The BIG thread of Shmup grievances.

[LordHypnos]

Life Force is the same as Gradius II in that you probly won't die at all unless some bullshit you werent prepared for like a fire pillar whacks you. Once it's memorized you won't even need to worry about the recovery.

Yeah, I kinda figured it's basically just been memorization fails. I think I have so much Mars Matrix in my head there's no room for Life Force (NES)

But I see what you are saying. Actually I think you are even more fucked without checkpoints if you end up losing all your options. The one thing about the checkpoints is there tends to be a carrier or two in all of them to help you deal with whats coming, though it's generally not helpful enough for the average player to survive anyhow. It's kind of a weird design, since the people most likely to pull off a recovery are the people least likely to need to recover in the first place.

Yeah, I was kinda thinking that checkpoints might actually benefit recovery a little in a game with a Gradius power-up bar.

The lack of checkpoints is well implemented in the arcade version of Salamander though, since it doesn't use the gradius powerup system you tend to recovery pretty fast. No extends though, so that can make things rough.

Yeah, that makes sense. Damn, though, no extends would be rough...

[BareKnuckleRoo]

I also have a couple weapon edit run using the E-Laser and freeze options, which I believe to be the strongest setup in the game.

Agreed, Type 1's Freeze Multiple is arguably the strongest and most versatile (you can easily widen it or compress it, or shoot through walls). Type 3 and Type 4 aren't great, they're more there for ease of use for beginners. Type 2's directional laser is good for sweeping, but isn't as good in general usage.

Personally, with weapon edit I always go with Two Way missles for added vertical protection, and either Laser or Ripple. E. Laser is super strong, but it's tricky to use for stages, whereas Laser and Ripple are more reliable.

If you find bosses give you a lot of trouble, I suggest trying out Spread Bombs. If you compress 2 or three Multiples together and cram them into a boss weakpoint, you can do a massive amount of damage in a hurry. The giant blue blasts can be a bit disorienting in tight spaces though.

[BIL]

Gradius V was actually My First Shump, at least the first one I played seriously for a clear. The microscopic hitbox and instant recoveries alone are huge assists, and there's also the very generous practice mode that lets you break stages into checkpoints for either recovery or full-powered practice (the latter by using the Konami code). At the same time it's definitely not a watered down shooter designwise, lots of imposing stages and bosses to get to grips with... it's an impressive balance. As a more experienced player I find it a bit slow to get going and overlong, but it's always a hell of an experience. st5's Coco Puff Clusterfuck and its terrifying Blaster Cannon Core will make you feel like a goddamn space stud.

(I just wanted to see if the announcer would quit trashing me once I made the loop! great motivator, seriously... first I was "gimme a fuckin break" at st2's "YOU NEED SOME PRACTICE," then I was saying the same thing at screenshots where the player had lost lives by the same point! instant elitist prick!)

[Squire Grooktook]

As a more experienced player I find it a bit slow to get going and overlong

A bit true of stage 2 and 3 I think, but stage 1 is probably one of my favorite stage 1's out there. Squeezing through those beach ball Zelos's just never gets old to me.

[BIL]

Same, pretty much. Stage 1 itself is A-okay by me for that lovely riff on Gradius II st1 with added Salamander ("OWAAAH"), plus the short runtime, and the rather badass presentation of the Vic tearing out of the station and into orbit with a trail of destruction in its wake. Then it's right into a bonus stage. Stage 3 has a lot of quality too, outside of a few sleepy transitional moments.

It's really stage 2 and its lazy corridor drifting that needed editing. I remember the brain hallway scaring the crap out of me when I was new, but now it seems about cruising speed.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Stage 2's definitely a low point. The boss rush is a lot of fun though. Personally, my least favourite section of the game is where the Elephant Gear shows up. It's long, it takes forever to become vulnerable and then it's hard to kill, and it's not terribly satisfying for a final boss (considering there's no boss in the last stage).

[Obscura]

OMFG, the fucking DFK Ura Route bullshit is the dumbest thing I've ever seen in a videogame.

"Hey, if you don't manage to do a ridiculously difficult trick in stage 1 absolutely perfectly, your entire credit is gone because literally half of the game changes! And even if you do hit every single target perfectly, sometimes you won't get the warp anyways!"

