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What a tune, sweet Jesus. Maybe their single best, although with their ridiculously high bar, there's a good half-dozen from that soundtrack alone to rival it. The Sky Line (slappin), Sea of Flame (fiery), Great Sea Power (that wailing lead sustain, jebus), Downright Attack (ugly duckling galloping progger), Stand Up Against Myself (lighters in the air for VASTEEL) and Stranger (badass jaw-jacker) all make my Tecno Soft MD tracklist too. Even if Stranger's more of a motif than a full composition, similar to Metal Squad's harbinger Neo Weapon.

On the subject of Tecno Soft music, crossposting from the Shmup VGM thread:

For me, a game that I unconditionally enjoy 100% would be Mushihimesama. It's actually quite surprising even to myself, since at a glance it feels about as run-of-the-mill bullet hell as it can get. But once I gave it some time I came to realize just how solid its balancing is. Granted, it doesn't add anything unique or outstanding to its gameplay design compared to others. But all the experimental stuff can get bothersome, and when you just want some bullet hell fun at the end of the day, you want it to be GOOD above all else. And GOOD is what Mushihimesama definitely is.

Also, its soundtrack is miles above Futari's and I'm accepting no arguments about that.

I always have soft spot for those 2000s freeware doujin shmups since they were once responsible for rekindling my shmup interest after several years of hiatus. Namely good but less popular titles like Galax, Patriot Dark and late era free Dark Hell Company/Astro Port shmups (Demolition Gunner, Sonic Ironstorm).


Too bad the lack of time and modern OS breaks their compatibility every often or so makes me reluctant to revisit them anytime, still would like to keep collecting them regardless.

I'd never heard of Galax, looks pretty nice. Downloading from that XP doujin freeware thread to try it out.

edit: ok yeah, great art, great music - can you explain how the hacking mechanic works? I tried using Google Translate for the manual, and not so surprisingly that didn't illuminate much of anything for me.

Once the "enter command prompt" screen appears you must input certain input command to hack them.

like these:
Z, X, C - freeze enemies in place, hitting them gives you extra 10 score per shot
Z, Z, X, C - destroys hacked targets, only works on popcorns
up, down, Z, X, C - turns locked enemies into allies, this also works on background turrets you can't shoot

The manual makes it confusing at first that instead of just pressing Z, X, C it tells you to "press C to apply input command" (otherwise pressing C before inputting any button will cancel the command prompt)

If you press X while lock on square is enabled, you'll notice enemies will be tagged with different crosshair. Release C to use screen clearing bomb, it consumes energy but it recharges over time (the SP bar on top right).

+1 for ESPgaluda here... I'm also a pretty casual player and love this game, it's among Cave's most approachable. The slow-down mechanic is genius in that it actually teaches you how to dodge complex patterns so that you'll be able to handle them with less or no slowdown. I also love how the scoring mechanic is linked to the slow-down so when you're playing for survival you still start thinking about how to convert those huge bullet spreads into points for extends. If rereleased with a good tutorial it will certainly win new fans for the genre IMHO

some other games I love that don't get mentioned a lot here:

Brave Blade - also very approachable difficulty-wise. If you ignore the low res it actually does a decent job of grabbing the raizing style and putting it into 3d. Stages are very varied. The giant metallic elephant boss in lava cave is a classic moment of raizing crazy, and whipping the shit out of him with your melee attack is just great fun.

Battle Bakraid (advance mode) - if Garegga is king than Bakraid is his jester... more colourful and manic, not quite as intimidating and more fun to be around Just love how this game keeps you on your toes, even when replaying the early stages. There's always an element of randomness, and even if you're just playing for survival, there's always just a few more bomb fragments you can grab. IDK why I prefer it to APB, Garegga or Ibara, probably just that it's slightly easier and I just gel more with the rhythm of the gameplay.

Jamestown - there's just this moment in the game, during the stage that starts above the clouds, where you drop through the clouds into a thunderstorm and the music goes nearly silent and there's these strange glowing plants on the ground below... pure shmup setpiece magic. Reminds me of Terra Diver where you drop down to the planet and all of the sudden you see those buggies racing along the planet surface, trails of dust behind them.

+1 for Jamestown ! And it's coming on Switch soon

For now on Switch there is Rolling Gunner : it's a hori, but we can shoot in every direction (with the rolling gun), there is a great scoring system, colourful graphics, upbeat electro music, the game is damn fun.
There is an ex Cave who worked on it, and it shows.
I put it on my all time favorite with Ketsui.

The brilliance in Mushimesama and its sequel is the level design. Futari's stage 5 is probably my all time favorite level in a shmup. I like the original Mushi's stage 3 and 4 a lot as well.

The audio and visual presention of both games is quite good too.

I'm 100% in agreement with you.

For me, Jamestown is the game I randomly booted up from my Steam pile-of-shame a couple of years ago and made me go, "Holy crap, I forgot how much I loved this type of game!".

2 years later and I've built my own dedicated vertical arcade cabinet. Used to be powered by RPi3 - where Espgaluda was my favourite shmup (Rpi3 couldn't deal with Espgaluda 2 or DDPDFK/more recent Cave stuff). Sad that Jamestown isn't vertical, but great that it's coming to Switch!

These days I play a fair amount of Danmaku Unlimited 3. Got it on Switch and loved it so much that I've bought it on PC to join my CAVE Steam shooters, and now upgraded my cabinet with a PC! Good times!

If anyone wants to recommend a first time shmup on PC/Switch/Mobile, Danmaku Unlimited 3 is an excellent contender for that.