I'm so glad that Hamster's Arcade Archives are a thing.

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Marc
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Re: I'm so glad that Hamster's Arcade Archives are a thing.

Post by Marc »

Ah, interesting, cheers for the info!
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Re: I'm so glad that Hamster's Arcade Archives are a thing.

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Re: I'm so glad that Hamster's Arcade Archives are a thing.

Post by BIL »

I love tearing up Image Fight and Trigon and Omega Fighter Special and Dogosoken on my Taito Memories discs Image
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Re: I'm so glad that Hamster's Arcade Archives are a thing.

Post by BrianC »

Post reminds me of back when Midway included games from Irem and Data East (Moon Patrol and Burgertime) in one PS1 collection because they published the AC versions, though Namco actually did something similar by including Mendel Palace/Quinty and Legacy of the Wizard in their FC collection.
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Re: I'm so glad that Hamster's Arcade Archives are a thing.

Post by Marc »

Wow, Task Force Harrier is kicking my ass.
It's hectic as hell by the third stage. Managed to get there without loosing a life last night, and it battered me within minutes. Made it again loosing a life to the ST2 boss in the process and it seemed a little less intense to start with so managed to make it to the ground part before kicking the bucket. Really enjoying this.
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Re: I'm so glad that Hamster's Arcade Archives are a thing.

Post by BIL »

Super solid game. I particularly like the agile ship speed - lots of aggressive macro dodging, as illustrated by st1-2's twin boss tanks, and 2-1's flamethrower behemoth. Goes great with the lack of horizontal panning - you can tear all over the place without worrying about something nasty lurking just offscreen.

The way ground missions affect weaponry - Shot becomes limited-range, but will mow through ground targets, while Bomb becomes monstrously outsized - is really cool, and a neat nod to the Harrier's real-world VTOL capability. The switch from 194X-esque high altitude to ultra-detailed ground graphics is great too. The terrain destruction isn't quite consistent throughout, but when it's on, it's on. That desert oilfield later on gets it good. :cool:

I guess the limited-range thing will annoy some, but I'm a Gun.Smoke vet who's used to compensating with nippy player speed. :wink:

The high-altitude city stage's opening farmlands are so strikingly Raidenesque, I really wonder if Seibu was directly referencing them in its own, now-iconic first stage. A stretch maybe, other than Raiden being a remorselessly brilliant Kyuukyoku Tiger refit that pinches Hishouzame's second stage BGM for its own. Image Also has its craft visibly shift to VTOL mode during boss battles, hmm.

Time Pilot '84 is out tomorrow (along with the PS4 version of Harrier). This year's been full of pleasant surprises for ACA. :o Never actually seen, let alone played this, but I dig the first one a lot, and Konami STGs always merit investigation.

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Re: I'm so glad that Hamster's Arcade Archives are a thing.

Post by Marc »

BIL wrote:The high-altitude city stage's opening farmlands are so strikingly Raidenesque, I really wonder if Seibu was directly referencing them in its own, now-iconic first stage. A stretch maybe, other than Raiden being a remorselessly brilliant Kyuukyoku Tiger refit that pinches Hishouzame's second stage BGM for its own. Image Also has its craft visibly shift to VTOL mode during boss battles, hmm.

Ha, was the first thing I thought on seeing it for the first time!
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Re: I'm so glad that Hamster's Arcade Archives are a thing.

Post by BrianC »

Sweet. I played a bit of Time Pilot 84 via MiSTer and I enjoyed it quite a bit.
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Re: I'm so glad that Hamster's Arcade Archives are a thing.

Post by BIL »

Time Pilot with Itano missiles and ground targets is something so logical, and yet I never considered it. :o Starting difficulty seems much fiercer than the original's - can't mess around with those tank formations! Where '82 takes a couple stages for the loop-around counter to become essential, I'm aggressively using it from the get-go here. Bogey on your six? Turn n burn, baby. Image

I miss '82's cute parachutist rescues, but the beefed-up enemy machinery makes up for it. Love t-boning those minelayer behemoths. "Heading straight for them I press down my guns!" Feels rad, as expected of marquee Konami shooting. Always cool see bridge titles between their Scramble and Gradius eras, too (dig the Contra font :cool:). Roll on Gyruss!

ShmupMAMEv4's audio emulation on Harrier ain't great, so this is my first time really enjoying HIDE-KAZ's trademark sullenly fiery, bass-driven post-punk. And ho ho hoooly shit, do I love the bit in st3-1, where the BGM bites down hard as the armada steams in. COMMENCE OPERATIONS Image Bomb Type II (the narrow vertical column) works great there. I wish the battleships blew up, but not even Capcom and Toaplan had reached that milestone just yet. I do like how their bridges catch on fire and audibly cook up, though! War is hell, kids!

