Gunners Heaven

Been playing the quite cool PS1 run ‘n gun Gunners Heaven for a few days now. I’ve actually owned the PAL version, Rapid Reload, for many years, but I got the japanese release a while back since naturally the PAL version is lacking the ever-important 60hz.

The game has bosses up the wazoo, most stages have three bosses altogether. They’re very much pattern-based, they telegraph their moves and always do the attacks in the same order so technically once you learn their patterns you shouldn’t have any problems beating them. I still take way too many hits against Stage 2 last boss though, his last attack where he shoots two lasers in quick succession aimed at the player is a bit annoying. I usually try to time a jump and go over the lasers while moving enough to the right so I don’t land on the laser’s lingering scorchmark but not too far so I don’t hit the second laser. The timing’s rather tight there, gotta practice it some or figure out a safer way of dealing with it.

Yesterday I got to Stage 4′s last boss for the first time. After some creditfeeding (the game’s checkpoint-based) I managed to learn his patterns and more importantly, the area leading up to him. The game’s slightly odd feature is that your guns, all four of them which you can switch between at will, aren’t always up at their max level, you have to collect gems dropped by most enemies. As long as you have at least one gem, weapons work at their maximum strength. But the collected gem count keeps dropping constantly (except during boss fights) so you have to keep moving while also killing enough enemies to keep your gem count up. It’s pretty easy to always have your weapons working at max. strength until Stage 4 where after the first boss there’s first a long elevator ride, the second boss and a long corridor without any gem-dropping enemies. If your gem count is too low after the first boss you might have to fight the second one with low-powered weapons. That’s not too bad though, but the corridor afterwards took some tries before I figured out the safest way of dealing with it. You get some gems right before the stage’s last boss, luckily.

Stage 5 is actually a shmup stage. It’s sorta fun, though really easy until the boss, the stage’s only one. Couldn’t beat him after five or so tries. Need to practice and I think I’ll do it on an emulator with savestates just to save some time. The game’s bit on the long side, I’d guess a full run takes around 50 minutes.

I’ve also been playing a bit of the one NES shmup that the Internet calls “utterly crap” and “utterly impossible”. Guess we have AVGN to thank for that. I find Silver Surfer to be fairly fun, though disappointingly easy. After only a few runs I’ve already made it to the last stage. To be fair, I am using autofire which helps a lot here. After I’m finished with Gunners Heaven I’ll return to the Surfer and go for the 1LC.