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After a hiatus of entirelytoolong, I have returned to the Great Cause: recording successful mega-time runs of all 150 challenges in Spider-Man 2. This is not an effort that should have required years, so we can file this as evidence against my productivity and dedication. With my capture rig alive once again, perhaps we may summit before another year passes.
Had I wanted to organize the challenges by difficulty, I could have passed all the Easy, Medium and Hard within a night or two. The Insanes are all. As it is, I’ve tackled them geographically. The tokens that activate each time trial challenge are spread throughout the city, and I’ve worked from south to north. This gives me a varied diet as I progress instead of gnawing only on the very hardest. I’ve cleared two new Insanes in my latest surge.
Challenge 80 was the more interesting of those. Two rough sections made this … rough. The first was the jump off the gargoyle at around 0:42. Doesn’t look like much in the video, on account of I made the jump. What would be clear if you were among the victims suffering through my streamed attempts was that Spidey2′s clipping is a little shaky. Lining up my sprint to hit that goal marker and also get the full-power dive towards the next marker without triggering a weird hover and blowing 5-10 seconds was a more precise operation than you’d guess.
The second crotchkick was the climb up the Empire State Building, starting about 1:10 in the video. The quickest way to scale skyscrapers in Spidey2 is to sprinkle charged jumps into your wallrun as dashes. This is what I’m doing at the start of the video with those half-charges on the jump meter. But the ESB is tiered. The top of each tier interrupts my wallrun. The slow, useless float after each can really kill my time. My success in the recorded run is middling. I had some time to spare as I reached the building and didn’t blow it too badly.
Finally the obligatory evangelism. Spider-Man 2 contains the best game ever made. 150 time-trial challenges, the Mary Jane missions, the pizza delivery missions and the Daily Bugle missions. In a sinister turn, this content is hidden behind a mediocre beat-em-up, so well disguised with a facade of dopey combat unlocks and shitty voice acting that few have discovered the precious treasure. Mercifully, the game offers a code to skip all that nonsense that reviewers think is the game. This is not a cheat code. It is a machete to hack through the jungle of mediocrity and reach the Lost City of Gold.
hai tecno soft i bs your last two bosses by taking advantage of my massive life count
So other than that, I’ve been playing some more Tetris: The Grand Master and its clones. I can finally get S1 in TGM2+/TAP. I still don’t like TGM1. Lack of hard drop firm drop means I’m kinda fucked if I get an overhang, and the game is slower, so I stack differently (stacking about 60-80% high to speed this the hell up), and my performance suffers. I can’t bear to play this game so much now.
I’m also going to participate in a Blockbox competition, because screw Tetris Friends unless it’s Sprint mode (and even then, screw Sprint mode too), and screw Blockles oh wait they deleted the old blockles which is basically crappy multiplayer Tetris with unremappable shit controls (up to rotate? space to hard drop while soft drop is still on down?). Given my poor track record with VS matches in BB, I’m gonna see if I end up sucking so hard that I destroy the fabric of time and space and create a fourth division.
but on the plus side i suddenly broke my record of 55 seconds on 40 lines by 3 seconds: 52″52
I’ve found myself playing another Tales of game, this time the Tales of Phantasia (ToP) remake (from SFC, the first Tales game) on the PSX. I don’t know, I guess you could call me a Tales fan. I’ve played some of Phantasia (SFC) and beaten Symphonia, Eternia (Destiny 2 US) and Abyss. Whenever I play these games, I question myself and my enjoyment of the game, “what is it that is making me come back to play more, exactly?” Most of the time it feels like I’m in a confused state of addiction when I’m trying to discern this. Is it the reward systems? The music, graphics, story or the characters? Well, I have some ideas as to why I play the games by now.
Have sunk in about 10 hours into Phantasia. There is a dungeon called the Lone Cave where miasma is fucking up the valley and pissing off the wind spirit, Sylph. In this dungeon the miasma is like a poison effect on your party, there are also enemies that inflict poison in this area. Playing through this part I recall why I enjoy playing RPGs. I’m trudging through, dragging boulders over these miasma-chemical filled holes and my party continues to take plenty of damage from the miasma, poison and the battles (I have the hard rank turned on). Healing after every battle, cooking food to heal up and nearing the end of the dungeon, I run out of HP and TP (MP) restoration items. I enjoy progressing just by barely hanging on. I want to see my party members fall mid-battle due to poison, that would be dandy.
