Battlantis [Arcade]

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Perikles
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Battlantis [Arcade]

Post by Perikles »

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I am fallen prey
There was a time
When fangs sank deep
My body dragged
And flesh howled
Fear's face was cold
With instinct's need

[...]


Konami's unorthodox business venture with the avowed goal to eat quarters and turn childs as well as adults to weeping husks. Feel free to give it a shot if you dare. I nearly destroyed my controller a few times, you sure won't forget the experience!

Since the Konami oversea releases usually were different from the originals I'd kindly ask you to specify the version you were playing. Thus the format:

Name - Score - Stage - Version

Code: Select all

   Name                 Score     Stage   Version    
1. Perikles           1,745,640    ALL     Japan      
2. Shepardus            308,140    17      Japan
3.
Last edited by Perikles on Wed Aug 08, 2018 9:47 am, edited 12 times in total.
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Perikles
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Re: Battlantis [Arcade]

Post by Perikles »

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Perikles - 341,180 - 18/2-2 - Japan

Video


Only three deaths in the first loop, all of them in stupid manners - this couldn't have been much better. One of my best performances so far - the game is insanely unfair, but the satisfaction is tremendous.
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Mero
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Re: Battlantis [Arcade]

Post by Mero »

Congrats, will definitely watch that vid.
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Kollision
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Re: Battlantis [Arcade]

Post by Kollision »

Perikles wrote:the game is insanely unfair, but the satisfaction is tremendous.
oh my, if only heathens knew the real truth about shumpz!
:wink:
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Perikles
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Re: Battlantis [Arcade]

Post by Perikles »

Soon, ladies and gentlemen, we will have another episode of

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I want the 2-ALL and the game made me sufficiently angry with its various antics. Thus, I sat down, drew myself little maps of every stage in the second loop and even recorded a stage-by-stage loop 2 series without any deaths. Provided you play absolutely perfectly and get lucky with some power-ups, you can beat every stage in loop 2 without dying, although it's almost impossible against the final boss, you're realistically going to lose a few lives in order to lower the rank. I got several pixel-perfect manoeuvres and also the double K.O. which - in an act of uncharacteristical mercy - will instantly revive you in this game. In case you're interested to watch the above playlist, here are a few particular nuggets within this asylum:

- My price for the most outrageous total package goes to stage 29. Some other stages are as bad and so are some of the bosses, the combination of both is unmatched in this level, however. You're constantly a few frames away from getting killed by several barbarians while you have to weaken the correct shield wielders at the right time so that you can barely win this battle. The boss fight is by far the most infuriating one in the game: you have to kill two teleporting ghosts whilst avoiding to hit the two insectoid men in the back lest they shift positions and come to close. More often than not, the ghosts spawn/move in/to an unfortunate spot, or are covered by million projectiles, or you're screwed anyway. It's like having a staged boxing match against a member of the mob: you just want to lash out, but you have to restrain yourself for the consequences of fighting back are much worse.

- I had to suffer for a long time before I finally stumbled upon the pseudo safespot in stage 31 against the barbarians. It only works against the first two bosses and they have to behave in just the right way, yet if you can get this to work you're pretty much done with this fight. Fighting the lower barbarian in any other way is madness, he's way too close for his potentially aimed boomerangs, this battle can easily kill a credit.

- If you get the wrong power-up in stage 30 then lawls you're gonna die. Simple as that.

- Stage 24 is probably the strictest one in terms of precision, you even have to walk through enemy fire at the right moments.

- Stage 22 is equally tense, at least all the power-ups in this stage are useful.