What a bunch of fucking bullshit. I was really enjoying this game and was looking forward to learning how to really push it, but this bit of completely pants-on-head retarded design completely puts me off.

[Cagar]

OMFG, the fucking DFK Ura Route bullshit is the dumbest thing I've ever seen in a videogame.

"Hey, if you don't manage to do a ridiculously difficult trick in stage 1 absolutely perfectly, your entire credit is gone because literally half of the game changes! And even if you do hit every single target perfectly, sometimes you won't get the warp anyways!"

What a bunch of fucking bullshit. I was really enjoying this game and was looking forward to learning how to really push it, but this bit of completely pants-on-head retarded design completely puts me off.

Watch some replays, make sure you know the requirements, practice.
If you know exactly what to do, you'll have 99.9% consistency at it.

[Obscura]

I know the requirements, but I can kill every single silo before the tanks, not die, get all 3 bees, and have full hyper meter before even killing the last tank, and it won't warp me most of the time.

Best I can tell, it's completely fucking arbitrary. Unless there's another requirement that no one knows about, doing it 100% perfectly won't cause it to happen a huge percentage of the time.

[Lilium]

Can you in any way record yourself trying to do it? It would make it easier to point out what you're not doing right

[Obscura]

I've got a huge chunk of attempts recorded and encoding now. About 30 minutes of runs, three total successes.

[Obscura]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePMKVw3 ... e=youtu.be

It's up now. If you watch to the end, where I finally got the start right and played the credit through, why on earth did the chain break on the St 2 Ura midboss? I thought that boost + hyper would both fill the chain gauge and add hits against the Ura bosses?

[Bananamatic]

doesn't look like you're killing the silos but rather the tanks run over them, I don't think the animation is any different

[trap15]

Yeah those silos are definitely being run over.

[Obscura]

After another straight four fucking hours of doing the same 20 seconds over and over and over, I STILL CANNOT FUCKING DO IT.

So fucking infuriating. It's not like I can even say "fuck it, I'll learn this trick later", BECAUSE IT CHANGES THE ENTIRE REST OF THE FUCKING GAME. I literally cannot continue playing this game at fucking all until I can get this stupidly hard trick down nearly 100%, and there's no way in hell I can get there.

Fucking hell, I hope some retard at Cave lost his job for this stupid shit.

[Legendary Hoamaru]

I swear there is some rank in Eschatos. Finally thought I had a solid strategy for space invaders section at end of stage 4 through practicing the stage but the enemies seem aggressive as fuck with the fire rate in a real run.

Pick this back up a few days ago and the rust is real. Still fun as fuck though, gotta keep practicing and not fall off the shmup wagon this time.

[LordHypnos]

Nothin' more frustrating than getting a really nice +750 chain in Mars Matrix stage 1 followed by dying on the boss >_<
Except maybe keeping failing to maintain the stage 3 chain in such a way that reduces said chain by like +300, and total experience by several hundred thousand.
Or perhaps failing to kill the final turret on the Battleship in stage 4 fast enough to be able to get the full +600-700 chain from the gold cube fountain

-_-

[Cagar]

After another straight four fucking hours of doing the same 20 seconds over and over and over, I STILL CANNOT FUCKING DO IT.

So fucking infuriating. It's not like I can even say "fuck it, I'll learn this trick later", BECAUSE IT CHANGES THE ENTIRE REST OF THE FUCKING GAME. I literally cannot continue playing this game at fucking all until I can get this stupidly hard trick down nearly 100%, and there's no way in hell I can get there.

Fucking hell, I hope some retard at Cave lost his job for this stupid shit.

Well I have to admit, I opened the game up and started recording a video of my way of doing it and failed, but just kept recording and ended up doing this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bzBV0XwVQo

[pegboy]

Same, pretty much. Stage 1 itself is A-okay by me for that lovely riff on Gradius II st1 with added Salamander ("OWAAAH"), plus the short runtime, and the rather badass presentation of the Vic tearing out of the station and into orbit with a trail of destruction in its wake. Then it's right into a bonus stage. Stage 3 has a lot of quality too, outside of a few sleepy transitional moments.

It's really stage 2 and its lazy corridor drifting that needed editing. I remember the brain hallway scaring the crap out of me when I was new, but now it seems about cruising speed.

