TRP-STGT 2017 Conversation Week 4: Gekirindan

[EmperorIng]

I haven't seen anything special in the replays I've seen (other than milking the missiles for a pittance), but I typically enter the battle with around 90k and end it with 120k. The boss itself is worth 30k, so I would say you're just timing it out sometimes, but it takes a very long time to time out...

Ha ha, how embarrassing. I guess I was just mucking around. Oh well, I guess I don't need to take the extra "risk" (I got punched out of space a few times when I wasn't paying attention).

EDIT: As an interesting bit of trivia, IIRC I read somewhere that this was the last shooter Taito developed for their legendary F3 board (which saw other shooters like Darius Gaiden and RayForce, along with great games like Elevator Action Returns and Bubble Symphony). I almost look at the game as a "greatest hits" of graphical tricks that the F3 can pull off: the ever famous Taito spinning cylinder, the title screen flashing in a la the materialization of RayForce's st2 boss, the pseudo-3D parallax of stage 4 (much like Grid Seeker's st2 canyon boss fight). It is a very pleasant-looking game, which helps alleviate some of the complaints that it isn't very innovative or daring in concept.

I also was thinking about how since this is sort of a Toaplan-inspired game it is kinda funny that it also does the early-/mid-Toaplan thing of not having boss themes. Rushed development, or purposeful homage?

[Despatche]

Still not sure if Type-A and Type-B are actually different between sides. Type-C is clearly very different, though. I have no idea who at Taito thought it'd be funny to have not just Type-C but also Type-C 2P.

Guess I'll be studying the Saturn port, finally, after so many years.

[EmperorIng]

A and B don't feel any stronger or weaker between the sides (could be wrong but i don't think so). It really makes me wonder if Taito wanted an "easy mode" pilot with Type-C 2, with a readily available joke answer ("two pilots for TWICE the fire-power!!").

I wish the Saturn port didn't have those graphical issues (who knows about score changes).

[maximo310]

How much milking must one do to get WR (2.4 million)?

[EmperorIng]

There must be some other secrets that we are unaware of? Is there a superplay that reaches that height?

I think it's neat that you can trigger that special BONUS carrier (with the same sprite as the 1UP in 5) if you are aggressive and point-blank the center of HUGE BOSS at the start of the game. It's something that definitely only Type-2C can do - unless the other players use a bomb (and forfeit an extra 8,000 points per round per a no-bomb bonus).

Also: I cannot effectively dodge that st2 boss's spread for the life of me. It is really pissing me off since it's such a simple-looking pattern.

[Square_Air]

Also: I cannot effectively dodge that st2 boss's spread for the life of me. It is really pissing me off since it's such a simple-looking pattern.

The stage 2 an 4 bosses both have a spread move that seems simple, but the bullets criss cross in a way that can take you off guard. With the second boss, if you stay at the bottom of the screen and tap away from the center line of the boss by something like ~1 ship width you can avoid it all.

[copy-paster]

The hardest part to me was st3 first half. I can't count how many times I died here.

[Shepardus]

Judging by the scores some of you are posting, you guys are enjoying the milking far too much for your own good, and it scares me.

The hardest part to me was st3 first half. I can't count how many times I died here.

You mean the part where hardly anything shoots at you other than some aimed turrets and you just move left and right to avoid those when they fire? (Sorry if this is a joke, I honestly can't tell)

[copy-paster]

What milking? last boss small drones?

You mean the part where hardly anything shoots at you other than some aimed turrets and you just move left and right to avoid those when they fire? (Sorry if this is a joke, I honestly can't tell)

Turrets don't bother me much, but one of those jets still fire and hit at you even they are burned.

[Square_Air]

The hardest part to me was st3 first half. I can't count how many times I died here.

You mean the part where hardly anything shoots at you other than some aimed turrets and you just move left and right to avoid those when they fire? (Sorry if this is a joke, I honestly can't tell)

To be fair, even though i find this game to be kind of a snooze fest (albeit decent), the jets on stage 3 screw me up every now and then since they love to semi home in right underneath you when you're not paying attention. I've backed up into them a few times.

What milking? last boss small drones?

That and more. There's also quite a few small milking opportunities that can add up.

you guys are enjoying the milking far too much for your own good, and it scares me.

NO REFUGE

[EmperorIng]

IMO the spinning turrets on stage 4 also do that "deceptively deadly" firing pattern that is prevalent throughout the game. Simple, but when the stage places three or more of them together the speed and visual information can make you panic and mess up. A lot of bullets fired in the game are faster than they look, including the turrets on the battleship - though the biggest threat is dodging that lousy C power-up when the other turrets are firing. Luckily that doesn't last too long.

I also will quibble slightly that the background of stage 4 can make it a little harder to see threats.

Also: I cannot effectively dodge that st2 boss's spread for the life of me. It is really pissing me off since it's such a simple-looking pattern.

