STG wrote:Yeah, capture technology today is just so much easier and more widely available than what it was back then. Being able to watch myself play certainly helped in learning the game, especially since like you I'm only playing on PCB.
I agree about capture technology being easier and more accessible than it was 7-10 years ago. I recall one guy (somewhere in this thread) from here accusing me of cheating for not wanting to switch back to playing MAME emulator and making an .inp replay because I had no other other way to show off the gameplay. It was disheartening being accused of that, but then I remembered that I didn't pick up & play the game just to appease everyone, because I picked up the game to challenge myself.
Way back in 2004, when I started playing Progear, I pretty much played it exclusively in MAME with a shitty PS2 controller (don't ask me why), I didn't know too much about input lag and replay recording function (I don't think the regular MAME had this option) so I played it for fun and really liked the art style / design a lot. When I saw the Futobishi video, something inside me just pretty much went "I can play better than how I play the game!" and I went off into the deep end of the pool with the game. A guy I knew (who would later become one of my good friends) noticed that I was pretty into arcade games, and told me about his small & growing collection and that he had a JP Progear board. So of course I took the chance in asking him to borrow the supergun, his monitor, and the board so I could play it for hours. The lack of input lag made playing the game so much better.
I had a difficult time switching from the PS2 controller to a joystick, and it took me a really long time to get accustomed to it. I nearly gave up trying to use the joystick or quit the game altogether because I kept crashing into stuff and thinking I'd never get good at it, lol. It was infuriating. I also had to rely a lot on memorization and credit feeding doing full runs rather than doing savestate practices (it kept messing up my memorization for other stages because I would repeat one stage for hours), but could never put together a solid run until I decided to break the bad habits and switched over to PCB. Then several years later, 221m happened.
I kind of figured Futobishi's run is the one you most likely studied, as I didn't see Clover-TAC's replay online until semi-recently. Still, you had to adapt your play style using Chain which is impressive, along with a NMNB that far into the game. You definitely had to finish the first loop with a higher score than me, for example I usually finish the first loop with about 230,000 rings, Futobishi in his run has about 50,000 more than me. My guess is you were probably a bit closer to his totals than mine.
It's hard to say how close Futobishi's and my score were, but like I said, I dropped some chains that cost me a lot of points from what I can kind of remember. Futobishi's run was the only video that had higher score that I studied extensively compared to the other video (160m run) by an unknown player that was floating around on the Hameko site before it went under. (Hameko was an old video / download site that featured a lot of hard to find superplays and stuff like that, before NicoNico showed up a few years later.)
I'm not even sure why I picked Chain, to be honest. I guess I got comfortable using Chain over Nail, and was able to compensate for Chain's slow speed. I wish I could remember why I stuck with Chain, haha.
Glad to hear you got through that rough period of your life AB, cause yeah that sucks. And you never know if you ever get that itch to play again, hell I stopped playing games completely at one point myself and just explored other hobbies/interests for a number of years. Between all that and especially work (which I truly enjoy), sometimes I wish I simply had more time!
Thanks! Yeah, I wish I had more time to do more things, too. Lol