Shmup Ticker: What are you playing RIGHT NOW?

[Lemnear]

I'm in that "taste consolidation" phase, and there are games I occasionally reopen and throw a coin into; some are recurring, others aren't, and every now and then my tastes change.

For example, I never would have said I'd like Raiden III X MIKADO MANIAX so much (I haven't tried IV yet), and I never would have said I'd downgrade Darius in favor of the Ray'z Trilogy; there's something so satisfying about locking on as many targets as possible and destroying them together. I'm noticing that I don't like the Darius patterns in general; it's beautiful to look at but not as enjoyable to play, with the exception of Darius Gaiden.

The usual ones remain DOJ and Ketsui, obviously (and DDP), Batsugun is losing ground (oddly enough, because that's exactly what I started with), and things like the USAAF Mustang and P47 are rising in my personal list.

Maybe something will change later, but for now I'm basically bouncing between these.

Special mention goes to ESP.Ra.De and Dungun Feveron, though there's something I don't like about the latter and something that makes me want to play it again (maybe it's the third ship, it's unique). I have no complaints about Raizing in general; I simply don't like the hitbox or the small projectiles, and I can only enjoy Battle Bakraid

[Starfighter]

I'm not confident I'll reach my goal mainly because it's a horizontal shmup (I just can't dodge anything in those, every dodge forces me to stop thinking about anything else and just focus on my ship and the two or three bullets near me and I lose all birds eye perspective) but I sure want to really give it my best!

I've now experimented with pilot/gunner combinations and tried to get the hang of the ring/gem system for about five hours (if I'm to trust my game launcher software), but I'm still not even reaching the third score based extend (my last run ended at just over 10 mil). That run ended about ten seconds before the S5 boss went down (meaning if I had just one more bomb I'd already have the 1-ALL) however, and I missed the 1UP at S4 so... I don't really think I need to get good enough to reach the third score based extend to clear the first loop. I just need to get that hidden 1UP at S4 and I'll have this. Well, the last run was filled with "how did I survive that?"-moments so I'm sure I'll have a bunch of sessions ahead of me before I'll get that lucky again.

Edit: The combo/formation I used during my lucky "almost there"-run was Bolt/Rivet with the default formation, I thought the run would end early because I didn't really like it at first.