All those Darius Gaiden clears remind me that I should get the NMNB one day, I'm unfortunately really bad at the game (and don't particularly like it to be frank
). Special congratulations to microfolk for not using autofire.
EmperorIng wrote:Another Konami clear: this time the highly enjoyable saccharine-yet-prickly Detana!! Twinbee on the PCE. The last few levels can be truly terrifying, in typical Konami fashion. I look forward to seeing if any of my hard work will transfer over to the Saturn's Twinbee Deluxe Pack.
To answer your question in the high score thread (Mero already did, but anyway): you get a lot more points if you keep the bell chain going. The wicked aspect about this is that the rank gets much higher if you score well. I was shocked how much harder the final boss was at full rank compared to his lackluster presence when I first cleared the game with a much lower score. It's still no comparison to the arcade games, however, those are simply evil.
Might as well drop my assorted Irem & Konami 2-ALLs of the last weeks since I'm at it:
- Cleared
Mahou Keibitai Gun Hohki which seems to be almost forgotten among shmup fans even though both the
gameplay and the scoring system are great. Unlike most other Irem games which drop most if not all signs of mercy when you die on the second loop this one has instant respawns with not that much of a penalty. Granted, especially 2-6 is extremely rough and the few seconds it takes to materialize again might be enough to kill the entire run, but it wouldn't be an Irem game without any sort of retaliation for a mistake. This game should definitely see more activity, there are so many secrets and possible refinements for scoring to discover - you can pioneer there, in fact!
-
Xexex is probably my toughest clear so far, second loop has distressing bullet speed and a barrage of mean tricks up its sleeve. I really don't understand how so many complaints were geared toward the reputed "stupidity" of the Flint, it's extremely simple: the more tentacles it has the slower it is; it always moves in the direction of the closest enemy. That's it. The PSP version is exactly the same, by the way, the "enhanced AI" is nothing but an urban myth. Checkpoint recovery is astonishingly balanced even in most spots of loop 2 despite the difficulty, I was pleasantly surprised by that. I'd say this is certainly of the best R-Type epigones out there as is to be expected from a Konami game.
- Managed to beat both the
World version and the (substantially in case of the second loop) harder
Japan version of Image Fight. It feels like duelling a fundamentally evil chess computer, just with ships instead of gaming pieces. It's very enjoyable to figure out the devious traps in the second loop, developing alternate strategies for cases of emergency. I had to resort to two of these in the Japan version since I lost my laser enhancement in stage 2-3 and I couldn't get the magic pixel to work in 2-7. 2-5 was completely extemporaneous, though.
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Salamander 2 is on the opposite end of the spectrum regarding the relationship between planning/execution. While undoubtedly much easier than Image Fight and Xexex, it still gave me a lot of trouble due to the high ship speed (which is necessary for both scoring and survival in the second loop) and the amount of improvisational dodging one has to pull off (and the final boss is indeed truly scary in the second loop since the rank doesn't drop at all if you die there). Lovely, lovely game, I'm glad I could get a decent score after quite a few runs.
it wasn't so far in the future as you'd thought.