EDIT: oh hey, this is weird :shock:
Creamy Goodness wrote:One of the few instances where the console version is better than the arcade IMO. Arcade ship moves around way too fast and I like how the console version maps air and ground attacks to the same button with autofire. Graphics did take a heavy hit though.
I wonder if MAME is glitched/inaccurate in some way, or perhaps an alternate ROMset? In ACA, the ship is nowhere as agile. I'm kinda sad actually, I was liking the Raizingesque ninja moves. :mrgreen: It's still not slow, just average for a set speed Toaplanesque. Makes the earlier stages significantly tougher.

As expected of ACA, you can map Shot+Bomb to a single button, with a range of autofire speeds. Still, MD ver will always have a place on my shelf and in my heart - smart 4:3 conversion, and upped CUTE WAIFU factor. :cool:
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Re: I'm so glad that Hamster's Arcade Archives are a thing.

Post by trap15 »

One of the strange things about Task Force Harrier's movement, is that during slowdown, the player movement speed (and maybe player bullet speed? can't recall) is doubled to compensate for it, like some early 3D games did instead of frame-skipping. Very unusual feature, but apparently something someone at NMK liked as they brought it back for Gunnail, one of the things that makes me feel that Gunnail is some sort of a spiritual sequel to Task Force Harrier.

I don't recall the movement speed feeling that different between MAME and my PCB, I'll have to grab the ACA version and do a little comparison of them all, I suppose!
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Re: I'm so glad that Hamster's Arcade Archives are a thing.

Post by BIL »

Much appreciated. :smile: I tend to use ancient MAME builds, but the ship speed seems identically quick between ShmupMAMEv4 and the newest mainline release.
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Re: I'm so glad that Hamster's Arcade Archives are a thing.

Post by BrianC »

Time Pilot '84 is also the origin of that teleporting sound effect used in some Jeff Minter games.
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Re: I'm so glad that Hamster's Arcade Archives are a thing.

Post by Jeneki »

There's some enemy helicopters in Task Force Harrier, that have missiles attached to the left/right side before launching them at you. You can shoot these off before taking on the main helicopter if you want. So basically, we are shooting down the player from Tiger Heli. :lol:
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Re: I'm so glad that Hamster's Arcade Archives are a thing.

Post by ghibli99 »

Oh wow, I remember that The California hotel in Vegas had Time Pilot '84 back in the day. Played it a TON. What a wonderful addition to the ACA lineup. Definitely buying this!
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Re: I'm so glad that Hamster's Arcade Archives are a thing.

Post by OldSkoolShmuper »

I really want Hamster to bring over UPL's Bio-Ship Paladin and USAAF Mustang
(Fire Mustang on Mega Drive, and Bio-Ship Paladin is aka Space Battleship Gomorrah.

The Mega Drive versions of those games are both really good IMO,
but would love to have the arcade versions.

EGM made me aware of these games in 1991.
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(from Gamest)

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Re: I'm so glad that Hamster's Arcade Archives are a thing.

Post by CRP »

sale until June 2 on switch

ACA NeoGeo Aero Fighters 3 – $3.99 (was $7.99)
ACA NeoGeo Fatal Fury 2 – $3.99 (was $7.99)
ACA NeoGeo Metal Slug 2 – $3.99 (was $7.99)
ACA NeoGeo Samurai Shodown – $3.99 (was $7.99)
ACA NeoGeo The King of Fighters ’95 – $3.99 (was $7.99)
Arcade Archives Atomic Robo-Kid – $3.99 (was $7.99)
Arcade Archives Crazy Climber 2 – $3.99 (was $7.99)
Arcade Archives Double Dragon II The Revenge – $3.99 (was $7.99)
Arcade Archives Ninja-Kid – $3.99 (was $7.99)
Arcade Archives Terra Cresta – $3.99 (was $7.99)
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Re: I'm so glad that Hamster's Arcade Archives are a thing.

Post by Creamy Goodness »

BIL wrote:
Creamy Goodness wrote:One of the few instances where the console version is better than the arcade IMO. Arcade ship moves around way too fast and I like how the console version maps air and ground attacks to the same button with autofire. Graphics did take a heavy hit though.
I wonder if MAME is glitched/inaccurate in some way, or perhaps an alternate ROMset? In ACA, the ship is nowhere as agile. I'm kinda sad actually, I was liking the Raizingesque ninja moves. :mrgreen: It's still not slow, just average for a set speed Toaplanesque. Makes the earlier stages significantly tougher.

