Shmup Ticker: What are you playing RIGHT NOW?

[LordHypnos]

I finally succeeded at Operation "Make it to Stage 6 of Mars Matrix"
Details here if anyone is interested

Other stuff I've been playing (Was branching out a bit to help myself overcome the frustration that I was having with Mars Matrix):

Eden's Aegis - Funny story, I started playing this on a whim and got way further than I had last time on normal difficulty (Stage 3 boss ), then I realized my monitor and graphics card were inexplicably set to a 50Hz refresh rate, and so many of my shmups were running slow (Note that this would be a good way to cheat on PC games, or possibly older console games if you were using an NTSC region cart in a PAL system). Luckily it must not have made a huge difference, because I managed to make it to stage 4 once everything was back on 60Hz, so that's cool. This game has some interesting bullet patterns. It's almost too complicated though (It has a subweapon that drains a gauge in addition to normal shot, focus shot, and bomb, and that's not even including scoring)

Crimzon Clover novice mode - Didn't play this one enough to make any substantial progress. Still haven't quite cleared (made it to final stage boss a few more times)

rRootage - This is once again one of my favorite games. I love the bite sized gameplay of it Even started messing with the alternate modes finally. I think GW mode is my favorite (apart from the normal mode, anyway). PSY mode is really hard for me. IKA mode is cool too. I like that absorbing the enemy bullets shoots them back at the enemy

Direct-X - Another X68000 doujin. This one took me forever to find a source for. The difficulty chewed me up and spat me out, but it is pretty awesome how the whole game lasts under 9 minutes. Also awesome that touching enemies doesn't harm you. I only just barely made it to the S1 boss once. Soundtrack is rave music to an extreme degree, which works pretty well coming from the YM2151 (IIRC) sound chip. Gotta love a game that is super hard, super short, and doesn't punish touching enemies. Also you need to be super aggressive to succeed

Sengoku Ace and Gunbird - Only messed around with this for a little bit, but they're cool. I like how quick the pace is in both of them. I think I prefer Gunbird a little. I was playing with Kentomaru (or whatever) in Ace and Yuan Nang in Gunbird. Only thing that's keeping me from putting a bit more effort into these is the random stage order, which would make it just that much harder to actually get through >_< Fun games though. Also apparently relatively easy for Psikyo stuff.

@Neptas: I don't think the stars actually have a huge impact on scoring (though they do give you extends). Most of that seems to come from breaking and double breaking, which is also fairly satisfying. It's the kind of sneaky thing about CC. Pretty fun game though, I agree.

[ZacharyB]

Kenta Cho's L.A.2 really comes into its own when played with joy2key. Much better than using the keyboard.

[Neptas]

@Neptas: I don't think the stars actually have a huge impact on scoring (though they do give you extends). Most of that seems to come from breaking and double breaking, which is also fairly satisfying. It's the kind of sneaky thing about CC. Pretty fun game though, I agree.

Indeed, the best is to try to keep the multiplier as high as possible by breaking. It's kinda tricky actually, but I'm making good progress here. But the amount of stars you can collect per second is a bit ridiculous in a certain way xD

[LordHypnos]

Indeed, the best is to try to keep the multiplier as high as possible by breaking. It's kinda tricky actually, but I'm making good progress here. But the amount of stars you can collect per second is a bit ridiculous in a certain way xD

Yeah. I definately haven't figured out any decent routes or anything like that for scoring. It's pretty strategic. I think I'd be more likely to play boost for score because scoring is so much more simple, even if still very hard.

[MadSteelDarkness]

Add me to the Crimzon Clover fan club. That and Astebreed have taken over what tiny amounts of free time i have these days.

[PearlJammzz]

As lame as it may sound, Kolibri on 32x. Just got my 32x setup for the first time in many, many years!