The stage 2 an 4 bosses both have a spread move that seems simple, but the bullets criss cross in a way that can take you off guard. With the second boss, if you stay at the bottom of the screen and tap away from the center line of the boss by something like ~1 ship width you can avoid it all.

This was a great tip!! Thank you!

And of course I would have a no-miss no-bomb up until the st4 midboss and fuck it all up by accidentally having my fingers slip in a panic and hit the credit and P1 Start buttons on my fucking controller. God damn it. I swear I'm going to clear this game tonight.

[Perikles]

There's quite a few small milking opportunities that all add up.

You call a potential of ~300,000 points out of the third boss (without the 80,000 points from the boss itself, of course) a small milking opportunity? Golly, that's quite the understatement.

[Shepardus]

For stage 3, I just sit at the bottom of the screen and the planes never crash into me. They occasionally shoot a bullet so keep an eye out for that, though if you keep moving around they shouldn't be a problem either.

IMO the spinning turrets on stage 4 also do that "deceptively deadly" firing pattern that is prevalent throughout the game. Simple, but when the stage places three or more of them together the speed and visual information can make you panic and mess up. A lot of bullets fired in the game are faster than they look, including the turrets on the battleship - though the biggest threat is dodging that lousy C power-up when the other turrets are firing. Luckily that doesn't last too long.

The spinning turrets in stage 4 are one of the scariest parts of the game to me. I don't think I've actually died there but I tense up every time I'm at that part. It doesn't help that it comes as late in the game as it does. I find it effective to just sit at the bottom of the screen and move left and right, letting your spread take care of the turrets while napalm takes care of the other enemies.

C powerup is arguably the biggest threat in the game when playing as 2P Type-C.

And of course I would have a no-miss no-bomb up until the st4 midboss and fuck it all up by accidentally having my fingers slip in a panic and hit the credit and P1 Start buttons on my fucking controller. God damn it. I swear I'm going to clear this game tonight.

While going for a no-miss no-bomb I actually unbound the bomb button in MAME to make absolutely certain that I wouldn't hit it by accident.

There's quite a few small milking opportunities that all add up.

You call a potential of ~300,000 points out of the third boss (without the 80,000 points from the boss itself, of course) a small milking opportunity? Golly, that's quite the understatement.

At least the other milks aren't nearly as lucrative. Though that still leaves the question of where the world record scores come from...

[Square_Air]

This was a great tip!! Thank you!

No problem . Psikyo loves throwing patterns similar to that at you that at first seem unreadable, so now I just apply it to any boss I face just to see how it works out.

There's quite a few small milking opportunities that all add up.

You call a potential of ~300,000 points out of the third boss (without the 80,000 points from the boss itself, of course) a small milking opportunity? Golly, that's quite the understatement.

It seems we have a misunderstanding. I was trying to communicate that there were other much smaller milking opportunities on top of the obvious boss milking such as the destructible missiles on stages 3 and 5 from the ship turrets and the 3 flying enemies at the lasers respectively. These are not very lucrative, but are pretty risk free for a few extra points which could be significant for players that are only a few thousand points apart. I'll slightly change the language of my original post to better reflect this.

[EmperorIng]

I am so fucking beat. I have been playing this game all night and have kept on fucking up over and over again. Stray death on the ship section of st3, reset. Don't trigger the bonus on the st1 intro, reset. Die to the turrets/flyer combo on st4, reset. Grab a C, reset. It is so stressful.

At least this tournament netted me my first 1CC of the new year, a no-miss no less (hurray!)... Do I even want to play Gekirindan any more??? Why are there so many stretches of stage where nothing happens????? Thank God for the speed-up button on mame. I think I'd die if I had to wait the 60 seconds (!!!!!) between the st1 boss disassembling itself and the start of stage 2 for all these runs.

[Square_Air]

Thank God for the speed-up button on mame. I think I'd die if I had to wait the 60 seconds (!!!!!) between the st1 boss disassembling itself and the start of stage 2 for all these runs.

Amen. That section in particular and the space transition in Mad Shark have made the throttle button my best friend. I slap that shit whenever there's dead air. I almost rammed straight into the final boss while I had it pressed once. If this game went on for more than a week I would have definitely tried to learn how to do more sections of this game while throttled.

[Vanguard]

Congrats on the no-miss, Ing!

If you play any more, I recommend against resetting over the stage 1 bonus. It's not worth much.

Thank God for the speed-up button on mame. I think I'd die if I had to wait the 60 seconds (!!!!!) between the st1 boss disassembling itself and the start of stage 2 for all these runs.

Amen. That section in particular and the space transition in Mad Shark have made the throttle button my best friend. I slap that shit whenever there's dead air. I almost rammed straight into the final boss while I had it pressed once. If this game went on for more than a week I would have definitely tried to learn how to do more sections of this game while throttled.

That's the big downside of recording my runs. I gotta sit through that every time. I think this game is pretty good from stage 3 on, but the huge periods of nothing on the first two stages are brutal.

[Perikles]

It seems we have a misunderstanding.