As expected of ACA, you can map Shot+Bomb to a single button, with a range of autofire speeds. Still, MD ver will always have a place on my shelf and in my heart - smart 4:3 conversion, and upped CUTE WAIFU factor. :cool:
I actually played it on Final Burn. Never played it in the arcade so I do not have a point of reference. I didn't think of all the potential options for buttong mapping, but speaking of the ground attacks another thing I noticed is the console version seemed a little more forgiving with the ground attack hit boxes. The arcade felt like you had to be way more precise to get a hit on ground enemies. Could be the zooming in that came with going to 4:3 making everything bigger.
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Re: I'm so glad that Hamster's Arcade Archives are a thing.

Post by trap15 »

Hopefully they include both revisions of the game; the later one fixes a few insignificant bugs, but more importantly is significantly more lenient about the rank. Either way, looking forward to it!
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Re: I'm so glad that Hamster's Arcade Archives are a thing.

Post by Meriscan »

Finally, a good NMK game!

Mostly kidding, but TD and Task Force Harrier didn't get me excited to dust off my ps4. I'll be sure to give this game another try.
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Re: I'm so glad that Hamster's Arcade Archives are a thing.

Post by BIL »

Out now Image What a cool year it's been since Sunset Riders. So many killer games, famous and not.
trap15 wrote:Hopefully they include both revisions of the game; the later one fixes a few insignificant bugs, but more importantly is significantly more lenient about the rank. Either way, looking forward to it!
Not sure if it's the same thing, but it does include two versions, referred to on the title screen as "Japanese" and "English." It'd be excellent if they covered that! Also lets you reinstate the name entry bug Image

EDIT: Rank seems somewhat intermediate (and unchanged by game language) - the stage 1 battleship has an eight-way spread, and bullet speed seems to match emph's NicoNico reup, but I'm getting four flowers at halftime, rather than eight (granted, my score's nowhere as impressive as either yours or this dude's). No idea if rank affects score, I'd never actually played this. On that note, holy fuck what a cool game. :o Entirely expected given its rep around here. Image
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Re: I'm so glad that Hamster's Arcade Archives are a thing.

Post by trap15 »

BIL wrote:Not sure if it's the same thing, but it does include two versions, referred to on the title screen as "Japanese" and "English." It'd be excellent if they covered that! Also lets you reinstate the name entry bug Image
Just took a look, I actually had my understanding of the versions backwards; the bugfix version is harder. The easiest way to differentiate them is the NMK logo: when it's large, it's the new version, and when it's small, it's the old version. Unfortunately, the only version here seems to be the new harder version.
BIL wrote:I'm getting four flowers at halftime, rather than eight (granted, my score's nowhere as impressive as either yours or this dude's). No idea if rank affects score, I'd never actually played this.
The number of flowers is based on rank. You can get 2, 4, or 8 flowers, with 8 indicating max (or nearly max?) rank. Rank only increases over time and decreases when you die, so you can also use this to check the version. You can get 8 flowers on the first half-time if you time out the midboss on the new version, but it can only give up to 4 on the old version because of the more lenient rank increase. Rank doesn't help you in any way other than this, but since there's no reasonably way to control it (one extend at 1 million, and a second at 77,777,777 points lol) you just gotta deal with it.
BIL wrote:On that note, holy fuck what a cool game. :o Entirely expected given its rep around here. Image
It's really great! All the lovely NMK detail and vicious difficulty in a very cute package.
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Re: I'm so glad that Hamster's Arcade Archives are a thing.

Post by BIL »

Ahh, there they are. :o So obvious in hindsight that letting the midboss survive longer would do the trick.

Image

It only just hit me, how detailed the enemy machinery is - on par with their stonefacedly militaristic STGs. The whole thing works so seamlessly, I'm just like "sure the heli pilot's wearing a headset and aviators, how's else is he gonna hear himself talk?" Image

Hell Rank, the inevitability is kinda comforting in a way. :cool:
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Re: I'm so glad that Hamster's Arcade Archives are a thing.

Post by OldSkoolShmuper »

BIL wrote:HachaMecha inbound :cool:

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Spoiler
Image Image Image
Haven't heard of this game ever until now. Looked at an emulated playthrough, I'm already sold on the upcoming ACA release, Ivsee lots of parallax!

p.s., if Hamster is not doing Bio-ship Paladin for ACA anytime soon (or at all) at least give me USAAF Mustang with its sumptuous parallax and simply fun gameplay!

Better yet, ask M2 if they could enhance the arcade Bio-ship Paladin (I'm obsessed with this game if you had not already noticed!) with more parallax than it has--surpass the number of layers that the Mega Drive port got and give the arcade version parallax in places where the MD had it (i.e. clouds on the 1st stage) but where the arcade had none.

p.s. I'm a big fan of what M2 did with re-imagining Fantasy Zone II from an 8-bit arcade originallt, to a System 16 (with more RAM). I want to more games get that that kind of remake treatment instead of using modern HD graphics.
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Re: I'm so glad that Hamster's Arcade Archives are a thing.

