Pink Sweets: Agony in pink

[cave hermit]

So why don't we discuss Pink Sweets. Basically Yagawa may have gone too far in a few places.

So, has anyone here actually managed to 1cc v1.00 or the arcade version without using the infinite lives "feature"?

V1.01 has some changes to try and fix the base version of the game, but it is still a psychotic nightmare. That said, does anyone consider v1.01 a playable game, in that it is feasible to play for a 1cc and score?

People seem to like the arrange version quite a bit. Why don't we talk about that too?

[Sengoku Strider]

There's a video of Plasmo doing it, with his commentary throughout:

https://youtu.be/qNTblhlTEKg

I will likely never even attempt this game.

[Plasmo]

Ah yes, the long overdue Pink Sweets appreciation topic. I've been waiting for this as my hunger for this game is ever increasing.

The original game on PCB obviously has the infamous infinite lives bug, which absolutely kills many people's interest for the game a priori. The port then tries to "fix" this which results in an almost unplayable version of the game when you consider the absurd difficulty, a quickly escalating rank that cannot be controlled after a certain threshold, the lack of any score-based extends, as well as missing slowdown all over the place. As was pointed out already, Ver 1.00 on the port can still be beaten but it's very difficult. The easiest way to do so is to play super cautious in terms of rank management and never pick up any item at all. This turns into a pure survival challenge with no opportunity to score. This has recently been achieved by the Japanese players E.G.I. (replay here) and Gray, the latter of which continued and ultimately ended up survival clearing Ver 1.00 with all of the four characters Meidi&Midi, Kasumi, Shasta and Lace. At the moment, Gray is practicing for a no miss clear of Ver 1.00, which looks definitely in reach for him if you consider his very consistent route.

As of this day, there's still only one score-oriented playthrough of the game, which happens to be my own and which was released as part of Icarus' beautiful Special Demonstrations series. Incidentally, this was also the first documented clear ever of Ver 1.00 and preceded E.G.I. and Gray.

Ver 1.01 on the other hand is an extremely toned down version in terms of difficulty. The main difference is that you can now lower your rank by missing medals. This allows for a much smoother playing experience. Other fundamental changes are the addition of a third Rose Hip, quicker reload time of your Rose Cracker, and much less severe consequences upon death, which includes dropping power up items and a much faster respawn time. Comparatively speaking, Ver 1.01 is therefore not too difficult of a clear and can be enjoyed by a much greater audience.

But let's talk about the original arcade version of Pink Sweets. If you embrace all of its flaws and agree on using the infinite lives bug, this leaves you with a highly unorthodox game that plays unlike anything else you know from the genre. Just playing it for survival is still a reasonable challenge as you have to trigger infinite lives first. Afterwards this obviously becomes a walk in the park. Yes, I mean this quite literally, you can trigger infinite lives and then take a walk in the park. When you come back home you have the 1cc in the bag.

But what about scoring? Pink Sweets is a game that grants you infinite lives and playing this game for score means to make use of every single one of these lives. In fact, Pink Sweets appears to be Yagawa's final fanfare into insanity and can only be considered the logical consequence of his eccentric mind after Battle Bakraid's scoring, which already demanded a myriad of suicides as an integral part of the scoring system (cf. stm's highest scoring replay available for this game - an utmost beauty of a route!). So are infinite lives a bug? Well, most probably. But then again, how much of Garegga's system was but a lucky accident that turned out to work well in the end? Does it really matter if something is intended or not? Pink Sweets on PCB and Ver 1.00 on the port are two very different games that don't resemble each other at all. In my opinion, infinite lives are giving the unbalanced base game exactly the mad twist that it so urgently needed. What's left is one of the most beautiful trainwrecks this genre has to offer. Is it a good game? I don't really know. Is it a fun game? Hell yeah!

Embrace infinite lives!

As a bonus, I have uploaded a demonstration of how this game looks like if you go all out and play the original game for score. Infinite lives = infinite fun! Check out the replay scoring 27,834,140 points here!

[banjoted]

Ah yes, the long overdue Pink Sweets appreciation topic. I've been waiting for this as my hunger for this game is ever increasing.

The original game on PCB obviously has the infamous infinite lives bug, which absolutely kills many people's interest for the game a priori. The port then tries to "fix" this which results in an almost unplayable version of the game when you consider the absurd difficulty, a quickly escalating rank that cannot be controlled after a certain threshold, the lack of any score-based extends, as well as missing slowdown all over the place. As was pointed out already, Ver 1.00 on the port can still be beaten but it's very difficult. The easiest way to do so is to play super cautious in terms of rank management and never pick up any item at all. This turns into a pure survival challenge with no opportunity to score. This has recently been achieved by the Japanese players E.G.I. (replay here) and Gray, the latter of which continued and ultimately ended up survival clearing Ver 1.00 with all of the four characters Meidi&Midi, Kasumi, Shasta and Lace. At the moment, Gray is practicing for a no miss clear of Ver 1.00, which looks definitely in reach for him if you consider his very consistent route.

