Shmup Related Questions That Don't Deserve a Thread

[Pretas]

Do any of the Crimson Clover versions let you practice the TLB?

World Ignition definitely lets you select EX-BOSS in practice mode.

[DoomsDave]

Been lurking for a while and learned a lot here. I'm finally going to take the plunge and get and NTSCJ 360 so I have a few questions.

Will I be able to use my Australian XBL account and if so, will I being able to download and play my XBLA purchases? Can you set the system's UI to English? Should I just get it from play-asia or is there a better/cheaper option?

Thanks

[AntiFritz]

Been lurking for a while and learned a lot here. I'm finally going to take the plunge and get and NTSCJ 360 so I have a few questions.

Will I be able to use my Australian XBL account and if so, will I being able to download and play my XBLA purchases? Can you set the system's UI to English? Should I just get it from play-asia or is there a better/cheaper option?

Thanks

http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=23501

[DoomsDave]

Ugh, I feel dumb. Assumed hardware meant arcade and never looked. Thanks.

[LordHypnos]

Not really related to anything I'm doing right now, shmupswise, but how do people usually deal with practicing psikyo games that have randomized stage order? When I was playing Gunbird 2 (on DC) a lot a while back, I used the stage select only for practicing stages in the default order, e.g. America-1 Italy-2 Japan-3, because it resets to that every time you hard reset, and that's the 2nd easiest stage order (I feel like England, Italy, Japan is slightly easier)

[President_Obama]

Can someone tell me how I unlock those homing missiles in Ginga Force?

[Squire Grooktook]

What order were the Gundemonium games originally released in? I'm pretty sure Gundemonium Recollection is a remake, so would the original be the first game in the series? Or would that be Hitogatta Happa? Or was that remade too?

[BulletMagnet]

IIRC the "original" Gundemonium (Recollection is indeed a remake) was the first, Gundeadligne came next, Hitogata Happa was after that and Recollection was last. Someone correct me if I messed that up.

[CStarFlare]

Not sure where these fit in but http://www.platinedispositif.net/games/ ... summer.htm

[DoomsDave]

Does anyone know anything about Gaiabreaker on the Wii U? Been out in Japan since December and releases to western consoles on the 17th of this month. Very little has been written about it apart from this terrible review(http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/revi ... aker-wii-u) which lists "patterns are troubling" and "short experience" as cons. It does note that the game was written in enchant.js so I don't really have high hopes for it but you never know, might be interesting. So has anyone played it?

Gameplay vid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YH24Cbi3pXI

[ACSeraph]

I actually bought a Japanese WiiU a couple weeks ago but I hadn't heard anything about this game. Watching the vid... I can kinda see why. Looks pretty terrible.

[Yalecsa]

Hallo! Casual newby shmupper here with a couple of small questions that maybe someone can help me out with. Mainly in relation to screen sizes and pixels and suchlike.

Okay, so, I understand what yoko and tate mode are quite well, but every so often I see a game with a display mode it calls tatehosei. I've checked the glossary on this forum, and I've Googled for what it might be, but I've yet to get a definitive answer beyond "not as good as tate". Can anyone help me out and explain what it is? And why it exists?

Question the second! I've been rather enjoying the 360 port of Deathsmiles, and even dug out my old CRT TV to play it properly, but I've hit a snag. I don't at all understand what's going on with the screen scaling options. If the game runs at 320x240, and I'm displaying it on my 480i TV, then surely with the screen size set to 100%, it should either be exactly half of the screen, or if they're doubling the pixels, it should exactly fill it. And yet it's kind of somewhere in between? So, does anyone know what screen setting I should be using to have a pixel perfect display, as it would be displayed on an arcade monitor? (Or at least as close as a 480i TV can get; I can't justify buying a 240p monitor >.> )

Why on earth did the Mars Matrix developers choose the resolution that they did. I've heard it's something like 384x224. According to MAME, the pixel aspect ratio is 12:7. WTF! That can't be any kind of standard

Oh wow, something I can sort of answer. For that one you have to blame Capcom. Any game that runs on their CPS arcade hardware has to use that resolution for some reason. All the Street Fighters, Final Fight, Progear, etc, they're all at that bizzare resolution. It's why all the sprite rips you find for Street Fighter characters look so much fatter on square pixel monitors than they do when scaled properly. The rumour is that they did it back in the day to pack in even more detail on their sprites, and simply because they had so much power on that arcade board that they could. But I don't think anyone outside of Capcom really knows for sure.

[LordHypnos]

Hallo! Casual newby shmupper here with a couple of small questions that maybe someone can help me out with. Mainly in relation to screen sizes and pixels and suchlike.

welcome!