But I wonder if I can enjoy this ‘hanging on’ feeling at every part of the game, maybe if I play hastily and recklessly if an area has easier enemies than others. Or is it that I should pick the right challenges, the right enemies to fight, when the design of the game shows me what strategy I can forge to progress tooth and nail. If I feel unchallenged, the game becomes a chore and I start chugging holy bottles so I have less encounters. “Fuck this, these enemies are annoying to fight and don’t give good enough EXP.” Ultimately, I just want to see what the game has to offer. I think what intrigues me about these kinds of games is the discovery of methods for progressing efficiently. With the Tales of games, there’s always some redeeming quality I find in them, that will average out into a good experience.
With ToP PSX, I rather enjoy the sprited artwork/animation and character and enemy designs. The game has a colorful and genuine aesthetic that I like. Has a kind of anime feel to it. The battle system is OKAY, it was adopted after Tales of Destiny’s system, so it does not use the first clunky system. It is functional but pretty simple. Battle consists of keeping enemies at bay with the fighter, blocking and queueing up spells (or setting up a shortcut). Some strategy comes into play with what skills you want the fighter (Cless) to use. But there isn’t a whole lot to think about. It is still satisfying, I find.
Anyway. I just formed a pact with Efreet and have to form pacts with the other 3 spirits before I can head back into Morlia cave. I turned off hard rank in there because the difference is night and day in some parts of the games, but comfortably more challenging in others. The fire demons can cast explosion but dispensing of them was easy enough. Efreet was a push over, but he did get one casting of Explosion off that nearly wiped out my party.
I recall playing the game on the SFC so many years ago, it had an epic feel to the game that rivaled FF3 and Chrono Trigger because I had surpassed one of the game’s climaxes. … Are these pseudo review posts any good? lol. Grats if you read all this.
For many, arcades are a relic of one’s personal last; the kind of place one hasn’t visited in years due to the nearest one being some triple-digit number of miles kilometers away.
For others, like me, arcades are current–very current. In fact, the nearest (good) arcade from my house is less than four miles away. It is here that I get to play a very special game: DJMAX Technika.
Developed by Pentavision, the same folks who brought out the beatmania-like (to the point of legal trouble) DJMAX Online and DJMAX Portable series, Technika is a different kind of picking from these two; rather, Technika is a touch-screen game, played somewhat like a cross between Elite Beat Agents and Lumines. A white line sweeps down one hotdog-style half of the screen, and as it passes over notes, you touch these notes, rather than pressing buttons like in other rhythm games. Since I’m here to talk about how I’m doing in this game, not what the game’s about, you can get further details about Technika through this guide that a friend of mine’s chalked up.
I haven’t had many opportunities to play Technika; since the semester started, I’ve had limited opportunities to go to the arcade. But I did get a chance this morning to play a few rounds.
I decided to take another jab at Technical Mode‘s Heartbeat Set. My songs for this are Divine Service, Stop, and Remember, in that order. Most players tend to replace Stop with Play the Future, but I refuse to play it because I have a mental allergy to “jackhammer” notes.
So I force myself through “Divine Service” (a song I admittedly find boring, and only catches my interest when I get to the strings of drag notes), almost no kinks here. “Stop” is a bit trickier because the white line scrolls at double speed, plus the “movin’-groovin’-movin’-groovin’” pattern in which I have to hit 1/8 regular notes combined with 1/8 repeat notes). “Remember” is fairly trickier as it’s also a double-speed chart combined with an even-faster song, so instead of being relaxed and (in the words of a popular Touhou meme) taking it easy, I frantically scramble my hands to hit eighth-note after eighth-note. With about 80-90% of my life meter left, I move on to the boss song: Colours of Sorrow. (Due to some sort of allergy/disease/curse/condition/destiny that prevents me from ever getting 95% MAX or more, I thankfully will never see the even-worse alternate boss, Area 7.) The beginning of this song is a test to see if I will be able to live to see the end of this song; if I can handle the “da-da da-da da-da” notes, I may have a shot when, after, a nice long breather section, this sequence repeats itself multiple times. If not, excellent but let’s go better next time.
I also tried the Customizer Set, the most difficult set in the game (and will remain the most difficult, as something tells me that the Platinum Crew service will be permanently confined to Asian countries which means no Challenger Set), just for lulz. Y goes pretty smoothly, as it’s just its Popular chart with more hold-this-note-down-while-hitting-regular-notes stuff. Okay, let’s try Shoreline, which is one of my most favorite songs in the game. Nothing could prepare me for the hold note-fest at the end that would bring my life meter below the required 50% for a stage 2 clear.
