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Mission 6 was a toughie to S-rank and it’s a fair bet I can’t do it consistently yet. But I’ve done it once, and that’s good enough for now. The boss’ first and the second-to-last forms took the longest to crack, though there’s a stupidly simple way to deal with the blob that seems to work reliably. The boss’ last form is a push-over.
Managed to S-rank Final Boss Battle as well and did it three times in a row so that’s some nice consistency there. That means I’ve S-ranked every single stage in the game. WOO. Just, y’know, not during normal play, only in practice. I dread to think how long that’ll take. After taking care of Final Boss Battle I returned to practice Mission 5 in which I had died during my last two proper runs. In 10 or so runs I didn’t manage to S-rank it once, got 98% most of the time. More often than not I died to Lance who seemed to love to do his “pinball-bounce around the room” -maneuver which is the hardest of his attacks to dodge. But few times I even died to the Slug, the first miniboss of the stage. I’m hoping that’s just my brain feeling tired. I’ll return to it during the weekend. And then I guess I’ll start doing full runs again.
I found out you actually can increase your credits in the game (through co-op play), so my earlier comment about how the credits turn into lives when you start aiming for the S-rank clear isn’t quite true. Ah well.
My story is this. The Void Quest dungeon caused me a game over two times. The first time, I killed myself by having Hama (doom spell) reflected onto me from the Strength Beetles. That really stunk, so I didn’t play for nearly a month. Picked it up again and got to the 7th floor, where the enemies get a little bit harder. I was a little cocky and fought a few more battles when I should have exited and lo and behold, I get ambushed and the main character gets pummeled to death without a chance to escape. That also sucked, but after that point a vendetta formed for me against this dungeon. I would see it out for what it did to me, me and my people.
So yeah, I picked it up again last week with careful attention not to game over yet again. And thusly I progressed. Got to the top floor where the boss was and decided to try to take him out. This boss was really peculiar, I thought. It takes two forms. The true form is a disgruntled looking baby with an overly large head that has a tip that resembles the shape of dispensed ice cream. Well, the head has a tip… is the point *shrug*. It’s other form is an enlarged 8-bit-esque sprite. He begins the battle with the 8-bit Hero form which he will attempt to rebuild after its destruction. It attacks with dragon quest styled menu windows, it’s kind of adorable.
As soon as I crushed the hero form, a chain of attacks from the baby killed my main because he hit Kanji’s weakness with Garula. Then, I tried again which was a painstaking 30 minute battle that resulted with my main falling from Ghastly Wail, an attack that instant KO’s party members with the Fear status. Doh! I was… kind of close. So, what else could I do? I had one more rainy day before the fog settled so I leveled up my party a bit, the winning factor for this leveling up being that Yukiko learned Mediarama, a better all-heal spell. Third time was the charm and I got finally got ‘em, and the baby fell from his levitation and promptly became oddly charred. Odd because earlier in this dungeon there are enemies that resemble charred babies, except with flowers on their head. That kind of spooked me, a little… a little.
The whole motif seemed to click a little more to me than the others for the dungeons. Ascending each floor, you hear ‘the boss’ speaking arbitrarily about a game. The motif was that it was a mockery dungeon-crawling game within a game. It seems he was addicted to games or something. The fact he was a levitating baby may suggest that life is a game to him. Then I wondered to myself and wondered “Gee, have I been playing too much? Too many games?” I digress.
I get so full of myself playing the game sometimes, plowing through battles and what not, brushing off battles as mostly easy. But the heat really started to advance in this dungeon. I find myself taking more caution in battles, carefully examining the possibility of a game over. So painful to Game Over sometimes.
University has started again and I have close to no time playing Garegga. Nevertheless, I try to play for an hour in the evenings and effectively planning my weekend. I’m quite confident about getting a G now, it’s just a matter of time.
The flamingoes: I stopped playing Garegga years ago, when I was still using Iron Makerel, solely because of these damn birds. Then I found a consistent strategy to get 2,4-2,5mill everytime with using Gain and now, with the suicide game over technique in my hands, it’s back to random frustration again.
