Indeed, those are superb achievements, Harpuia & descriptive! Great to see so much enthusiasm for certain games.

Also congratulations to you, Shepardus, you didn't state it in this thread, but I saw you cleared Dragon Blaze with all four characters! Are you going to strive for a 2-ALL and if so, which character will you use?
Stevens wrote:
Perikles gets clears like I change socks.
Almost daily:D
Let's up the ante a bit - yesterday I cleared two more arcade shooters (those were pretty easy, though).

But first things first: I got the
V-V 2-ALL up. I already put various notes in the video description, so I want to use this opportunity to explicitly point out that this game
needs more love. I can't think of too many vertical shooters that are as creative and fine-tuned as V-V. So many unique enemies (like the critters that disgorge bubbles, the demonic face that sucks in all projectiles including his own, the huge tank that reacts to every of the player's move while his orbiting cohorts react rather angry when getting shot, the hunter mechanoids that seem to calculate your position on the screen for a while before mercilessly chasing you down, the ghastly final boss itself and several more), such a great presentation (I love the boss music - the "chorus" kinda reminds me of Final Fantasy VI's opera scene

), such a lovely gameplay. While it has the classic Gradius power-up system (supremely designed options with deathly missiles included!) it's also lenient upon recovery as you can see in the video where I die at the end of the second loop and still get on my feet. Simple, yet effective scoring system that allows for conservative or risky play, 2-ALL is quite a challenge regardless (although I'll admit that I suck at this type of game, proto-danmaku or not) considering the fountains of suicide bullets you'll normally get to see at a really high loop of a Gradius game. There's not a single reason to not play it, almost everyone should get a kick out of it, fans of more traditional and modern styles alike.
And speaking of underappreciated little gems: I can't believe no one here posted an arcade
BlaZeon score yet. This is one of the most accessible memorizers out there, with gorgeous graphics and a stellar soundtrack (if you don't like
Alpha you're a monster). I died one remarkably silly death there since I didn't realize that it would be detrimental to have a fully operational mechanoid at the beginning of the final stage instead of a damaged one for better autofire against the barriers, but as you can clearly see the execution barrier in this game is basically non-existent. You can (should! will!) enjoy the outstanding music without getting abysmally bored like in the SFC port while fighting some cool iremesque bosses along the way. Like their recently re-discovered Wing Force BlaZeon also has a neat boss counter scoring system, excess lives get turned into points by the end, as well. If you'd like to play a memorizer, but R-Type and its ilk are too hard for you, then I urge you to check it out. It's not perfect for some of the stages are admittedly a bit bland, but I think it's very enjoyable unlike the botched port which is moreso a guilty pleasure than anything else. You get to control awesome vehicles and can unleash Sonic Booms against the final boss, how could anyone dislike that?
But worry not, if BlaZeon is still too hard for you then there's
Strike Gunner S.T.G! It took me about an hour to trash this one, it's sad. Japanese wiki lists this as a 22 without autofire which is about 17 points too high. I suppose you have to figure out which weapons to use and which power-ups to collect, but other than that and a slightly tricky fourth boss (he's not as easy as he looks, he sometimes shoots at you from an awkward angle from close distance, killing you almost instantly) this game is a joke. Granted, if you die it's one finished credit, the default pea shooter is simply unable to kill anything, autofire or not. I'll open a scoreboard for this one in a moment, I expect a ton of clears from everyone soon!

But I wouldn't really recommend it, honestly, it's as average as they get, still better than the insanely boring SFC port, but that's not saying much.
One other thing I wanted to mention/ask: someone gave me the advice to force 60 fps when using Handbrake for editing the videos in order to eliminate those tiny jerky movements of the screen. While it does seem to work fine I also noticed that in conjunction with the Flash Video Player for Firefox (which sometimes allows for a higher resolution on videos, 480p on V-V for example instead of 360p when using the HTML5 Player) the videos seem to be sped up, ending a few minutes earlier than they should be, even though I don't get the feeling they're running much faster when actually watching the video itself. Can someone shed light on me what's that supposed to mean? I saw this on a few other videos, too, so I know I'm not alone out there. I also have practically no idea of video editing and things of that nature.
In any case, go play V-V and BlaZeon! And get a quick Strike Gunner clear during your break at work.