Will have to practice some more and also go through the first loop again to perfect my performance there, everything has to work without frictions. It might take me some days or weeks, but I'm going to slaughter this bastard. Image
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Perikles
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Re: Battlantis [Arcade]

Post by Perikles »

And a better score for now:

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Perikles - 504,940 - 24/2-8 - Japan


Ye gods, the frustration. I can honestly say that every death was either due to some laughable design decision or by virtue of unavoidable patterns (lost two lives on the three insect men in stage 23). Since the first loop is already so hard, you're never going to reach a point where it becomes trivial to enter the second loop with a bunch of resources. That'd be commendable in a perfect world (having an exciting first loop even after a lot of experience is a great thing, after all), not with this game, though. Oftentimes it feels like you're playing chess against a master who willingly sacrifices all his expendable materiel in order to achieve the checkmate, just with the added bonus that Battlantis also is blatantly unfair. I'll continue to post better scores until I get the 2-ALL, let's see how long it'll take. At least the game's short...
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Perikles
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Re: Battlantis [Arcade]

Post by Perikles »

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Perikles - 642,300 - 30/2-14 - Japan


Could've been the 2-ALL if not for an excessive amount of ridiculous deaths - I played like a goddamn expert during all the absurdly difficult parts, got constantly shafted in various other situations (explosions lingered around, walking enemies point-blanked me, my shots went right through certain foes)... Image
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Perikles
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Re: Battlantis [Arcade]

Post by Perikles »

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Perikles - 715,460 - 32/2-16 - Japan


Abysmal first loop, amazing second loop, got to the final boss with two lives, lost both, o' course. Had a run where I entered the second loop with five lives, all for naught. It's just a game of chance at this point, I have certain probabilities to beat any given stage without dying (depending on random elements/insulting debility you cannot possibly avoid; also a few really hard/precise stages/bosses), it just needs to come together. Hopefully in the next few days.
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Perikles
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Re: Battlantis [Arcade]

Post by Perikles »

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Perikles - 1,745,640 - ALL - Japan

Video

At last! By far the hardest clear I've gotten so far, even Tatsujin Ou or the Xexex 2-ALL were fairly mild compared to this. Even when I wanted some other clears, I've not played too much at any given day since I find that concentration and motivation starts to deteriorate if you force things too much - I culpably neglected this tenet here, I've spent the last afternoons with several attempts beating this hellspawn. Had a few runs where I managed to beat the entire first loop without dying, or where the first stretch of the second loop went really well, but I always fell apart somewhere. I thought I lost it with this run when I got murdered three times on the bosses in stage 29, yet somehow survived the next two stages without dying, allowing me to start the final boss fight with four lives total which is realistically the bare minimum to beat it (you need to die three times for a "manageable" rank; manageable in quotation marks, just look at the last pattern I've had to dodge!).

It's safe to say that I know no other shmup as well as I do Battlantis, as shameful as it is. The amount of time I've had to invest even for the smallest things is laughable, I could probably create an instructive ST had I the nerve to put in the time and effort. And while this run was barely victorious, this is probably as close as I ever got (get?) to a great clear. Due to how the game works, you just have to play extraordinarily well to stand a chance, the extends will only get you so far. I was actually thinking about how you could tweak several parameters to make the game so much more enjoyable:

- Allow more than two shots on-screen at a time. This restriction is particularly bad at the final boss in loop 2 since it's almost impossible to destroy the hatches while fending off their scions at high rank. You have to wait for too long before your shots hit the former, leaving you adrift against the swarms of enemies. And there are dozens of other instances where at least one more shot would be such a mercy, I really don't see a necessity to have such a constraint.

- Let those shots cover more than what feels like a millimeter. You have to do so many things simultaneously and with only two shots at your disposal, don't implement such a harsh penalty for missing by one or two pixels as well.

- Don't make power-ups random. For Christ's sake, what a dumb idea. Some stages have fixed drops (e.g. stage 6), most don't, however. There is quite a difference between getting a speed-up and complete invincibility, though, and it shouldn't come down to luck in such a precise game.

- Don't permit enemies to point-blank you. It's disgusting.

- In a similar manner: don't allow enemies to cut off your path to a climbing barbarian. This oftentimes happens when some rock detonates on the battlement, meaning that the hit is still active for a second or so before you can move past it. You're just standing there with no hopes of survival.

- There is a glitch at certain frames of the climbing animation of enemies where you shoot right through them. Fix that.