I got 3,4-3,5mill a couple of times, with a score like that, I’m even allowed to do numerous mistakes later on, unfortunately I usually get like 2,9mill. Stuff that makes the game over technique easier and raises the chance for 3mill+ scores:
-Try to destroy the stage 1 boss’ front propeller. It’s difficult to do, I go the safe route with a double suicide on him. This way you can aim for 600k+ scores after stage 1 (my best is 654k atm).With around 600k you respawn faster at the flamingoes since you get the extend earlier. This is crucial, because you want to throw your first bomb after resurrection as soon as possible.
-It’s important to exactly know when to stop shooting to let one enemy live. The enemies seem to appear random, which means that if you stop shooting and the enemy is appearing on the very right of the screen, you’ll going to lose a lot of points, because you first have to wait for him to fly over and THEN drop the bomb.
-Placing the first two bombs is very important aswell. I still don’t have a feeling for the ideal placement yet. After the second bomb you should immediately ram into the enemy. At this point, it comes in handy, if you had a good stage 1 or not. If your stage 1 score was only 500k-550k, you first have to wait 0,5secs before killing yourself.
-After your resurrection you should keep an eye on the big bomber item. It often hides behind the explosion from your last bomb. While trying to collect the item, you’re allowed to drop one bomb. If you are to slow collecting the bomber item, because it’s not visible or even thrown offscreen and you can’t use the big bomber item as your second bomb, you’re going to lose a lot of points.
-After your resurrection, you have to drop three bombs in total. The sprite limit sometimes doesn’t allow a third dropped bomb, again, if this happens, big point loss. The sprite limit seems to be expired sooner the later you try to drop the bombs. Hammer the B button, as soon as you resurrect! If you didn’t ram into the enemy early enough, you now can’t drop a third bomb. Another reason why you need around 600k from stage 1…
-The placement for the latter three bombs is quite straightforward for once. You can just throw them on one spot alltogether.
…and even if you did everything correct, you sometimes get 500k less, just because the flamingoes hate you.
On another note, my Saturn froze during stage 6 boss the other day with a D,2 score and still a lot of milking to go. Would’ve been around D,5, which would’ve been perfect for a G.
OH WELL
S-ranked Mission 5 yesterday and played two runs today. I seem to average two S-ranks per run and I keep finding new, inventive ways to die. Basically small things that happen rarely but are fatal if you haven’t taken them into consideration. In Mission 1, right before the boss with the bees that carry you off, I was picked up by one right between the two metal bars you hang from, and upon flaming the bug fell right off the screen. In the second run one of those small bugs the boss’ first form releases managed to get through my grenade barrage and hit me. In Mission 4 my normal “Flame the backpack from below”-approach went perfect up to the point where a missile hidden behind the backpack hit me right after I had begun moving away, thus directing my protective flame elsewhere. Mission 5 would’ve been perfect if I hadn’t ran into a spider while flaming a propeller out of the way. Did this on both runs actually, never had much of a problem with it before. And so on. They’re all easily avoidable, so now I should be prepared for these particular incidents.
Anyhoo, the first run ended at Mission 6 boss. I had learned enough of the (awesome-looking transformer) copter to defeat him easily. For the second run I decided to take advantage of the Konami code, get me 30 lives and open up Mission 6 in Practice mode. This was an excellent idea as I certainly would’ve needed to start taking blood pressure meds had I tried to do it the proper way. One of Mission 6 boss’ forms (the blob) took waaaay too many lives before I even figured out how to hurt it, and quite a few more while I did the hurting. In the end I managed to clear the whole game (with 0 lives left) and open up both Mission 6 and Final Boss Battle in Practice mode, even though I averaged only B-rank. All the FAQs say you need at least average A-rank for the Final Boss Battle to open in Practice mode , but I’m not complaining.
The next step, of course, is to practice these two until I can S-rank them both. The idea of S-ranking the whole game on a proper run doesn’t feel impossible, just really hard but something I should be able to do if I just keep playing.
