TRP-STGT 2017 Conversation Week 4: Gekirindan

[trap15]

Gekirindan (Taito, 1995)

A Toaplan extravaganza!

Playing week ends Sunday, 7 January, 2018 at 22:00 GMT

Dynamic scoreboard at http://daifukkat.su/stgt/2017/

Tournament main thread: http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?t=61125
Score submission thread: http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?t=61539

RULES

MAME or PCB. MAME set is named gekiridn.
Autofire is allowed.
1 credit only.

DIP SWITCH/CONFIGURATION SETTINGS
Default settings.

Discuss the game, strategy, and such here, not the score submission thread.

[EmperorIng]

Does player side matter? IIRC P2 starts off with an extra powerup.

Also, wtf lmao dude

Unless next week pulls out a real rabbit this will at least be "best soundtrack of STGT-TRP-2017." Maybe I will finally clear this game after years of playing it.

[trap15]

You can use either player side, just mark it when you submit obviously.

Also, what do you mean "wtf lmao dude". There is no "wtf lmao" here.

[KAI]

Oh yeah! Taito Memories here I come.

[Shepardus]

I feel like the technical bonus is way too easy, I reached it on my first credit ever playing this game. None of the other technical bonuses so far have been especially hard but they at least took more than one try.

First impressions of this game are pretty decent. I can't tell whether it's actually a Toaplan game in disguise.

[Blinge]

What is it with you and asteroids

[EmperorIng]

Good to know; I'll have to see if it really makes a difference!

Also, what do you mean "wtf lmao dude". There is no "wtf lmao" here.

Maybe I'm just always caught off guard by the choices. I was also imagining the pained asses of some players trying -with futility- to milk bosses for paltry sums.

What is it with you and asteroids

Week 5 Atari Week Confirmed???

[OmegaFlareX]

First impressions of this game are pretty decent. I can't tell whether it's actually a Toaplan game in disguise.

Lee Ota (Oota?) went to Taito and has a production credit. Not sure if there are any other former Toa devs involved.

[Deadliar]

YES FINALLY A GOOD GAME.

about damn time

[copy-paster]

Why I can't configure autofire here? Tried with different rate but always same default rate.

[system11]

The game has built in autofire so it's kind of meaningless to try to configure something extra.

[ACSeraph]

Just to confirm, Taito Memories is not allowed?

[Shepardus]

The devs did the sane thing and gave you a fixed rate of fire. Though I kind of wish I could autofire Type C's alternate weapon.

Are there any regional differences in this game?

Edit: I just cleared this game with no misses and 1 bomb (which was more out of nerves than necessity). I thought it was going to become challenging but then it just ended.

[copy-paster]

Are there any regional differences in this game?

Japan version has quote for each character during stage bonus score, truly homage for Batsugun.

Extra challenge for this game is playing it without auto, trust me it doubles the fun.

[Shepardus]

Extra challenge for this game is playing it without auto, trust me it doubles the fun.

Autofire does nothing in this game, there's no "extra challenge" playing it without.

[Hiki]

MAME or PCB. MAME set is named gekiridn.

MAME-version I use doesn't have that or clones.. PS2 okay?

[Zerst]

The top score on this forum is 1.6m.

The world record is 2,364,440.


trap why

[Square_Air]

Figured I'd share this PM just in case other people are having problems with save states.

CptRansom - 1,003,720 - 5 - 2P - Type B - ShmupMAME 4.2

Loading states seems to not work for me on this game, so getting this last stage down is going to be an act of frustration and boredom through the first few stages. Can't wait. Really.

Just wanted to let you know that (in shmupMAME 4.2 at least) you can save in between stages. I save my states as soon as the score counter reaches zero. The background change between the score checkout and the next stage will make everything pop in correctly about 90%~ of the time. If it doesn't, restart and load again. On a fresh start, don't load your game until the "WAIT A MOMENT" text pops up otherwise everything will go dark. It seems like this can happen if you load at other points in the game seemingly at random. Sometimes the game has a bit of a flicker when you load states, but it seems to be minor.

It's not perfect, but it'll do.

[Shepardus]

Guess I'll share my PM then too:

Subject: TRP-STGT 2017 Week 4: Gekirindan

CptRansom - 1,003,720 - 5 - 2P - Type B - ShmupMAME 4.2

Loading states seems to not work for me on this game, so getting this last stage down is going to be an act of frustration and boredom through the first few stages. Can't wait. Really.

Protip - Savestates work fine in recent versions of MAME (even though it still says it's not officially supported). Same with other games on the same hardware such as Darius Gaiden and RayForce - they used to have problems with states (you could somewhat mitigate them by waiting for the game to load before loading a state, but there would still be issues) but apparently this was fixed at some point, I'm not sure exactly when.

[Square_Air]

Also, welcome to optimization week everyone!

The catchphrase of the week is "where the fuck did they even get those points from?"