As of this day, there's still only one score-oriented playthrough of the game, which happens to be my own and which was released as part of Icarus' beautiful Special Demonstrations series. Incidentally, this was also the first documented clear ever of Ver 1.00 and preceded E.G.I. and Gray.

Ver 1.01 on the other hand is an extremely toned down version in terms of difficulty. The main difference is that you can now lower your rank by missing medals. This allows for a much smoother playing experience. Other fundamental changes are the addition of a third Rose Hip, quicker reload time of your Rose Cracker, and much less severe consequences upon death, which includes dropping power up items and a much faster respawn time. Comparatively speaking, Ver 1.01 is therefore not too difficult of a clear and can be enjoyed by a much greater audience.

But let's talk about the original arcade version of Pink Sweets. If you embrace all of its flaws and agree on using the infinite lives bug, this leaves you with a highly unorthodox game that plays unlike anything else you know from the genre. Just playing it for survival is still a reasonable challenge as you have to trigger infinite lives first. Afterwards this obviously becomes a walk in the park. Yes, I mean this quite literally, you can trigger infinite lives and then take a walk in the park. When you come back home you have the 1cc in the bag.

But what about scoring? Pink Sweets is a game that grants you infinite lives and playing this game for score means to make use of every single one of these lives. In fact, Pink Sweets appears to be Yagawa's final fanfare into insanity and can only be considered the logical consequence of his eccentric mind after Battle Bakraid's scoring, which already demanded a myriad of suicides as an integral part of the scoring system (cf. stm's highest scoring replay available for this game - an utmost beauty of a route!). So are infinite lives a bug? Well, most probably. But then again, how much of Garegga's system was but a lucky accident that turned out to work well in the end? Does it really matter if something is intended or not? Pink Sweets on PCB and Ver 1.00 on the port are two very different games that don't resemble each other at all. In my opinion, infinite lives are giving the unbalanced base game exactly the mad twist that it so urgently needed. What's left is one of the most beautiful trainwrecks this genre has to offer. Is it a good game? I don't really know. Is it a fun game? Hell yeah!

Embrace infinite lives!

As a bonus, I have uploaded a demonstration of how this game looks like if you go all out and play the original game for score. Infinite lives = infinite fun! Check out the replay scoring 27,834,140 points here!

Just wanted to voice my appreciation for this post. This board often gets clogged up with whining and elitism, but posts such as this, with genuine insight, passion and quality language, are what keep me coming back here. Thank you!

[CStarFlare]

Pink Sweets is an endlessly fascinating game that I can only love from afar - Plasmo detailed the reasons for it being unfriendly and they're biggies. It's one case where I think non-default settings are probably warranted - Pink Sweets with extends every million seems like it could be easier to get into (though maybe Plasmo can advise if the particularities of the rank system defeat the benefit of a more traditional Yagawa extend system).

(I'm assuming console ver 1.00 here - obviously extends every mil just makes the infinite lives glitch a little easier to trigger in the arcade game)

[el_rika]

I'm gonna be crucified for this, but Pink Sweets (and Fever SOS) are the only Cave shmups that never ever clicked with me.
I am 100% sure that once i actually decide to really give it a go, i will discover in Pink Sweets an amazing game, like all of Cave's, but i'm always postponing.

This remains the one cv1000 game that i'm afraid to start analysing for my ongoing slowdown accuracy project

[trap15]

Pink Sweets is an endlessly fascinating game that I can only love from afar - Plasmo detailed the reasons for it being unfriendly and they're biggies. It's one case where I think non-default settings are probably warranted - Pink Sweets with extends every million seems like it could be easier to get into (though maybe Plasmo can advise if the particularities of the rank system defeat the benefit of a more traditional Yagawa extend system).

(I'm assuming console ver 1.00 here - obviously extends every mil just makes the infinite lives glitch a little easier to trigger in the arcade game)

Extends every million is easily the best way to play the game if you have no infinite lives glitch. It's still quite unreasonable (even more so on the port due to missing important slowdowns), but much less so than without. The unfortunate thing is normally the score does not come to you very quickly, so even every million seems too spread out; I would've easily asked for extends every 500k.

[Plasmo]

It's one case where I think non-default settings are probably warranted - Pink Sweets with extends every million seems like it could be easier to get into

Yes, I absolutely agree with you here. The game (non-infinite lives) plays much better with non-default settings, extends every 1mil. The only weird thing about it is: You rarely suicide in Yagawa games just for rank control. You often do that primarily for resource management and scoring. Rank control just so happens to be a very useful side effect. Since you don't gain any additional bombs from a suicide in Pink Sweets and - quite on the contrary! - lose all of your power ups without an easy option to recover, this still feels a little bit off.

