Games You Just Can't Crack

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zak
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Re: Games You Just Can't Crack

Post by zak »

Gun Frontier - PCB. I love the music and visuals on this, but the game is pretty unforgiving (even with auto fire)!
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Dawn111
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Re: Games You Just Can't Crack

Post by Dawn111 »

Definitely Ikaruga. Getting the max chains consistently is a doozy, and a player needs those max chains to get a good score.
Battle Bakraid is also another really hard shooter in terms of scoring. I would have to practice that game for so many hours.
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pegboy
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Re: Games You Just Can't Crack

Post by pegboy »

Speaking of Ketsui...the Ura loop. Seriously, what the fuck were they thinking with this shit?

I've never actually gotten to the Ura loop other than using save states to practice it, but it's just impossible. And I've cleared the Omote loop a few times legit on the real PCB, so it's not like I'm terrible at the game. I'm not sure if I need to move over to using the Panzer instead, but the blue suicide bullets are just to fast to dodge with the slow ass Tiger.
wiNteR
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Re: Games You Just Can't Crack

Post by wiNteR »

pegboy wrote:Speaking of Ketsui...the Ura loop. Seriously, what the fuck were they thinking
My thoughts about gradius-3 :p

Also, of course, ura does look very very hard.
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Sengoku Strider
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Re: Games You Just Can't Crack

Post by Sengoku Strider »

floralcateyes wrote: But for the life of my I just can't seem to get console shmups. 16-bit and earlier. Stuff like the Thunder Force series or the Aleste series. Maybe it's because I'm emulating them, but I don't have this problem with emulated arcade stuff. Maybe it's because I don't have their manuals at hand or something. Dunno what it is that prevents things from clicking in my idiot brain when it comes to those games. Even when I get farther than is usual for me, it still feels like I'm missing something critical.
These are the types of games I came up on, so they always seemed way easier to me than arcade shmups which are designed to get a person putting a quarter in every 90 seconds.

Console shmups are based around keeping your flashy power ups and stage layout memorization, and then boss gimmicks. In both of the series you mentioned, there are OP homing weapons that make things much easier. Relying on those while memorizing what not to crash into will get you most of the way. But by & large shmups designed for consoles should never take the dozens or hundreds of hours arcade ones can.
floralcateyes
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Re: Games You Just Can't Crack

Post by floralcateyes »

Sengoku Strider wrote:Console shmups are based around keeping your flashy power ups and stage layout memorization, and then boss gimmicks. In both of the series you mentioned, there are OP homing weapons that make things much easier. Relying on those while memorizing what not to crash into will get you most of the way. But by & large shmups designed for consoles should never take the dozens or hundreds of hours arcade ones can.
Thanks for the advice! Don't know why or where I picked it up, but I always default to thinking that homing weapons probably have low firepower, to balance out the homing capabilities. Interestingly, the only console shmup I've really gotten into, Recca, also has OP homing weapons that completely trivialize some of the otherwise brutal sections. Gotten criticized for it too.

Will be spending more time with it, but I still find MUSHA odd. Got a few stages in on my very first credit, yet like I said, I felt like I wasn't understanding what was happening. It felt confusingly busy, despite being nowhere near as dense or manic as later arcade and doujin stuff. Still feels that way. Hopefully it'll click with time though.

Also eyeing Infinos Gaiden, which is giving me Thunder Force vibes. I've clicked quite easily with doujin shmups before, they're what I've played the most, so maybe this game will help me better understand the subgenre.

And I don't doubt that these games shouldn't be more difficult than arcade stuff or even some of the newer bullet hell doujins I've cleared. On paper, at least. But I guess I haven't gotten to that point where I'm enjoying myself and liking the game enough to know that I want to put the work in to clear it. Maybe they're just not for me. Hope that's not the case though, as they look like really good times for the people who can appreciate them. If that makes sense lol.
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MathU
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Re: Games You Just Can't Crack

Post by MathU »

I've been playing Raiden Fighters constantly since I started this thread and it made me frustrated enough to finally put some hardcore effort into getting good. After some heavy practice put into the bosses and those evil submarines in the snowfield stage, I finally reached stage 6 for the first time. Feel like I'm hoarding my bombs just as much as ever though.
Of course, that's just an opinion.
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XoPachi
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Re: Games You Just Can't Crack

Post by XoPachi »