[Shepardus]

Also, welcome to milk everything week everyone!

The catchphrase of the week is "if it's worth doing, it's worth doing 50 times every run" please don't make me do this

FTFY

[Mero]

Yes, will be interesting to see if any of the participants can work out how to get a decent score this week (higher than 1.6m).

[Perikles]

I can imagine how one might get ~2m, but those WR scores certainly have some secret or another. Maybe there is a trick how to get inflated values for defeating certain bosses every single time - there was some speculation whether this is exclusive to the Saturn port, but perhaps there is some way to trigger this in the arcade game, too.

[Xyga]

Had to go back to a 2006 thread to find a summary of the issues with the Saturn port, here http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.ph ... 60#p115060
EDIT: please people note that in RAINE many shmups show no emulated hardware slowdowns whatsoever as far as I remember.

Read lots of feedback on it but this was the most complete afaik.
So basically if that is all then besides the game looking and sounding poorer, in terms of scoring it's really only the slowdows that differenciate the two versions (?)

But how dramatic are those slowdowns? I remember people saying for instance G-Darius PS1 was a disaster full of slowdowns but I've never noticed so many and so heavy that they would be considered flat out game-breaking VS the pcb.
I know some people are very maniacal when it comes to accuracy, but for me a slight difference in speed/slowdowns of maybe 10~15% isn't a game-breaking catastrophe making a port unplayable garbage.

So I don't know about Gekirindan honestly I haven't played the game in ages, neither arcade nor Saturn versions, just interested in objective judgement of the latter (not graphics and sound we already know they're inferior)

[Perikles]

The (potential) issue with the Saturn version would be what was discussed here:

I was looking for some Gekirindan videos on Youtube and came across this. The player gets 230k for destroying the third boss, you're only supposed to get 80k. Anybody else managed that? Might be a bug exclusive to the Saturn version(?)

As we successively found out over the last few years, some seemingly decent or even great ports altered some score values for no discernible reason whatsoever. One example would be Thunder Force AC on the Saturn where pegboy found out that you could possibly just counterstop the game during a boss fight (which is of course not feasible in the arcade version).

So far, this is all just speculation in the case of Gekirindan, there have been more than enough weird exploits/bugs in arcade games, too. But if it were true that this only applies to the port, this would certainly make scores non-comparable.

[Xyga]

If verified then yeah, ouch, altered score values are a no-no.

There's too many of those 32bit ports with too little info, or it's there somewhere in the dephts of the forums but hard to find.

[Mero]

The trick for getting a few extra points out of the stage 1 midboss (can't remember what it is off the top of my head) works on the Taito Memories version (so the arcade version) at least.

Think it's about an extra 5 or 6k, something like that.

[EmperorIng]

There's some trick with the stage 1 boss (Huge Boss) that I am not sure about, but sometimes I end the battle with an extra 30,000 points (90K vs 120K). I think it has something to do with alternating or killing both of its arms, but I'm not sure.

trap loves them games with hidden scoring tricks.

And man, this game is harder than I remember it playing on the PS2 Taito Legends or MAMEUIFX... I wonder if the difficulty was toned down for World releases, or maybe since I stuck with Anne (1B) in the past her full-powered shot made quicker work of enemies than 2C's spread.

I also wonder if the canonical reason that 2C has the extra firepower is because there are two pilots, ha.

[Shepardus]

There's some trick with the stage 1 boss (Huge Boss) that I am not sure about, but sometimes I end the battle with an extra 30,000 points (90K vs 120K). I think it has something to do with alternating or killing both of its arms, but I'm not sure.

I haven't seen anything special in the replays I've seen (other than milking the missiles for a pittance), but I typically enter the battle with around 90k and end it with 120k. The boss itself is worth 30k, so I would say you're just timing it out sometimes, but it takes a very long time to time out...

The trick for getting a few extra points out of the stage 1 midboss (can't remember what it is off the top of my head) works on the Taito Memories version (so the arcade version) at least.

Think it's about an extra 5 or 6k, something like that.

You get 7k for dealing damage to it fast enough and triggering it to run away early, not sure if you're referring to that. If you do that fast enough (hard, but possible, without a bomb) there's an additional powerup carrier that carries a bonus item, but it's only worth 1000 points (1400 including the value of the carrier itself), and it doesn't affect the stage end bonus since it's not one of those items. You do get some extra meteors and space debris to destroy, though.

[Mero]

uote]
You get 7k for dealing damage to it fast enough and triggering it to run away early, not sure if you're referring to that. If you do that fast enough (hard, but possible, without a bomb) there's an additional powerup carrier that carries a bonus item, but it's only worth 1000 points (1400 including the value of the carrier itself), and it doesn't affect the stage end bonus since it's not one of those items. You do get some extra meteors and space debris to destroy, though.

Yes, that's what I was thinking of.