I do like what Konami did with the lives and credits. When you start aiming for All S-rank the credits effectively turn into lives. At this point my Hit Rate for any stage is 100%, anything below that is the result of a death. But since one can Retry a Mission at any time from the Pause menu and it will not affect the final ranking, it’s possible to make three mistakes and still finish the game with S-rank. That’s pretty nice.
Bejeweled is an easy game for someone like me, who grew up with Puyo Puyo and Tetris Attack/Panel De Pon, to write off as just some timewaster like you’d see on those touchscreen games at bars or clubs, or that come with your phone. In the same breath, all games are timesinks, but Tetris Attack at least had great character and gratification that came from the amount of attention that was given to the gameplay balance and sound design. Western games like Bejeweled and Peggle on the other hand have about the same aesthetic brillance as Lisa Frank stationery.
But I will always love “time attack” style gameplay. Bejeweled Blitz is making me realize just how much. For those of you that only play actual games, this is a version of Bejeweled that you play on Facebook. It tracks the scores of all your Facebook friends that play. If your score (times 2) and the scores of all your friends add up to over 1 million, you get entered into a drawing to win a Popcap branded laptop that week. It’s made for quick pick up and play sessions; there’s only one gameplay mode and it’s only one minute long.
I tried Bejeweled 2 on PC after playing Blitz for a while, but it’s not the same. The fun in the game comes from the time restraint, where every move matters. Because the time is so limited, Blitz adds “blazing speed” mode and multiplier jewels. You are rewarded for each move you make in rapid succession of the last until you reach the top of that scale which activates blazing speed: it only lasts for a few seconds or so, but each match in this mode causes explosions shattering gems around it, netting you crazy points. Even if you manage to access this bonus though, it won’t make a lot of difference unless you’ve got a few multipliers under your belt. Multipliers appear if you make a lot of jewels explode in a single move, which can sometimes happen just making multiple matches of 3′s, but usually you’ll want to make matches of 4′s or 5′s which make jewels that cause cascading explosions.
To summarize, this is like the manic version of Bejeweled. They didn’t just attach a time limit, they toyed with the scoring system in such a way that you feel like you’re being pushed to the finish line. Making a big enough cascade can push your score over the edge and give you a higher score than seemed possible before. It’s really pretty good, and not even in the “empty calorie” way like Peggle. It could be argued that the game is kind of random, where some boards just hand you better matches than others, but when each match is only a minute it’s not that big of a complaint. The game could, however, use some sort of quick restart for when you know it’s just not your match.
Seeing companies like Capcom and Hudson showing interest in mobile gaming, I wonder if they’ll start to look at gaming on social networking sites as well. Some Star Soldier caravan mode perhaps? At the very least I’m hoping for more fast action games, although we’ll probably just see a bunch of Farmville clones. UGH FARMVILLE
Speaking of Tetris Attack earlier made me want to pick Planet Puzzle League for the DS back up again. I think I’d have a few things to say about that one. But I’ve been wanting to write about another time attack game for a long time now: Pac-Man Championship Edition. Or maybe I’ll just forget I even had a gaming journal for another two months. We’ll see!
Last time (all two months ago) I talked about Mana Khemia, so naturally this time I’ll talk about Mana Khemia 2. It’s a pretty typical JRPG sequel: Largely identical graphics and gameplay, a few gratuitous recurring characters, very little to do with the original game. This doesn’t bother me much because that story didn’t have anywhere else to go anyway (frankly, by the end I was getting a little sick of it.) This time around the Al-Revis academy from the first game has both metaphorically and quite literally fallen back to earth, and oh fuck it who cares. On to the gameplay:
Stuff that’s better:
- It’s still turn-based. I wasn’t expecting them to change that, but I’m still glad they didn’t.
- Item creation has been streamlined a bit. Now if you try to synthesize a item but have run out of one of the ingredients, it’ll automatically take you to that item’s synthesis screen instead of forcing you to do it manually. This was a major problem towards the end of the first game because the endgame equipment required lots of powerful ingredients that, in turn, also required lots of powerful ingredients. You might end up having to synthesize 9 or 10 items just to make one weapon. This was made even worse by having two separate synthesis locations, another thing the sequel has fixed.