[LordHypnos]

Was having a pretty serious slump in play yesterday, but I'm doing a little better today, so far. Was playing rRootage. started with 4R, moved onto 5R, then 6R, which I have done several runs of. I think one of my favorite things in rRootage is running out of bombs. I think it brings out the best in my gameplay. I managed to get through the entire 5th phase of 6R that way once, and also several earlier phases (I think it was 2 and 3, or something) in a different run. I'll probably do some MM practice later.

[MadSteelDarkness]

As lame as it may sound, Kolibri on 32x. Just got my 32x setup for the first time in many, many years!

Doesn't sound lame at all. Kolibri is good times.

Now if i could just find out what i did with my copy...

On topic, i just tried Clannada yesterday. Fun!

[Mr12Inches]

I finally succeeded at Operation "Make it to Stage 6 of Mars Matrix"

Seriously, awesome job dude! If only I could improve as steadily as you

As for what I've been playing, it's Crimzon Clover and more Crimzon Clover. I've wanted to learn Unlimited for awhile, so I've finally manned up and spent my free time for the past week learning the first couple of stages. It'll probably take me a long time before I can 1cc that mode, but I don't mind.

[LordHypnos]

Seriously, awesome job dude! If only I could improve as steadily as you

Well, I have been playing Mars Matrix since about February of this year. hahaha. That's like 5 months. But yeah, I'm pretty amazed with my progress, especially since May or so. It's pretty cool how, with practice, stuff that seemed impossible not long ago can be conquered.

[blackoak]

Crimzon Clover for me too. My first impressions are kind of lukewarm, but it doesn't seem like a bad game. I just don't care much for the lock-on mechanic.... though I like it in Rayforce. I'll give it another chance though. Maybe getting into the scoring system will change my mind.

[LordHypnos]

Currently working on Stage 5 as a whole in Score Attack (stage select) mode. It's amazing how I can sometimes no miss the entire boss rush, but I haven't been able to get too much consistency on that last car. The bullets feel kind of RNG, but they're probably not. There's a lot of parts that feel a bit RNG in MM until you learn how to manipulate the local rank. It's really satisfying whenever I do no miss it though.

End of that stage is still giving me the most problems. The battlefield is littered with really slow bullets that you need to maneuver around as large enemies shoot fast speed clumps of bullets at you. Although I recently realized one of the enemies that's responsible for the slow bullets, so maybe I can figure out how to dispose of them and clear up the screen a bit.

Definitely improving at stages 3 and 4 consistency, and even the part that differs between the Arcade and Dreamcast versions (Feels like I'm getting lucky, but usually luck doesn't happen so frequently )

[Cata]

Tons and tons of Ketsui!

[Lord Satori]

I was playing Crisis/Divider. Amazing game with a fantastic soundtrack! I find it interesting that if you end up timing out on a boss, you get warped to the final level. (at least I think it's the final level)

[LordHypnos]

OMG! I don't know if I can handle the rage that Mars Matrix causes >_< I think I might be having an off day (sucks though, because I have more time than usual to practice today). Keep losing track of my ship in the middle of all the bullets and gold cubes in stage 5 >_<

[eatdogs]

Chain blaster (3DS)
Metal torrent (3DS July club Nintendo game of the month for 200 coins)
Recca (3DS)
Shovel Knight (not a shmup burr AMAZING!)

[KAI]

Crimzon Clover WORLD IGNITION. Not liking the changes so far.

[Lord Satori]

Shovel Knight (not a shmup burr AMAZING!)

There's a thread like this in the off topic section for non-shmups.

[Squire Grooktook]

Fooling around with Armed Police Batrider, trying to see if I can get into it.

Messing around with the Gundemonium games again too.

Crimzon Clover for me too. My first impressions are kind of lukewarm, but it doesn't seem like a bad game. I just don't care much for the lock-on mechanic.... though I like it in Rayforce. I'll give it another chance though. Maybe getting into the scoring system will change my mind.

Scoring system will definitely make the game for you if anything will. It's really not until you dive into it that it really starts to shine IMO.