- Speaking of shooting right through stuff, the directly aimed boomerangs from the bosses in stages 10 and 21 are capable of sailing right through the crenels, as are some other boss projectiles. It depends on the angle and was obviously not intentional, someone just didn't notice or cared enough to amend that.

- It should be self-explanatory, but don't have unavoidable patterns in the game. The six ghosts in stage 19 do that from time to time, as does the final boss in loop 2, or the barbarian bosses in stage 31. You could always argue that you made some mistake several seconds ago where you should've dodged to the one side instead of the other, yet the fact of the matter is that you cannot know that beforehand since the patterns are random. It's insanely unfair.

- Also, some bosses are just way too close for comfort, especially the aforementioned boomerang guys. You sometimes have to guess where the boomerangs will fly to in advance because you cannot dodge on reaction. Since most of the attacks are just heading somewhere, you may well run right into something in the process. Just position the guys a tad bit further back.

- Some bosses have way too much resilience.

- If you don't want to address any of the above things, you could at least make the protagonist a bit faster as a redress. Or change the hit detection a little.


It's a miracle this game works at all. I don't have an inkling how long this game was in development, it feels like a bunch of people were crafting it for an considerable period of time to make absolutely sure that several sections may work out at all, but just barely.

Anyway, while I never want to touch this ever again, I'm immensely glad to have it in the bag. I'm usually not one to even mull about it, I nonetheless am quite sure that this is the first 2-ALL of this bastard in a long time, I doubt anyone outside of Japan bothered to even go this far (for good reasons).

To sum things up, a couple of my doodles and a spoof picture:
Spoiler
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Shepardus
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Re: Battlantis [Arcade]

Post by Shepardus »

Look at this madman :o

Well done! :shock:
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Imhotep
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Re: Battlantis [Arcade]

Post by Imhotep »

I have a hard time imagining that the devs made such a huge effort to balance it to that precise level of intensity, instead of fixing some of the more obvious issues. Congrats on this insane clear.

You are excellent.
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Shepardus
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Re: Battlantis [Arcade]

Post by Shepardus »

Woohoo second place!

Shepardus - 50,840 - 3 - Japan, program code E
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BIL
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Re: Battlantis [Arcade]

Post by BIL »

Fucking intense reading. Grudge matches rule. :cool:
Perikles wrote:It's safe to say that I know no other shmup as well as I do Battlantis, as shameful as it is. The amount of time I've had to invest even for the smallest things is laughable, I could probably create an instructive ST had I the nerve to put in the time and effort.
As per your usual instructive standards, your notes here are a pretty good stride towards a fully-fledged ST if you go that route. :smile:
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Perikles
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Re: Battlantis [Arcade]

Post by Perikles »

Thanks a lot, guys, I really appreciate it! :) Also good job on your score, Shepardus, stage 2 was the first time where I seriously started to doubt the game when I played it the first time. :lol:
BIL wrote:As per your usual instructive standards, your notes here are a pretty good stride towards a fully-fledged ST if you go that route. :smile:
There are certain rules you can follow which are related to the enemy columns*, but in order to get anywhere, you'd really have to make a stage-by-stage guide, with explanations for different strategies depending on which power-up you get and some of the RNG patterns of the bosses. With most games - even harder ones -, a general idea suffices, I find, but not so with Battlantis. And I know who's not going to write all that text. :mrgreen:


*You usually want to take out either the left-most or right-most column first so that the rest of the enemies has to walk the entire width of the screen; just killing the front enemies in every column makes them move faster and faster, and since all the columns are intact they will start to climb the battlement from all places at once, killing you invariably in the process; the worst thing that can happen is if you have one enemy on the far left and the far right and lose a life, both of them will be absurdly fast the next time, climbing the battlement from the extreme ends and killing you one more time unless you get lucky and manage to kill one. This only gets exacerbated by the storming barbarians that also demand your attention, of course.
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Shepardus
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Re: Battlantis [Arcade]

Post by Shepardus »

Two more credits was enough to make me regret trying this again. At least I got a PB in the meantime.