I don't really get Mecha Ritz

at all
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Lethe
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Re: Games You Just Can't Crack

Post by Lethe »

XoPachi wrote:I don't really get Mecha Ritz

at all
What's there to not get about it? You just need to come to terms with it not making any sense.
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XoPachi
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Re: Games You Just Can't Crack

Post by XoPachi »

Lethe wrote:
XoPachi wrote:I don't really get Mecha Ritz

at all
What's there to not get about it? You just need to come to terms with it not making any sense.
I just don't really understand how to properly play it.
Mainly against bosses. I don't understand how to kill any of them in the allotted time. I blitz the first two and then suddenly it feels like my ship's power is crazy nerfed. I go to destroy parts, try to point blank, mix up laser and shot usages, drop bombs but all the boss health of everything after stage 1 is too tanky for me to kill in time for the bonus. Regardless of ship. I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

Aside from that, I also feel like I'm generally not scoring properly. As if not seeing a key mechanic.
Basically I'm feeling the same way I do when I play a Raizing game. Totally confused and clueless.
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Lethe
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Re: Games You Just Can't Crack

Post by Lethe »

If you're failing to kill things in time with a good ship, you probably don't have enough Heat (=shot power). It mostly goes up with rank and time. If it's really a problem try setting the starting rank to 100+ to increase its base level. Double items from pointblanking item carriers are worth 3 rank each and picking up items at max capacity is even more; bombing in order to run up the screen and get a double item is totally worth it. Same can be said for bombing bosses to get at the bonus spots (2-B tank endboss is made for bomb spam). Speedkilling enemy waves makes more item carriers spawn, you can get 8+ of them before the first stage 1 midboss if you're really quick.

01 (red) is the easiest ship in general. Just ripple everything bigger than a zako, the width and piercing are busted at higher Heat. The graze force ships (purple) are really strong and break the game at high rank. 02/08 (blue) are okay; by pulsing shot on and off you can get rapidfire and the controllable balls out at the same time. 03/09 (green) suck and get walled by some sections, and 10 is virtually unplayable without autofire (but very fun at ~15hz). 04/07 are playable and distinctive. The eraser gun ships I know nothing about.

B stages are more profitable on rank/score/resources but they have irritating bosses and degenerate into resource spam fests once the rank gets high enough (might not be more profitable in fun). Scoring is: speedkill and/or pointblank everything, get rank up, get time up, use resources wisely, then blow absolutely everything milking Veloce-B's final pattern because it's worth exponentially more than anything else in the game. Playing for rank total is more entertaining IMO.
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Rastan78
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Re: Games You Just Can't Crack

Post by Rastan78 »

MathU wrote:I've been playing Raiden Fighters constantly since I started this thread and it made me frustrated enough to finally put some hardcore effort into getting good. After some heavy practice put into the bosses and those evil submarines in the snowfield stage, I finally reached stage 6 for the first time. Feel like I'm hoarding my bombs just as much as ever though.
I always end up with the opposite problem with bomb usage in Raiden Fighters games as I end up being too tempted to use them for the Defended the Tanks bonuses and so forth. Then you don't have any bombs to use in panic situations when you get to a tough boss.

It might sound counterintuitive, but you should try a run where you suicide one ship immediately at the beginning of the game. This will drop the rank. Of course since there are no extends it might be debatable whether this pays off for you. It could work better once you are fairly comfortable on the later stages. I remember my first clear of Raiden Fighters 2 I did die twice early on and then was able to no miss from there.
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XoPachi
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Re: Games You Just Can't Crack

Post by XoPachi »

Lethe wrote:If you're failing to kill things in time with a good ship, you probably don't have enough Heat (=shot power). It mostly goes up with rank and time. If it's really a problem try setting the starting rank to 100+ to increase its base level. Double items from pointblanking item carriers are worth 3 rank each and picking up items at max capacity is even more; bombing in order to run up the screen and get a double item is totally worth it. Same can be said for bombing bosses to get at the bonus spots (2-B tank endboss is made for bomb spam). Speedkilling enemy waves makes more item carriers spawn, you can get 8+ of them before the first stage 1 midboss if you're really quick.