[LordHypnos]

I just spent like 2 hours trying to record a decent run of Mars Matrix. I have 3 worthwhile videos that I came up with, but none of them are really that great, unfortunately.

One of them is a run where I don't lose my last life until right before stage 5 boss and managed to get around 1.6 million experience, one I managed to get 1.6 million by the end of stage 4 , but then got completely destroyed in every possible way in stage 5 (still got around 1.8 million ep, though).

One is just the first stage because I ran out of space for more video on the camera, but I chained +777 which is awesome, and also better than I usually do. On the 1.8 million one, I manage to chain the end of stage 2 from the rotating turret, and I think I did pretty well on stage 3.

Also, in classic Mars Matrix video tradition, the quality is awful, because I'm recording a CRT computer monitor (It's Dreamcast VGA, at least!) from a digital camera that can only record 640x480 resolution for videos. lol.

I mostly captured video because I've heard that watching your own gameplay can be helpful, but if anyone would actually be interested in seeing any of this, I could upload it to sendspace or some shit.

[Stevens]

Cause I seemingly have a love affair with both the Dreamcast and helicopters I have finally added Zero Gunner 2 into my rotation.

[nosorrow]

Sound choice, I love how it controls even if it takes some getting used to.

I'm currently playing two games:

1) Triggerheart Excelica (Dreamcast)
I gave up too quickly when initially trying out the game. As soon as I used the automatic Anchor rotation (manual doesn't really work with a pad - at least I can't do it), the game clicked. The music is also quite catchy and fun.

2) Espgaluda (PS2)
I had played some Donpachi and Dodonpachi before, but this is my first exposure to "modern" Cave games... What a rush this game is (fantastic soundtrack too), but it is somewhat too overwhelming for me because of the number of bullets. I'll practice more to improve but I find it hard navigating through the bullets. Hopefully I'll get the hang of it. (I tried "arrange mode" and can't even beat the first boss. And I hear this is Cave's easiest game, ouch for me, lol...)

[professor ganson]

You're not alone in finding Espgaluda challenging. I always have. It made a big difference taking the time to experiment with the mechanics, which lack a pick-up-n-play quality. The more comfortable you get with them, the further you'll go. Though, I'm probably the last person to be giving advice about this game since I'm still not any good at it. Great game in any case.

[nosorrow]

re: Espgaluda

The mechanics are very interesting, but I find the orb thing hard to get a hang of. I feel the game uses maybe a button to many, but I'm used to Mars Matrix, so take that with a grain of salt.

Also, what's up with the default controls being different wether you play Arcade vs. Arrange mode? Plus, there doesn't appear to be a way to change the button layout for one of the two (can't remember which one as I last played Wednesday). Maybe an oversight on my part, but if not, that's rather odd.

[null1024]

Eden's Aegis - Funny story, I started playing this on a whim and got way further than I had last time on normal difficulty (Stage 3 boss ), then I realized my monitor and graphics card were inexplicably set to a 50Hz refresh rate, and so many of my shmups were running slow (Note that this would be a good way to cheat on PC games, or possibly older console games if you were using an NTSC region cart in a PAL system).

This reminds me of the first time I played Dangun Feveron -- my machine at the time was absolute shit, and I forgot turn on auto frameskip (in fact, I might have posted this years ago in this thread, haha -- too lazy to look it up).
The game is much easier at 85% full speed. Like, I was getting to Stage 3's boss or so regularly (at a time when I wasn't remotely good enough to get past the middle of Stage 2 at 100% speed).

[Kiken]

re: Espgaluda

The mechanics are very interesting, but I find the orb thing hard to get a hang of. I feel the game uses maybe a button to many, but I'm used to Mars Matrix, so take that with a grain of salt.

Also, what's up with the default controls being different wether you play Arcade vs. Arrange mode? Plus, there doesn't appear to be a way to change the button layout for one of the two (can't remember which one as I last played Wednesday). Maybe an oversight on my part, but if not, that's rather odd.