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Shepardus - 51,660 - 4 - Japan
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Shepardus
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Re: Battlantis [Arcade]

Post by Shepardus »

what am i doing with my life

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Shepardus - 146,080 - 9 - Japan
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Perikles
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Re: Battlantis [Arcade]

Post by Perikles »

Impressive work, getting to stage 9 is not for the faint of heart! I'd hazard the guess that this game incites a sort of vindictive Stockholm syndrome in its victims - one simply won't accept getting treated like that and vows to retaliate, alas, only to get ensnared in a vicious net.

It's such a goddamn shame. As I've stated earlier, what makes this game so insufferable really is the combination of everything combined. Were you faster or allowed to have three projectiles on screen at once or had you a smaller hitbox, that would be a grand mercy already. Or less ridiculous RNG with some of the boss enemies or the power-ups. Or a more lenient enemy behaviour if you accidentally kill the wrong one in a formation, often resulting in a couple of deaths due to their absurd movement speed once they get down to a small handful. But nooooooo, Konami had to implement all of that, of course. :roll:
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Shepardus
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Re: Battlantis [Arcade]

Post by Shepardus »

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Shepardus - 192,200 - 11 - Japan

The majority of my runs end in stage 2.
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Shepardus
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Re: Battlantis [Arcade]

Post by Shepardus »

Shepardus - 296,560 - 17 - Japan

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Video

1-ALL \o/

Copy-pasting my video description here since I spent way too long writing it for it to go unnoticed there, and I thought it'd be a good addition to the other posts in this thread:
Battlantis is a game that is simultaneously refreshing and maddening in its simplicity and efficiency.

Hearkening back to the game that jump-started its genre, it features grids of enemies that shift back and forth across the screen à la Space Invaders. Also like Space Invaders, any of the enemies reaching the bottom of the screen and ascending the wall of your fortress dooms you to an untimely demise. To this formula Konami added a wide variety of stage designs that tests the player in all sorts of ways.

This stage design is both the highlight of the game and the bane of prospective winners. It often pushes the player character to the brink of his (admittedly very limited) capabilities, demanding a total comprehension of the stages and enemy behaviors to claw through, but the ways it does so are often clever, and every stage feels unique (even the second "loop" isn't so much a loop as it is a second half, since everything except the main bosses are new). Since failing to kill any of the enemies leads to your death, there is no shrinking away from the challenge, no hiding in the corner waiting for dangerous enemies to conveniently leave the arena.

I found this strictness off-putting at first, but grew to enjoy its starkness. Battlantis does not distract you from the heart of its gameplay with complicated systems or flashy superfluity. It knows what it wants from you and makes that clear from the get-go. It's just you, the enemies, and maybe a handful of projectiles. And the fortress walls that seem to exist more to protect the enemies from you than vice versa. Rather than overload the screen with chaos to create challenge, the game shows a strong restraint in efficiently exploiting your limited capabilities, placing enemies and attacks such that even a single projectile, or none at all, can strike fear in one's heart. Those limitations (slow movement speed, shot limit, etc.) paired with the enemy behaviors (and the RNG in some places) can feel like total BS as early as stage 2, but I also found that throughout playing this game I never questioned my ability to conquer the challenges. Even as I died over and over again, I felt like I could really pull through given another chance, so despite all the questionable aspects to this game I cannot bring myself to call it "unfair." And that's what kept me drawn to this game. Of course, however, that opinion doesn't take into account the second loop, which turns everything up to eleven and which I haven't even begun to think about clearing.

A side note: Despite how unforgiving the game is in many ways, recovering from a death is actually quite forgiving, since you don't lose any real power and enemies in the grid that you have already eliminated do not respawn. Timed enemy spawns and bosses, however, do reset. It's an interesting mix of both checkpointed and non-checkpointed gameplay. Also, if you double-KO, dying at the same time as a boss (or even before, if one of your remaining shots finishes off the boss), the game counts it in your favor, moving you on to the next stage without even subtracting a life.
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Shepardus
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Re: Battlantis [Arcade]

Post by Shepardus »

Shepardus - 308,140 - 17 - Japan

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