Okay, so, I understand what yoko and tate mode are quite well, but every so often I see a game with a display mode it calls tatehosei. I've checked the glossary on this forum, and I've Googled for what it might be, but I've yet to get a definitive answer beyond "not as good as tate". Can anyone help me out and explain what it is? And why it exists?

Unfortunately can't help you with this one. Maybe try the hardware subforum though. A lot of people there know their shit.

Question the second! I've been rather enjoying the 360 port of Deathsmiles, and even dug out my old CRT TV to play it properly, but I've hit a snag. I don't at all understand what's going on with the screen scaling options. If the game runs at 320x240, and I'm displaying it on my 480i TV, then surely with the screen size set to 100%, it should either be exactly half of the screen, or if they're doubling the pixels, it should exactly fill it. And yet it's kind of somewhere in between? So, does anyone know what screen setting I should be using to have a pixel perfect display, as it would be displayed on an arcade monitor? (Or at least as close as a 480i TV can get; I can't justify buying a 240p monitor >.> )

Well, on a CRT, the pixels can vary in shape and size, unlike on pretty much any other common type of display. High end CRT monitors (or just any PC monitor) have geometry controls that allow you to stretch and move the pixels around. If your TV has geometry controls, you can probably stretch the image to fit the screen. If it doesn't, then there's a chance that it's just a screen with bad geometry issues that you probably can't fix (IDK how fixable this sort of thing is, but I know that I had an SDTV at one point that consistently drew the image too tall so that part of it was off of the screen and the images were stretched vertically a little bit) Additionally, a 240p image that is actually 240p should fill the screen on an SDTV, it will just have "scanlines" seperating the lines that your TV is drawing.

Why on earth did the Mars Matrix developers choose the resolution that they did. I've heard it's something like 384x224. According to MAME, the pixel aspect ratio is 12:7. WTF! That can't be any kind of standard

Oh wow, something I can sort of answer. For that one you have to blame Capcom. Any game that runs on their CPS arcade hardware has to use that resolution for some reason. All the Street Fighters, Final Fight, Progear, etc, they're all at that bizzare resolution. It's why all the sprite rips you find for Street Fighter characters look so much fatter on square pixel monitors than they do when scaled properly. The rumour is that they did it back in the day to pack in even more detail on their sprites, and simply because they had so much power on that arcade board that they could. But I don't think anyone outside of Capcom really knows for sure.

Wow, never thought this would get answered in this thread. hahaha. I have basically come to the conclusion that it's just that: higher detail, and because the game was designed to be displayed on a CRT monitor, there's no reason why the pixels had to be square.

[Lyv]

Not really related to anything I'm doing right now, shmupswise, but how do people usually deal with practicing psikyo games that have randomized stage order? When I was playing Gunbird 2 (on DC) a lot a while back, I used the stage select only for practicing stages in the default order, e.g. America-1 Italy-2 Japan-3, because it resets to that every time you hard reset, and that's the 2nd easiest stage order (I feel like England, Italy, Japan is slightly easier)

All the recent Psikyo games (that is, afaik, Strikers 45 2, Gunbird 2, Strikers 99 and Dragon Blaze) have the first stages in the default order the first time you boot the rom/PCB, so if you play on emulator you can pretty much ignore the randomness for these games by resetting between each attempt.
For the other ones, I guess you could set up a savestate at the beginning of each random stage in the highest position, and thus practice each stage at its highest possible difficulty.

[LordHypnos]

All the recent Psikyo games (that is, afaik, Strikers 45 2, Gunbird 2, Strikers 99 and Dragon Blaze) have the first stages in the default order the first time you boot the rom/PCB, so if you play on emulator you can pretty much ignore the randomness for these games by resetting between each attempt.
For the other ones, I guess you could set up a savestate at the beginning of each random stage in the highest position, and thus practice each stage at its highest possible difficulty.

Thanks, that's kind of what I figured.

[President_Obama]

Search function's proving fruitless, so I'll ask here. Is there anywhere I can find a description of what the extra items do in Ginga Force? I know that one displays enemies' energy, but that's it.

[nZero]

Search function's proving fruitless, so I'll ask here. Is there anywhere I can find a description of what the extra items do in Ginga Force? I know that one displays enemies' energy, but that's it.

This?