01 (red) is the easiest ship in general. Just ripple everything bigger than a zako, the width and piercing are busted at higher Heat. The graze force ships (purple) are really strong and break the game at high rank. 02/08 (blue) are okay; by pulsing shot on and off you can get rapidfire and the controllable balls out at the same time. 03/09 (green) suck and get walled by some sections, and 10 is virtually unplayable without autofire (but very fun at ~15hz). 04/07 are playable and distinctive. The eraser gun ships I know nothing about.

B stages are more profitable on rank/score/resources but they have irritating bosses and degenerate into resource spam fests once the rank gets high enough (might not be more profitable in fun). Scoring is: speedkill and/or pointblank everything, get rank up, get time up, use resources wisely, then blow absolutely everything milking Veloce-B's final pattern because it's worth exponentially more than anything else in the game. Playing for rank total is more entertaining IMO.
I don't think I would have ever figured this out on my own...
I was playing at the highest rank it allows you to set but the rest of that stuff I just didn't know at all. I get the feeling I won't be able to get a hang of these mechanics honestly.
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davyK
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Re: Games You Just Can't Crack

Post by davyK »

There are certain combos of slower ship and faster bullet speeds that I just can't cope with. Example of that is Raiden III. I had to go to easy difficulty to get a 1CC.
floralcateyes
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Re: Games You Just Can't Crack

Post by floralcateyes »

XoPachi:

If you need to ease into the game a bit more, try playing at a lower starting rank. No shame in that for now, etc. This was the first shmup I put more than an hour into and the game that got me into the genre, and I could get time bonuses, reach the TLB, etc. with a starting rank of 50. Moved on when I got a sub-20 minute run, which isn't a good time at all in retrospect but was satisfying enough for someone who had never played shmups or speedrun before.

The simpler version is: kill things as fast as possible, kill things while as close to them as possible, use bombs liberally because the game gives you more of them in a single stage than most other shmups give you across their entirety. Pointblank item carriers. Avoid dying, of course, but that's relevant here as a death really cuts into your rank and heat. Also, remember that destroying parts and aiming for those circular bonus things on bosses doesn't necessarily deplete their health bar.

As Lethe said, the red ship is probably the simplest and most straightforward choice. The purple ship and its variant can be extremely broken if you know what you're doing; iirc a couple of boss phases can be defeated in a second or two with minimal to no set-up. Stay away from the green ship and its variant for now unless you want a laugh, though I am really curious what high-level play with those looks like.
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Lethe
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Re: Games You Just Can't Crack

Post by Lethe »

That reminds me, I failed to mention something important: The scroll speed speeds up as rank increases but drops off a lot at every increment of 100. Rank 90 is actually a lot harder than 100, and 190 harder than 200 and so on, because the scroll speed is so much faster. If whatever start rank you've been jamming routinely results in you being just under an increment of 100 shortly after game start then it's no surprise you're having a hard time.

To illustrate how absolutely broken graze force is, I just now made my first ever attempt at playing for speed, picked type 11 and a coward start rank, and improved my previous best time by 4 minutes. With no idea what I'm doing and at least one serious mistake (letting the rank get too high on stage 4 and slowing the scrolling to a crawl). Some bosses explode on their first attack and Veloce changes phases before she can finish talking. It's insane. So there's always that option if you just feel like winning.
floralcateyes
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Re: Games You Just Can't Crack

Post by floralcateyes »

Lethe wrote:To illustrate how absolutely broken graze force is, I just now made my first ever attempt at playing for speed, picked type 11 and a coward start rank, and improved my previous best time by 4 minutes. With no idea what I'm doing and at least one serious mistake (letting the rank get too high on stage 4 and slowing the scrolling to a crawl). Some bosses explode on their first attack and Veloce changes phases before she can finish talking. It's insane. So there's always that option if you just feel like winning.
Apologies if a bit off-topic, but curious: when you did this, did you choose to fight Veloce-B? If so, how did you deal with the attacks where she starts shooting zako at you? Probably just an issue of low heat again, but I remember those attacks in particular being a bit nasty for the graze ships. No dense clusters of bullets to exploit, and a weak main shot against said kamikaze zako.
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MathU
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Re: Games You Just Can't Crack

Post by MathU »

The bullet grazing ships honestly feel out of place compared to the other ships in Steel Rondo, like they belong in a different game.
Of course, that's just an opinion.
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atro_city
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Re: Games You Just Can't Crack

Post by atro_city »

A few things on Raiden (the first one):

Are you playing as player 2 (blue ship)? Doing so decreases the rank dramatically and makes a huge difference. Also, are you playing a revision with checkpoints/start back mode? Japan set 3 and US (Fabtek) versions have checkpoints disabled making the game much more manageable. For bombs, I recommend identifying trouble spots and planning bombs ahead of time. For example, I always throw down a bomb once I destroy the Stage 3 boss's turret platform and expose the cannons below. Otherwise I'm likely to die there.

