I tried every difficult milking strategy right from the start. Today I got the basics down again, and I’m refining my strategies for the first 5 stages (6 if you count colosseum). On my best run, I got to the first ninja on the highway with a score of 7mill, that’s only 1,5mill shy off the 17mill replay from superplay.co.uk. Enough for a D or E score I think.
Stage 1: I usually get around 1mill, If I learn some advanced milking techniques and try to destroy his backpack, I can get around 1,4mill. Right now I couldn’t care less, too much effort for such a small increase – not worth it YET.
Sky High Stage: Since I’m playing the Korean B version, I have some problems destroying the blue ships to activate Bashinet. I’m just not having enough firepower. I really need a special power up there, maybe not that good for rank management, but there’s nothing I can do. I’m not milking Boredom, but I try to milk the small missiles during Bashinet’s first form, which actually is quite easy once you have some sort of routine.
Sewer Stage: The level itself is pretty much straightforward. I have to work on destroying more of the big enemies with aura, could be worth it. The boss is much more interesting though, milking Deviate is essentially important and can give you up to 800k alone! However, you have to use a Batrider ship and one mistake can cost you Black Heart. I’m concentrating on getting all the secret bosses first, but sooner or later I definitely have to come back to milking this boss.
Airport Stage: Not much to say here. Milking Bazzcok isn’t as hard as I thought and I’m getting better at shooting Gob Robo’s balls (!) for the 10 extra medals. Timing is everything.
Colosseum: Bashinet2′s first form is a complete bitch and imo has the hardest attack patterns right after Envy of course. Breaking my medalchain here is very likely, I’ll work on that.
The Highway Stage itself still is a mess. I don’t know if I should destroy the hovercraft or get the extend and I’m messing up the end quite often. Haven’t thought about the bossrush yet.
Thanks to discoveries made during co-op I’ve also made progress in single player. Made it to stage 7 on a credit, though I still died on stage 6 few times. As suspected, stage 5 is ridiculously easy if one can get there fully powered up. It’s enough to park yourself to the upper left or lower left corner and only occasionally move out to take care of the few popcorn enemies now and then. With the Red weapon held all the way from stage 4′s start the boss falls quickly.
Stage 4 itself is still annoying. There’s so many small, yet fatal things that can go wrong there. Getting better at the boss, though. Rather silly that stages (and bosses) 5 and 6 feel easier than stage 4…or at least they have far less things to remember to watch out for. Though in stage 6′s boss room, where you want to (or I want to, anyway) put the Force to my back I gotta be real careful not to run into a wall doing that. I think Dimension’s 3D graphics are playing tricks on me there, it looks like there’s more space there when there actually isn’t. Lost two lives just to that. Didn’t get too far into stage 7, a large “thing” came out from the left and I took a laser blast at close range after a while. Rather reminiscent of Delta’s stage 6, actually.
Speaking of Delta, I just realized the other day that I never changed away from Red weapon while I was playing it. Not sure why, just didn’t seem necessary to. In R-Type I change weapons at almost every opportunity and there’s a good reason every time. ‘Course in Delta RX’s Force has homing capabilities which more or less does the same job as having a more spread-out weapons fire output like those of the Blue or Yellow weapons. Makes me wonder if Delta’s and the original’s level design have that different philosophies behind them, or if RX was just that good. I guess if/when I go back to Delta to the other ships I’ll really find out. Could certainly make that one bit in stage 6 a whole lotta easier.
I earned an ALL2 1-credit-clear on Raiden Fighters Jet to go with my previous and paltry ALL1. Path was 1->5->15->20->40->50. Score was 21M and change. Yes, I know that’s bad. That’s the idea.
My pattern for the weekend was to take a few swipes at the sim50 birdboss in training each day. Before this run I added a practice session on the 20 and 50 bosses. The former as a refresher, the latter because I knew I was just sloppily bombing and hoping.
The run itself doesn’t make much of a tale. I had 1 life and like a dozen goddamn bombs in stock when I reached 50, so I played cautiously. Adrenalin didn’t kick in until I reached the boss. Bombfested and still managed to die once in his last phase of damage, during the recharge delay for the Fairy’s bomb.
Scoreplay is up next. This effort leaves me at 6th, I think, on the Live scoreboard. Which is deceptive, because the dropoff is so dramatic. I have only 20% of Twiddle‘s top entry. So it’s really no score at all.
Score begets rank. Rank begets speedy bullets. May speedy bullets beget more fun.
Zaarock from the irc channel agreed to partner up for the co-op and we got to it. As we’re both located in Finland there’s very minimal lag, so that’s the technical side taken care of.
It’s almost like a whole different game with two players. At first we both basically played it like a single player game, which stops being a good idea at the midpoint of Stage 1. So, heavily revised tactics need to be made. Instead of trying to divide the power-ups evenly from the start, one player now collects most of the power-ups in stage 1, with the other getting the Force just before the boss. Works much better. The first two stages are pretty straightforward and simple so there’s not much visible teamwork (until the second boss, anyway) but from stage 3 onwards there’s almost nothing else.
Dimensions has options for playing with player collision on or off, and being gluttons for punishment, we’re having it on. This means that the ships can’t overlap but they push each other around instead. Often into inconveniently placed wall or bullet. This is responsible for maybe third of our deaths. Playing the co-op game with player collision on means you not only have to look out for your own ship, but also be aware where the other ship is and is there anything fatal near it. Should make for fun times when we really get into stage 6 with its moving boxes and tight routes to follow.
We have made it to stage 6 on several occasions, but never at full strength. Most of our deaths happen in stage 4, and reaching stage 5 in an underpowered ship makes the stage so much harder. If we could both get there fully powered, it’d probably be the easiest stage of all.
I uploaded a video of one our more successful attempts (until the first death, anyway) to Youtube. I’m not going to post videos constantly about this, this was more a proof-of-concept thing to show people what co-op play looks like. Or looked like, we’ve already changed some of the tactics used in that video.
Dan Haigh
Ghegs
[DRZ] OTL-TIW
sikraiken
Alice
victoly
plasm0
Aquas
Raydere
szycag
BDA
bloocloud
Kollision