Post by BIL »

Both Paladin and Mustang are highly probable ACA releases, with Hamster (IIRC) having the rights to UPL and NMK's catalogues. :smile: At this point, the most unlikely from that camp would seem to be the latter's Macross titles, though this gen has been full of wonderful surprises for arcade releases on home console.

I'd love to see both. Only played Paladin/Gomorrah (what a name :cool:)'s MD ver briefly, seemed like classic offbeat UPL. Big fan of Mustang's MD incarnation, Fire Mustang, too. One of the most knockdown/dragout carts you'll find on 16bit. Another example of Inescapable Hell Rank too, haha. That Thailand-esque stage full of weather balloons will seem trivial, if you've died shortly beforehand. Nomiss to that point and MEIN GOTT IN HIMMEL :shock:
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Re: I'm so glad that Hamster's Arcade Archives are a thing.

Post by OldSkoolShmuper »

BIL wrote:Both Paladin and Mustang are highly probable ACA releases, with Hamster (IIRC) having the rights to UPL and NMK's catalogues. :smile: At this point, the most unlikely from that camp would seem to be the latter's Macross titles, though this gen has been full of wonderful surprises for arcade releases on home console.

I'd love to see both. Only played Paladin/Gomorrah (what a name :cool:)'s MD ver briefly, seemed like classic offbeat UPL. Big fan of Mustang's MD incarnation, Fire Mustang, too. One of the most knockdown/dragout carts you'll find on 16bit. Another example of Inescapable Hell Rank too, haha. That Thailand-esque stage full of weather balloons will seem trivial, if you've died shortly beforehand. Nomiss to that point and MEIN GOTT IN HIMMEL :shock:
I want to thank you for this reply, it was 'music to my ears'.

I am discovering NMK's catalog for pretty much the first time and re-discovering much of UPL's catalog.
In the early 90s before emulation and before I knew what the internet was, all I had really was EGM to discover shmups for 16-bit consoles and arcade. Where I grew up most of the arcade games weren't shmups outside of Sega's superscalers like After Burner and Thunder Blade. Never got to see well-known shmups like Gradius or R-type. I think the only proper shmup I saw the arcade cabinet of during 'it's time' was Twin Eagle at a steakhouse..I'll neva' forget that rockin' music & those vocals tho!

The Macross games btw, would be great.
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Re: I'm so glad that Hamster's Arcade Archives are a thing.

Post by DenimDemon »

So downloaded Hacha Mecha Fighter on PS4 and it come with a super cool ACA 7th anniversary Theme. I dont care about themes... But damn does it look cool. Nice.

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Re: I'm so glad that Hamster's Arcade Archives are a thing.

Post by EmperorIng »

BIL wrote:Both Paladin and Mustang are highly probable ACA releases, with Hamster (IIRC) having the rights to UPL and NMK's catalogues. :smile: At this point, the most unlikely from that camp would seem to be the latter's Macross titles, though this gen has been full of wonderful surprises for arcade releases on home console.
It's too bad as well; I think Macross II is the best NMK game I've played, along with TD2.
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Re: I'm so glad that Hamster's Arcade Archives are a thing.

Post by BIL »

Killer game indeed - even in first-rate STGs, I never fully clicked with Caravan modes until that one. If only they'd rolled their own mecha ala HyperDuel! Image

TBH, given some of the strange/wonderful things the series has pulled off over the years, I wouldn't even bet 100% against something shaking out, at some point. Dubious as the product itself may be, that Capcom-licensed SUPER FUN TYME stick has frickin AVP. Interesting times for home arcade gaming.
OldSkoolShmuper wrote:In the early 90s before emulation and before I knew what the internet was, all I had really was EGM to discover shmups for 16-bit consoles and arcade. Where I grew up most of the arcade games weren't shmups outside of Sega's superscalers like After Burner and Thunder Blade. Never got to see well-known shmups like Gradius or R-type. I think the only proper shmup I saw the arcade cabinet of during 'it's time' was Twin Eagle at a steakhouse..I'll neva' forget that rockin' music & those vocals tho!
Pretty much the same here, haha. Only real arcade presence where I grew up, other than the unstoppably ubiquitous Raiden, was VS Fighting. SFIICE and MKII did a roaring trade at the corner store, VFII caused riots. :lol: Lots of nostalgia looking at those EGM scans you posted. :mrgreen:
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Re: I'm so glad that Hamster's Arcade Archives are a thing.

Post by Rastan78 »

This praise for NMK has me convinced I've gotta go home and DL Saint Dragon. Been meaning to give that one a look.
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