The biggest recommendation though I think is to just play PS1 Raiden Project instead of the arcade version. The lower difficulty settings are far, far easier than the arcade version and are a great jumping in point to be able to practice all the stages and not just the first few over and over.

Believe me though, I feel you on Raiden being a tough nut to crack. I will probably never 1CC the arcade version, it's a cruel mistress. And Raiden 2 is even worse in that regard.
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Lethe
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Re: Games You Just Can't Crack

Post by Lethe »

floralcateyes wrote:Apologies if a bit off-topic, but curious: when you did this, did you choose to fight Veloce-B? If so, how did you deal with the attacks where she starts shooting zako at you? Probably just an issue of low heat again, but I remember those attacks in particular being a bit nasty for the graze ships. No dense clusters of bullets to exploit, and a weak main shot against said kamikaze zako.
I went with A because it's shorter. Tried B today and it didn't make that much difference, some patterns are delayed but the fight was still pointblank bomb spam and supergraze. There's a big difference between 05 and 11 though: 05 has that set-distance rapidfire for damage so you have a conflict between positioning for graze or being able to shoot things, while 11 can (has to) ram its head into everything and gets both.
MathU wrote:The bullet grazing ships honestly feel out of place compared to the other ships in Steel Rondo, like they belong in a different game.
Half agree. In concept, turbo Psyvariar with chaotic rank fluctuation and suicide bullets sounds great to me, and there's plenty of moments in the stages where playing around with the graze cancels is quite entertaining, so it can't be a total failure. The problem is that it's not at all balanced around the bosses.
floralcateyes
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Re: Games You Just Can't Crack

Post by floralcateyes »

Lethe wrote:Tried B today and it didn't make that much difference, some patterns are delayed but the fight was still pointblank bomb spam and supergraze.
Makes sense. Thanks for the reply.
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MathU
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Re: Games You Just Can't Crack

Post by MathU »

Well I finally did it, I beat Raiden Fighters! Looks like my stage-specific practice really paid off: In only the 2nd time I've ever made it to the sixth stage, I managed to clear it without bombing and then beat the last stage in the first time ever reaching it. Defeating that nasty stage 6 boss without bombing feels so good. 40 million points with the Chaser, not too shabby eh? :wink: Its charge attack with missile power-ups is incredibly handy for dealing with medium-sized enemies fast before they cover the screen in bullets. All these people who just jump straight to slave ships or Raiden mk2/Judge Spear really don't know what they're missing.
Rastan78 wrote:I remember my first clear of Raiden Fighters 2 I did die twice early on and then was able to no miss from there.
Hah, I just had practically the same experience. Died once on the second stage and again on the third (very typical), and then I plowed through the rest of the game without bombing until the final stage.

It's too late to do me any good, but I just figured out something interesting about the game's adaptive difficulty system that others might find helpful. Raiden Fighters has a devious money-grubbing system that keeps track of the number of consecutive playthroughs attempted and makes the game more difficult as the counter rises. I guess the idea was that arcade machines make the most money off the hardcore "whale" players who won't stop after a single failure. Interestingly, the system doesn't care at all about the number of credits inserted or continues used, only the raw playthroughs attempted from the start of the game. You can reset this counter and the difficulty by letting the attract demo play all the way through once so that the high score listing closes itself on its own. This might be part of the reason I've always found the first few stages so brutal--they were actually getting harder every time I improved because I load up save states to manage my high scores rather playing from a cold boot every time!

The same adaptive difficulty system exists in Raiden Fighters 2 but it's easier to deal with because you can just mash the start button to cycle the full attract sequence manually and reset the consecutive play counter quickly (although in early versions of the game the counter reset seems broken!). The counter also exists in Raiden fighters Jet but I can't seem to determine if it actually has any impact on difficulty in that game.

All right guys, now it's your turn to take down that game you've always had trouble cracking. :P
Of course, that's just an opinion.
Always seeking netplay fans to play emulated arcade games with.
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