- New “Camp” option makes the day-night cycle much less of a pain in the ass. Now if you find a save point out in the field you can opt to rest until morning, noon, or night. This means you no longer have to stand around waiting for the time of day to change if you want to get a particular fruit from a tree, or if you want to not get slaughtered by considerably more powerful night enemies.
Stuff that is dumb and bad:
- Goddammit they added fucking minigames. I praised the first game for not having asinine minigames be an important part of item-gathering, so naturally they fixed that for the new gaming. It’s nothing too heinous, but goddammit I do not want to play the fucking slots for my items stop it
- Nested locations make map navigation a little bit more annoying. This is a minor thing, but you spend a lot of the game here so even minor things can grate after a while. Most of the important locations in the academy are now on submenus rather than the top menu, meaning you have to click twice to reach them rather than once. This bugs me more than I thought it would.
I admit I was reaching a bit on that last one, so there is a pretty significant net gain here. Nice job by Gust of incremental improvement.
Dangun Feveron is awesome and I might actually stick with this for a while, right now I’m around the latter part of stage 3 and on a good day I feel good… otherwise I’m relaxing with Imperishable Night, because touhou games are always great to relax with.
and then Jewelry Master which is probably one of my most favorite games ever. actually straight up playing that game for score will give me a headache at some point, so I’m just going to see about no-missing and cascading well for now. is it even possible to no-miss? I’ve never done it
I did as promised: I’ve S-ranked all the inital missions in Shattered Soldier. It didn’t take that long, the in-game clock (though I think it’s very screwy) says I haven’t broken the four-hour barrier yet. Mission 1 S-rank was probably the easiest/fastest to get, while Mission 4 was the slowest. Took me almost a whole hour. The big mecha at the very beginning was annoying until I figured out you could place yourself under his backpack (where the mines come from) and just flame it from there. It should be possible to destroy the backpack the first time you’re behind him.
After S-ranking Mission 4 I continued playing and S-ranked Mission 1, showing I do have some consistency going on, but just barely failed to S-rank Missions 2 and 3 on that run. Got 98% and 96% respectively, all deaths which were a result of misplacing or mistiming jumps. Mission 5 was unknown to me so naturally I died a lot, but I still got to the boss fight(s). I think I got to the fifth boss but I might’ve lost track.
It was fun getting the S-ranks on the stages and the main reason for this was because I was able to play any of them at will. Now that I’m up to Mission 5 I have to play almost 30 minutes before reaching it. And to open it up in Practice mode I have to clear it with at least B ranking, if GameFaqs is to be believed. That’s quite stupid in an otherwise great game (Neo Contra improved on this by opening stages for Practice upon reaching them, if I remember correctly). I am having fun with the game and want to continue playing it, so I guess I could play it on Easy and abuse the 99 credits available there to get my practice.
That still leaves Stages 6 and 7 to deal with…and they too have the same asinine “Clear the stage with a good enough rank to open it up in Practice”-requirement. Sigh.
So this week, thanks to recent developments, I was able to get a Street Fighter IV Fighting Stick Tournament Edition.
I got this stick at a Fry’s for $104 (- tax = $95 subtotal), and it happened to be the last 360 TE at that location. It was a pretty surreal feeling finally getting my hands on an arcade-perfect stick. I have an NES Advantage stick and a SNES Super Advantage stick, and really, those are toddler’s toys compared to this mofo. For those who have played on a Street Fighter IV or BlazBlue machine, this is pretty much the same kind of setup you’ll find on either of those.
However, transisting to the stick was not without its hurdles. For one, the restrictor is square-shaped, as opposed to the circular ones of most American arcade cabs. This takes some getting used to, as it can result in accidental diagonal movements. The buttons are also unlike American cab buttons; less clicky and more sensitive to the touch, so hovering a finger over a button could accidentally trigger it. Also, playing on a stick causes me to think differently; twists become harder to do in Tetris: The Grand Master (in which I rotate the restrictor for 4-way movement), and I have to relearn some bullet patterns in shmups.