You can change the button layouts for both modes, the problem is that you can only customize the layout for one mode at a time, really. The game has four functions which are listed twice (the second in brackets, IIRC)... the second button set is for Arrange Mode. So each time you want to switch modes, you're most likely going to have to go back into the menu to swap the buttons around. Something of an annoying oversight in an otherwise amazing conversion.


As for myself.. started playing Thunder Force V on Saturn again recently.. always wanted to improve on my old scores. And I wanted to test out capturing on my new DVR unit, so The Little Free-Range That Could made for a good test game.

[AntiFritz]

re: Espgaluda

The mechanics are very interesting, but I find the orb thing hard to get a hang of. I feel the game uses maybe a button to many, but I'm used to Mars Matrix, so take that with a grain of salt.

Also, what's up with the default controls being different wether you play Arcade vs. Arrange mode? Plus, there doesn't appear to be a way to change the button layout for one of the two (can't remember which one as I last played Wednesday). Maybe an oversight on my part, but if not, that's rather odd.

You can change the button layouts for both modes, the problem is that you can only customize the layout for one mode at a time, really. The game has four functions which are listed twice (the second in brackets, IIRC)... the second button set is for Arrange Mode. So each time you want to switch modes, you're most likely going to have to go back into the menu to swap the buttons around. Something of an annoying oversight in an otherwise amazing conversion.


As for myself.. started playing Thunder Force V on Saturn again recently.. always wanted to improve on my old scores. And I wanted to test out capturing on my new DVR unit, so The Little Free-Range That Could made for a good test game.

I still don't understand why espgaluda arrange has the buttons swapped around at all.

[DocHauser]

Been getting back into Jamestown recently. Managed a respectable place in the online leaderboard with a 1CC in Legendary...



There seem to be a few suspect scores at the top of the board (40-50 million), so my actual position might be higher than that. I did see Kyper with a score of 14 million at #7 (on Judgement difficulty), so I'm guessing that's probably somewhere near the maximum possible score...

[Kiken]

I still don't understand why espgaluda arrange has the buttons swapped around at all.

Because the two modes have different buttons and Mihara-san probably thought it was better to have a default layout for Arrange that mimicked the ESPRa.De. layout.

Arcade: Shot, Kakusei, Guard Barrier, Auto-Fire
Vs
Arrange: Shot, Splatter Shot, Guard Barrier, Kakusei

[LordHypnos]

Yesterday was trying full runs of MM again, but at the more reasonable time of 2:30ish to 4:30ish (PM). Stages 3 and 5 were probably the worst. Didn't even manage to no miss either once, though I'm getting better at stage 5, at least. Just getting worse at stage 3 >_<

4 was giving me surprisingly little trouble, though I only managed to not die against the boss once (In practice I no miss him most of the time, fucking nerves). Best run I made it all the way to within 2 or 3 seconds of the 5th stage boss dying. so fucking annoying. Then I went on to 3cc the game. Not too bad, actually.

I think the final phase of the 5th stage boss is actually the hardest part of the game. Sure the final bosses all have hard to read patterns with really fast bullets, but they're super static, so once you've memorized the patterns, you just have to have good enough reflexes, and get the timing of your movements right. With the final phase of the 5th stage boss, I haven't figured out any consistent pattern (seems like it's RNG or something), and the bullets are super fast, so you need to read the pattern on the fly and react to it in time. That's really hard sometimes!

On a side note, I think if I can manage to do normally well on stages 1, 2, and 4, and more or less full chain 3 and 5, I'll end up with a multiplier of over 2,000,000 in the sixth stage O_O Keep on screwing up on the 3rd stage though, but usually I get between 1,600,000 and 1,900,000 by the end of the 5th stage. One time I managed to not screw up on the 3rd stage, and got 1,600,000 by the end of the fourth O_O, though my 5th stage route was not as good, at the time (and I did really bad on it, that particular time), but I still managed to get a multiplier of 1,800,000.

anyway, TL;DR: Mars Matrix is a cruel mistress.