Stage 1 is one of the better opening stages I've seen, love blowing those Zelos forces apart with that ridiculous scream. In later loops it's also one of the hardest stages in the game to clear without dying, if you screw up and don't power up properly your multi-loop run can go right down the toilet.

As for stage 2, the boss rush and awesome music makes up for the lackluster corridor part, and I think the gimmick with helping your future self out was actually rather ingenious. I kind of wish they had taken that concept further, and perhaps designing an entire level around it.

[Obscura]

Seriously, FUCK DFK URA.

15 more hours of practice; still can't even get it to 10% consistency. I'm SO FUCKING TIRED of seeing those 15 seconds; I'd like to be able to play this game, but this stupid bullshit is literally just saying "nope".

I've never seen such a fucking blatant quarter-eating bullshit mechanic in my entire fucking life (and I'm old enough to remember when Smash TV and Gauntlet were actually in arcades).

[ACSeraph]

Honestly though if you can't get consistent enough to open the URA, then you probably can't get consistent enough to clear it either. In a way the game is doing you a favor by not giving you a death sentence.

[Emuser]

In case you haven't ran across this yet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8UxFNsRSxw

Ura entry; It is finnicky, but there are a number of obscure things, I have it dwindled down pretty much so that they should be explained in the vid.

And yes, Ura Power is no freggin joke.

[Obscura]

Honestly though if you can't get consistent enough to open the URA, then you probably can't get consistent enough to clear it either. In a way the game is doing you a favor by not giving you a death sentence.

Define "death sentence"; I've had a Power-style credit stay on Ura run before ending on the last set of laser wheels, and nearly all of my runs that don't end in a forced stage 1 reset make it to stage 5.

Yes, I know, stage 5 is where the real challenge is, but it's not like waltzing into an Ultra mode or something.

[ACSeraph]

Well for me at least it's pretty rough. All I'm saying is I'm not sure it's fair to call it a quarter munching feature, as in a way it diverts lower level players to a course more on their level.

I can agree though, that it would have been better if they had just made it a totally separate selectable mode like the modes found in Mushi.

[Bananamatic]

ura midbosses are easier than the regular ones though

[ACSeraph]

You think so? I find them way harder. Lack of practice maybe, but I can always half-ass my way through the standard course whereas I tend to get wasted occasionally by the URA midbosses.

[Bananamatic]

st1 and st2 are just hypered every time for both score and survival
st3 can be point blanked with a hyper which removes most of its cannons and makes him not shoot anything for 80% of the fight
st4 is slightly harder on ura but not by much
st5-1 is WAY easier on ura, you can just point blank him with a hyper and tap dodge the first attack and he dies immediately
st5-2 is equally difficult on both regular and ura

not to mention 2 extra bees for going ura which means extra hyper charge

[Obscura]

Well for me at least it's pretty rough. All I'm saying is I'm not sure it's fair to call it a quarter munching feature, as in a way it diverts lower level players to a course more on their level.

Except it's not actually doing that. All it's actually doing is diverting players who can't do one absolutely ridiculous score trick onto a route that scores way fucking less and fucks up any chains into/out of midbosses that they've practiced (actually, is it even possible to chain out of the normal stage 2, 3, and 4 midbosses?).

And yeah, the only one that's even harder on Ura is st 4, and that tiny difference is more than made up for by how much easier the st 5 first midboss is (the normal version of that midboss is seriously nasty).

[SuperSoaker360]

DTP I missed you

[Lilium]

Yeah no, you're not serious. 15 hours of practice and not figuring out how to do that just doesn't compute. If you legit played 15 hours of it and still have barely any hope of getting into the Ura route then its because you're not doing it right. Instead of more carefully referring to replays and the written guides on how to access the ura route, you spam attempts at doing something you're obviously not doing properly and then you come to complain about a game that it seems you haven't even paid for and is running through terrible emulation?

Why don't you start with getting an Xbox 360 if you don't have one to begin with and then getting the port so you're at least playing a proper version and then you try again with the aid of some replays. Its extremely simple to do, not some ridiculous score trick.

actually, is it even possible to chain out of the normal stage 2, 3, and 4 midbosses?).

I hear that its actually easier to full chain stage 4 on the normal route. Of course, unlocking the Ura route is simpler than bridging between any midboss and the next part of their given stages. If you can't do this much, I say good luck with the chaining.