The hurdle and the $104 is definitely worth it, though. Dodging shots with a stick feels wonderful and almost dream-like, as opposed to playing on my SF2 PS2 pad or my 2nd-generation Sega Saturn pad. Using individual fingers on each of the large buttons allows me more control over button presses, and is less likely to make my fingers sore from holding down or mashing buttons than a pad does. After several sessions with the stick, I can finally start really enjoying shooting games (to hell with the term “shmup”); all I need now is a tate’d monitor for my vertical shooters. I’ve also been able to improve at shooters I’m already playing; I broke my NOIZ2SA Stage 9 record, pushing myself from 2.8 mil to about 3.3, as well as PSY Stage 5 records in rRootage and my Parsec47 Lock-Normal record (admittedly, I did the latter just so I could post that I used a stick in the P47 Shmups Forum high score thread).
My current dilemma is the effort needed to rotate the restrictor for TGM; unscrewing the bottom plate, rotating the restrictor, and putting back the plate doesn’t seem like something I’d like to do twice a night. I’ll probably rotate the restrictor every week instead; one week play shooters on it while playing TGM with a keyboard, the next week play TGM while using a pad (which I’ll be using on campus anyway when I play shooters).
Obviously I’m not lugging this thing to campus, partly due to it being heavy, and partly because I don’t want it to get jacked. I have a friend who lives on campus and has this stick anyway, along with a homemade stick made out of a wine box with easier access to the innards (and by extension, the restrictor gate).
Mushihime-sama Futari Ver 1.5 comes out next month. Now that I have this stick, I definitely look forward to playing some Futari when it comes out.
And on an unrelated note, Space Invaders Extreme 2 got released this week. I may get it this weekend. I’m already lamenting the closure of the GameStop across the street from campus.
Been a while since my last posting, so here’s what amounts to a situation report:
I’ve been wandering from one game to another trying to find The One that I’d feel motivated to properly work on. I’ve played a bit of G-Darius for score. It’s really fun. Beam battles against the bosses are an awesome visual reward for doing good. I’ve gone all-lower route and made it to Stage 4, though Absolute Defender ends my game more often that not. Damn him and his pool of random attacks. He can be either a wuss or a total bitch. And I always mess up right before he shoots his twin beams out, leaving me feeling stupid when I have no captured enemy to counter them with. I’ve been playing the game on Taito Memories, which I understand runs fast. I have mixed feelings about that. On one hand, it’s cool to play a game’s slightly harder variation. On the other hand, it kinda sucks when there’s no slow-down at all and there are some patterns that it’d be really nice to have on. I guess I could just get the PS1 version to play and practice on and move back to the PS2 one if I feel like getting a bigger challenge afterwards.
I’ve also been re-visiting R-Type Delta and seeing if I could do a No-Force run. I think I could do it, though practicing it is painful. When you have to avoid the Force power-ups, recovering from death is waaaaay much harder. I’d really have to rely on emulation for practice so I wouldn’t go insane. Regardless, I’ve made a No-Miss, No-Force run to Stage 3′s boss on a credit. It’s actually the part right before the boss fight itself that’s so far the biggest obstacle. Those blue spinners shooting destructable blue bullets take a lot of punishment. But it’s really interesting to play the game this way. Parts that are barely noticable during normal play suddenly become deathtraps (the beehives in Stage 2 are a good example). And when the only equipment at your disposal are the normal gun, two bits and missiles you really start to appreciate them a lot more and figure out exactly what they can do.
And finally, I’ve been dabbling with Contra: Shattered Soldier. After a few attempts I S-ranked the train stage. The other three stages open at the start don’t feel quite as much fun as that one, but I think I’ll at least try to S-rank all of those and see if I feel like pushing further.
Next week I’ll be getting Shock Troopers for my MVS. Maybe I’ll get addicted to it, maybe it’ll stay in my shelf for years before I get in the right mindset for it like has happened many times before. We’ll see.
Dan Haigh
Ghegs
[DRZ] OTL-TIW
sikraiken
Alice
victoly
plasm0
Aquas
Raydere
szycag
BDA
bloocloud
Kollision