Popular Mode is…alright I guess. Since I can’t hit notes accurately for crap, for one set of three songs I decide to do an all-Blind run (in which the white timing bar is invisible, forcing you to play the (still-visible) notes by ear). For my last few plays, I had to play Melody twice, first time ending pretty poorly with a clear but lots of Misses and Breaks (and thanks to a friend saying this song is easy to time, I catch Thunder Force III-itis for a bit), second time ending a bit better. And for my last song before leaving? Uh, Cherokee + Blind + Fade Out = BAD, BAD IDEA.
Someday, I’ll be able to play accurately enough to finally play the alternate final bosses of the First Step and Electro E(-)P(enis) sets. That, or be forever stuck in improvement stagnation hell.
I was briefly adrift in Mega Man 9. I completed my immediate goals, which were a legit no-continues clear of the main game and an any-means-necessary clear of Hero. After that: a little bit of Superhero, some baselines in Time Attack, some Endless….
Endless Mode in particular fails to delight. It’s a series of segments, each 5-10 screens big, thrown at you in random order, with bosses at certain milestones. You’re scored based on how far you survive, in number of screens. Brilliance is scattered throughout the segments, remixes of the best sequences over the life of the Mega Man series. But there is no sense of ramping up as I progress in the mode; it doesn’t get any harder.
I’ve found the wind and set a course again: all-buster boss clear. That is, I’ll use specials to pass stages, but I’ll fight each of the Robot Masters with the peashooter alone. That seems a bit arbitrary, written out, but it made sense at the outset. I’m not going to use e-tanks or the 1/2 damage jobby to pass any of them, which would make it fairly trivial. Well, ok, maybe against Plug Man. Because fuck Plug Man, that’s why.
Progress so far: 5 stages clear. Magma, Plug and Tornado remain. Hornet Man was the roughest so far. Had to practice a spell to work out a viable strategy for him, which I guess I’ll bury beneath the fold. You have only yourself to blame for the tedium of reading it.
I’m finally starting to feel like I’ve got a handle on the secrets in sim5. My approach to learning Raiden Fighters Jet has been a gradual one. I ran through most of the stages first with no effort to score at all; I just focused on survival. Then proper scoring technique in sim1, while just playing the rest of the game for survival. That went smoothly enough, and yielded scores just shy of 40M for a full run.
Learning sim5 has not gone smoothly. Hovering over the big turrets to reveal the 3 micluses in the early going is the hardest shit in the entire goddamn RF series. I learned the TLB in RF2 more quickly. Twiddle goes on about kamikaze planes trying to collide, but mostly I’ve had trouble with turret fire at short range while I try to sidle into position. Maybe I’ve got a mental block about dodging sideways incoming fire. I come in sideways because I’ve got to shoot the stuff just upscreen from the big’un so that it can’t point-blank me while I’m hovering.
That’s falling into place now. The micluses, anyway. The DX bonuses on the trains are still elusive. And I’m not maximizing at-a-time bonuses or all that jazz.
I was trying to summarize my approach to learning the game. Once I have things a bit tighter on 5, I’ll start learning the secrets in 15. And onwards, focusing on just a level at a time until success is assured. I bring it up in part because the STGT folks are playing Jet this week. What I’ve been doing is no kinda way to one-week a game. My total time in is 13 hours, according to Aces, with a top score of 48M. That’s not a great return on investment if you’re against a deadline. And my scoring density sucks, since I play everything after 15 for survival. I’ve reached Real Battle Phase 2, and plenty of folks score 60M+ without hitting Phase 1.
I find it suits, though. At least for now.
Went through all the characters in Sonic Wings 3, just trying them out to see which one would be fun/efficient to play…as per Sonic Wings standards, Kowful The Viking is a mad powerhouse. He’s slow, but is powerful enough to destroy bosses way faster than other character, in some cases I’d say the difference is as much as a minute or more. After taking all the characters out for a drive I played a few more games with Kowful and whoopsie-daisy, cleared the first loop already. That makes it the third game along with Sonic Wings and Sonic Wings Special where I’ve cleared the first loop with Kowful. Though to be fair, I chanced upon a really easy final boss…most of his (her? I’m not even sure what it was) shots were destructable. There’s at least three final bosses I’ve seen now.
And as per usual Video System/Psikyo standards, I can’t do shit in the second loop. Couldn’t even pass the first stage. In the first loop the first boss is, as expected, really easy. It’s a huge, slow tank and you can even park yourself over it for its first form and you’re completely safe. But in the second loop…whooboy. It’s no longer a huge tank. It’s the size of a normal popcorn-enemy tank, only about five times as fast and it goes in and out of the screen, popping up at different places (though there’s a pattern to it) while shooting volleys of fast aimed shots at you.