Regardless of that, I would still say it's a way to make the game much more approachable. It's no coincidence that many arcades in Japan actually have the game set to these non-default extend settings in order to not scare every single customer away from the game. Interestingly enough, it's handled in exactly the same way in some arcades for Mushihimesama Futari's Ultra Mode.

The unfortunate thing is normally the score does not come to you very quickly, so even every million seems too spread out; I would've easily asked for extends every 500k.

Extends every 500k would perhaps be too much in my opinion. Consider that the score ceiling for non-infinite lives in Pink Sweets is maybe 16-17 million (at least with Lace), which then just looks like your typical Garegga score. Giving the player only an extend every 1 million points also encourages score-oriented play, which is a good thing and would keep the game challenging. Presenting the player with a difficult challenge is a good thing. Let the game be harder than your average shmup, that's fine. But the way Pink Sweets plays (non-infinite lives) feels just cheap. It's not going to find too many advocates even among the hardcore crowd.

[Kiken]

But let's talk about the original arcade version of Pink Sweets. If you embrace all of its flaws and agree on using the infinite lives bug, this leaves you with a highly unorthodox game that plays unlike anything else you know from the genre. Just playing it for survival is still a reasonable challenge as you have to trigger infinite lives first. Afterwards this obviously becomes a walk in the park. Yes, I mean this quite literally, you can trigger infinite lives and then take a walk in the park. When you come back home you have the 1cc in the bag.

Or... the game can also simply crash. That is the other possible outcome from triggering the infinite lives trick.

[brokenhalo]

But let's talk about the original arcade version of Pink Sweets. If you embrace all of its flaws and agree on using the infinite lives bug, this leaves you with a highly unorthodox game that plays unlike anything else you know from the genre. Just playing it for survival is still a reasonable challenge as you have to trigger infinite lives first. Afterwards this obviously becomes a walk in the park. Yes, I mean this quite literally, you can trigger infinite lives and then take a walk in the park. When you come back home you have the 1cc in the bag.

Or... the game can also simply crash. That is the other possible outcome from triggering the infinite lives trick.

I remember reading about this being a major issue with the few people crazy enough to play this for score bitd. Wondering if this was something you had to keep in mind when pushing for higher scores, Plasmo. Were there tactics or situations that needed to be avoided? Were crashes a common occurence, or was that all just overblown?

[Plasmo]

But let's talk about the original arcade version of Pink Sweets. If you embrace all of its flaws and agree on using the infinite lives bug, this leaves you with a highly unorthodox game that plays unlike anything else you know from the genre. Just playing it for survival is still a reasonable challenge as you have to trigger infinite lives first. Afterwards this obviously becomes a walk in the park. Yes, I mean this quite literally, you can trigger infinite lives and then take a walk in the park. When you come back home you have the 1cc in the bag.

Or... the game can also simply crash. That is the other possible outcome from triggering the infinite lives trick.

I remember reading about this being a major issue with the few people crazy enough to play this for score bitd. Wondering if this was something you had to keep in mind when pushing for higher scores, Plasmo. Were there tactics or situations that needed to be avoided? Were crashes a common occurence, or was that all just overblown?

So first off in reply to Kiken: There's no connection between infinite lives and the freeze bug. The game can freeze regardless of what the player does. This also means there is no way to prevent it from happening. It might be somehow connected to the sprite limit.

The game can freeze exactly in two parts: 1) during the final onrush of drill enemies right before the 6th boss; 2) during the fight with the TLB, most likely right after he has blown up. If the latter happens, you can still see your final score on screen, which isn't too bad then. A score submission should still be fine. Only the freeze during stage 6 is very bad. However, I've been playing the unfixed PCB now for over a year and the freeze bug has occured exactly once for me. That's hundreds of hours of play. It's probably safe to say that it's actually much rarer than previously assumed.

What's more, there are some revisions of the PCB that got rid of this bug altogether. Most people will not have access to the PCB but will rather play the game on Mame. If you use the "2006/04/06 MASTER VER...." (with 4 dots after "VER") you won't ever have to deal with this bug. More serious players can of course also hunt down these revisions as PCB.

In short, yes, this bug is bad, but also, yes, the issue was overblown.

[Kiken]

So first off in reply to Kiken: There's no connection between infinite lives and the freeze bug. The game can freeze regardless of what the player does. This also means there is no way to prevent it from happening. It might be somehow connected to the sprite limit.

The game can freeze exactly in two parts: 1) during the final onrush of drill enemies right before the 6th boss; 2) during the fight with the TLB, most likely right after he has blown up. If the latter happens, you can still see your final score on screen, which isn't too bad then. A score submission should still be fine. Only the freeze during stage 6 is very bad. However, I've been playing the unfixed PCB now for over a year and the freeze bug has occured exactly once for me. That's hundreds of hours of play. It's probably safe to say that it's actually much rarer than previously assumed.

Ahhh, so it's similar in nature to the stage 2 lock-up glitch that can occur in ESPGaluda 2 (which has happened to me twice).