[Despatche]

Why on earth did the Mars Matrix developers choose the resolution that they did. I've heard it's something like 384x224. According to MAME, the pixel aspect ratio is 12:7. WTF! That can't be any kind of standard

Oh wow, something I can sort of answer. For that one you have to blame Capcom. Any game that runs on their CPS arcade hardware has to use that resolution for some reason. All the Street Fighters, Final Fight, Progear, etc, they're all at that bizzare resolution. It's why all the sprite rips you find for Street Fighter characters look so much fatter on square pixel monitors than they do when scaled properly. The rumour is that they did it back in the day to pack in even more detail on their sprites, and simply because they had so much power on that arcade board that they could. But I don't think anyone outside of Capcom really knows for sure.

pretty much this. and it's not just the cp system series or even arcade machines, but tons of older devices used strange internal resolutions by square pixel standards that would be "stretched" to fit a normal 4:3 or 3:4 screen; always remember that a standard crt television does not care at all about resolution. why such strange internal resolutions were chosen, however, is a question for the ages.

for example, nes games use an internal resolution that almost looks like a square through square pixels (it's similar to how the game boy looks). technically, that means all of these sprite rips of mario for "retro" avatars and shirts and whatever are incorrect. in fact, nes emulation (among other systems) is so prolific that most people would probably tell you that 4:3 looks "wrong"!

another example is the polygame master, the hardware that cave's little "pgm trilogy" (daioujou, ketsui, espgaluda) runs on. it uses some wacky 2:1 (448x224) internal resolution, simply because.

i find both internal resolution at square pixels and at 4:3 stretching to be two different kinds of correct (especially with developers using square-based monitors later on taken into account), but some don't

[BareKnuckleRoo]

I actually bought a Japanese WiiU a couple weeks ago but I hadn't heard anything about this game. Watching the vid... I can kinda see why. Looks pretty terrible.

It has inertia - that alone makes it pretty terrible. The gameplay video is a snoozefest too. Just a kusoge, nothing to see here.

[President_Obama]

Search function's proving fruitless, so I'll ask here. Is there anywhere I can find a description of what the extra items do in Ginga Force? I know that one displays enemies' energy, but that's it.

This?

Aha thanks. All I was getting was page after page of mentions. Thanks to Pestro too, that's pretty comprehensive. I've stuck it in my favourites folder.

[Pretas]

I actually bought a Japanese WiiU a couple weeks ago but I hadn't heard anything about this game. Watching the vid... I can kinda see why. Looks pretty terrible.

It has inertia - that alone makes it pretty terrible. The gameplay video is a snoozefest too. Just a kusoge, nothing to see here.

More of a programming exercise than a true kusoge. Gaiabreaker only exists so that Ubiquitous Entertainment could demonstrate a game running within the new Nintendo Web Framework HTML5/JS environment using enchant.js, which they developed. Not sure why it's being sold as a full-fledged game.

[Squire Grooktook]

How big exactly are the hitboxes in Garrega and Batrider? I remember once being told they were like 11x11 pixels or something like that, but playing them it feels quite a bit smaller, though I could be mistaken.

[Noah!]

interestingly enough, garegga and batrider both have a character test which outright shows em. up+a is the command to show/hide it, left/right+a cycles through characters



based on these, 6x11 seems to be the default, with it shrinking by 1px on each end if you pick c/abc type
(the character test also sorta muddles it by drawing a crosshair in the center of each sprite)

unfortunately batrider's character test is less helpful, and only shows what i think are its grazing hitboxes. i'd assume the real ones are about the same size though

[Squire Grooktook]

Very interesting, thank you.

[d3vak]

I'm kinda ashamed to ask this but I didn't find any further info about it: Does "Radirgy Noa Massive" include the older "Radirgy" game in it?

[BulletMagnet]

I'm kinda ashamed to ask this but I didn't find any further info about it: Does "Radirgy Noa Massive" include the older "Radirgy" game in it?

It doesn't, but there is a play mode (offhand I forget the name) which allows your ship to pass through enemy ships (most of Noa's modes don't allow this), which makes it feel more like the first Radirgy.

[Captain]

I heard that I can get better at shmups by sacrificing newborns of shmup players to Nyarlathotep's niece.

I won't say the ritual but it involves mustard, lemons and fifty cockroaches.

Is this for real?

[Patashu]

I heard that I can get better at shmups by sacrificing newborns of shmup players to Nyarlathotep's niece.

I won't say the ritual but it involves mustard, lemons and fifty cockroaches.

Is this for real?

Yes, this is how all the pros do it

[Patashu]

Is this chart true?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_ ... _human.svg
e.g. I will play best (on average) between 10 am and 4 pm, and outside of that attempts aren't going to be quite as good unless I'm warm enough to make up for it?

Do I need to adjust it based on my sleep schedule? There's something called 'jet lag', so I guess it doesn't adjust unless my sleep schedule changes permanently?

[LordHypnos]

Is this chart true?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_ ... _human.svg
e.g. I will play best (on average) between 10 am and 4 pm, and outside of that attempts aren't going to be quite as good unless I'm warm enough to make up for it?

Do I need to adjust it based on my sleep schedule? There's something called 'jet lag', so I guess it doesn't adjust unless my sleep schedule changes permanently?

That actually sounds about right for when I'm best at shmups during the day (Afternoon basically), but it would make sense to adjust it according to your sleep schedule, I'd think.