Plainly put, it’s absolutely the worst kind of pairing for Kowful’s slow ship with its firepower concentrated tightly in front of the ship. I’m thinking this might actually be a clever plan by the developers – make Kowful very strong so that most anybody can beat the first loop with him easily, but make him so much more difficult to use in the second loop, which’ll force the players looking for the 2-ALL to not only learn another ship, but the entire first loop properly.
With that mind, I’ve started playing with Malcolm, who is also fairly strong but much faster and has homing shots as well. After many runs I’ve made it to first loop’s last stage once, where I died due to not realizing the bomb has a brief period of maybe a second or two after it disappears when it can’t be used. A refractory period, if you will.
Just now I was having much trouble with Malcolm (I kept getting stages which he’s not that good for) so I played a run as Kowful. Cleared the first loop again, this time with two lives remaining. Lost them both to the Speedy Gonzales tank.
(disclaimer: I do play Team Fortress 2, just once in a red moon, aka whenever I go to LAN parties.)
I decided to take a break from Thunder Force IV to work on Thunder/Stay Ni–I mean, Thunder Force III, so I can stop sucking at it more than I should.
Taking some advice from a fellow shmupper, I decided on Haides as my starting stage, so as to quickly fully power up (assuming I don’t make any of the many wonderful stupid mistakes I usually make in a TF3 run, especially on Haides and Gorgon). It took me many runs to teach myself “don’t go into the fork where the first Lancer/Laser is, that’s guaranteed death due to the way one of those rock stick things rotate.” From the waterfall area onwards, the stage is a piece of cake, as well as the boss (assuming I haven’t lost my Craw or my Saber/Sever); with both, the boss’s missiles are nothing, but with either missing, I can very easily get hit by a stray missile.
Moving onto Ellis/Eris, this is the easiest of the initial stages, if you ask me. The diagonal-scrolling section poses very few abrupt hazards, and the scrolling-up section is almost nothing. The boss is another story, however; in the 15-20 seconds it takes for the thing to turn red and asplode, I tend to not properly dodge the lasers coming out of its center, or the arms it shoots out once its ship launchers are gone.
Most casual TF3 players have Hydra as their first stage; for me, it’s my third. I play Gradius for this stage and switch to Fire(y) to keep the ground and ceiling targets out. There are a few sudden hazards here, like the enemies that appear from behind (though it’s nothing Lancer can’t handle), a “>” formation that suddenly emerges from the top and bottom, and rows of rockets on the ceiling and floor that I find easier to simply BS through than try to destroy. I tend to die or lose shield at the boss because dammit Saber why can’t you fire right in front of my ship and not just higher and lower than it at least this shit isn’t invisible
Gorgon tends to make me use gory language for a bit. Firstly, there’s those laser-firing machines that I need to teach myself not to move vertically in front of. There’s also the pillars of lava that make it harder for me to avoid the rocks that bust to paeces–it doesn’t help that some of them will hit the floor or ceiling and burst without me doing anything. There’s a lava pillar that doesn’t stop to watch out for (hint: bouncing fireballs on the left side of a lava pool). The boss requires some tricky maneuvers to avoid slamming into it and its eight-way bullets, but otherwise does nothing out of the blue.
My last stop on my tour of whatever planetary system this is is Seiren/Siren, because it just wouldn’t be a post-T(hun)F(o)2 TF game without a stage that goes underwater. Somewhat reminiscent of Super Mario Bros‘s underwater stages (with the water currents, only they go up), my first worry is those stupid mines that, on exploding gray, can kill me. At one point, there is a narrow passage with difficult-to-hit mines, and although there is a 1-up here, it won’t make up if I lose Saber (which I’m already rarely using out of fear of losing it). The midboss and the boss are both pains in the ass; the former only opens up its weak spot when it’s doing its wave attack, and the latter is this game’s equivalent of Gradius Gaiden‘s Heaven’s Gate.
After all this, it’s time to chase after the Cerberus. Using a [DATA EXPUNGED], the (awesome) music for this stage sounds kinda off, as opposed to playing it in cartridge form (which I’d love to have one day). With Saber on hand, I can make away with the rear jets, but without her I’m kinda fucked because Twin Shot can only put so much “Practical” in Boring But Practical. Other than that, Cerberus is pathetically easy. Maybe I should snap up Thunder Force VI so I can fight Cerberus and not CerberASS.
After my ship somehow escapes the exploding Cerbuttrus without a scratch, it’s time to take on the Orn Base. Hazards include the claw-like things that act as walls that are indestructible unless they have a root that can be destroyed and the orbs that fire 8-way lasers (which, when part of the wall midbosses, are a total pushover). Said walls may cause me to lose a life or two (out of the 6-10 lives I have at this point), but the real danger here is the boss. YAY MOVING BOXES. YAY BOX PATTERNS THAT MY BRAIN CAN’T PROCESS.
Once/If I manage to BS this boss, it’s time for the final act of this game: Orn Core. At this point I’m most likely at 0 or 1 spares to go. The midboss vaguely reminds me of Gradius III/IV/V‘s Big Core mkIII, only getting between its helixing lasers is not only optional, but disaster waiting to happen. Okay, stupidass midboss down. Hey Orn Core, what’s up? Yeah, your first form is so easy it’s not even funny. Yeah, I expected you to have a second form. Oh crap, a whole screenful of wave lasers and those bullets that move in circling clusters of four! Oh hey, the wave lasers can be destroyed, I’m not as in trouble as I thought I was! Nope, too late, couldn’t process that thought fast enough to avoid these shots.
EXCELLENT PROGRESS
but…
let’s BS the Orn Base boss less next time
In honor of the new 360/PS3 game Batman Arhkam Asylum…I’ve been playing the NES Batman game (Famicom version actually, but whatever). It’s damn good. And it’s made in the only way to do a good movie tie-in game: by ignoring the movie almost completely. There’s Batman, and the last stage takes place in the Cathedral, and you fight the Joker…and that’s really it. I don’t recall seeing Batman fighting against a gizmotron in the sewers in the movie. And that’s a good thing. Movies are movies, games are games.
The game itself is an action-platformer, a genre that got a lot exposure on the system, with a heavy emphasis on walljumping. The mechanic is very nicely introduced too. In the first stage you don’t need it at all, in the second stage you can take a shortcut with it, in the third you need to make one walljump if you want to avoid taking damage…and from then on you need to use it just to make progress. This culminates in the last stage, where you need to make very accurate walljumps (too high and you take damage, too low and you don’t make it) while also dealing with enemies. Best way here and in any level with a similar situation is to time your walljump so you avoid enemy shots, land right next to them and start wailing on them with punches. There’s a brief period when enemies are stunned after taking a hit, so you can either walk through them unharmed or destroy them easily.
The game’s often mentioned in “Most difficult games on NES”-types of lists (along with Contra), but it’s not that hard (just like Contra). I guess most of those lists are made while reminiscing how the game felt to a 7-year old kid. The bosses are pushovers once you figure out a solid tactic to their patterns (though Joker can be a bitch regardless) and there’s only three stages that can pose any problems…3-3 (with the big fireball-shooting tanks), 4-1 (lots of enemies, ground mines and bomb droppers at the same time) and the aforementioned last stage 5-1. I’ve made it to Joker while dying only once on the way and I have cleared the game with continues. I’ve mostly been playing it just for fun, not taking it too seriously. But I might get the no-continue clear by accident rather than by design at this rate. But now I also want to get into the original Ninja Gaiden games…not unlike Batman, only harder.
And eventually I’ll get Arkham Asylum, when it’s a bit cheaper. I’ve been spending a lot money lately so I need to cut back on the purchases a bit. Ever since STGT few years back, when Blazing Star was one of the chosen games, I’ve sorta wanted to get back to it. It’s one of the few shmups where I really like the scoring system and my brain seems to be wired for horizontals, at least for now. I got a nice, sleek consolized MVS (big thanks to rgb, he’s a real magician) and got a nice deal for the game…along with five others. Hey, at least I got a discount.
I got swept into Andro Dunos, though. Fun, fast-paced horzie. I’ve already made it to Stage 6 boss (8 stages overall) on a credit so a clear doesn’t sound too impossible a feat. Even though there’s not a real scoring system in place here, the game still requires it’s due attention even at the beginning since it’s fairly easy to die to an enemy that zooms right into you. So it’s nice to play. The four always-selectable weapon sets are cool and none of them are useless (though Reverse gets very little use). One could slap a buttrock soundtrack to the game, call it Thunder Force’s little cousin and nobody would bat an eye.
I still have little technical problems with recording MVS footage (I can, but then I’d have to play on the small monitor and experience slight input lag, so hardly optimal) but those should hopefully be resolved soon.
Dan Haigh
Ghegs
[DRZ] OTL-TIW
sikraiken
Alice
victoly
plasm0
Aquas
Raydere
szycag
BDA
bloocloud
Kollision