Didn't want to sound snarky, either - it just seemed like an odd thing to say regarding the general context of milking possibilities in the game. I, for one, never want to circle around the third boss in this game again, barely avoiding various bullets whilst taking out turrets that are worth way too many points.

Thank God for the speed-up button on mame. I think I'd die if I had to wait the 60 seconds (!!!!!) between the st1 boss disassembling itself and the start of stage 2 for all these runs.

Amen. That section in particular and the space transition in Mad Shark have made the throttle button my best friend. I slap that shit whenever there's dead air. I almost rammed straight into the final boss while I had it pressed once. If this game went on for more than a week I would have definitely tried to learn how to do more sections of this game while throttled.

I would've done that with gusto if not for the fact I recorded the whole thing. Waiting for the second boss to finally arrive is likewise maddening if you're on your third or fourth attempt to best your score, let me tell you that.

[Square_Air]

That's the big downside of recording my runs. I gotta sit through that every time. I think this game is pretty good from stage 3 on, but the huge periods of nothing on the first two stages are brutal.

I would've done that with gusto if not for the fact I recorded the whole thing. Waiting for the second boss to finally arrive is likewise maddening if you're on your third or fourth attempt to best your score, let me tell you that.

I can't speak for the other versions of MAME, but in ShmupMAME 4.2 if you throttle during a run when you're recording an INP it will play at normal speed during playback the entire time. I always thought it would throttle during the INP playback before this tournament, but my Mad Shark & Gekirindan INPs that I definitely throttled in play as if I never did. Of course this won't change anything if you're recording live runs (I can't do this, I always drop frames on my PC), but throttling seems to have no noticeable effect on recording or playing back input files.

[Dumple]

I cleared this back in April 2016, so it was fun to circle back to it for a victory lap. I had to de-rust a bit but the no-miss came pretty easily. Especially since I used 2P type-C == EASY MODE. This game is a blast.

Hats off to everyone getting really high scores through the power of MEGA MILK.

[EmperorIng]

Wow, props to Kyper for breaking 2.1 million! You still have a whole day to figure out how to get the World Record!

Congrats on the no-miss, Ing!

If you play any more, I recommend against resetting over the stage 1 bonus. It's not worth much.

Thanks; I was pretty proud of myself even if I feel like a tired sack of crap today. Looking over my 1CC list, it looks as if Gekirindan is my 20th arcade shmup 1CC (out of ~40 total), so milestone reached!

I agree mostly with your second point; except that if I ever record myself doing a 1CC of Gekirindan, it's gotta have that in there for style points. I can get the bonus about half the time - the trick is to point-blank the boss just a few pixels off-center so that all four shots are hitting, move back a few ship lengths to let the lasers track you, and point blank for the kill.

I still wonder if there are other esoteric scoring bonuses in the game... In a game with secrets inevitably you'll start thinking about weird stuff, like,

What if I destroy all the small turrets of the battleship before destroying the big ones and their corresponding sections?
What if I leave the battleship's big turrets alive?
What if I let those two huge do-nothing guard robots on the final stage live and let them walk back? Will that do something?

If I had more time and willingess to fuck around (or if I could figure a way to cheat invincibility) I'd love to see if there are other scoring tricks like this. I can't imagine the whole WR score being merely milking Stage 3, 4, and 5 bosses. But maybe I'm wrong.

Since the score table was bumped, it was nostalgic to see one of my earliest posts around here, a few months after joining, trying to get the 1CC with Type-1B. I'd like to try that again one of these days. I'd imagine it a lot more frantic since you wouldn't be able to skip all of those awful attacks these bosses have planned for you (like the first phase of the final boss... that three-way spread, yikes!).

[Shepardus]

Since the score table was bumped, it was nostalgic to see one of my earliest posts around here, a few months after joining, trying to get the 1CC with Type-1B. I'd like to try that again one of these days. I'd imagine it a lot more frantic since you wouldn't be able to skip all of those awful attacks these bosses have planned for you (like the first phase of the final boss... that three-way spread, yikes!).

I don't want to bother checking now, but I think the rank might also be more intense on the 1P side. The napalm subweapon is still effective enough to get quick kills in some sections but the game's certainly more intense on the 1P side. Still doesn't do anything about those extended stretches of nothingness, though.

[EmperorIng]

If you play any more, I recommend against resetting over the stage 1 bonus. It's not worth much.

I agree mostly with your second point; except that if I ever record myself doing a 1CC of Gekirindan, it's gotta have that in there for style points.

Case in point! My video recording of me flailing like a madman, besting my no-miss score despite dying to the final boss twice like a chump, AND getting the stage 1 secret bonus! I still don't know the optimal way to get the raw AVIwrite from MAME to show up as a pixel-perfect resolution scaled to youtube, but it looks good enough.

I don't want to bother checking now, but I think the rank might also be more intense on the 1P side. The napalm subweapon is still effective enough to get quick kills in some sections but the game's certainly more intense on the 1P side. Still doesn't do anything about those extended stretches of nothingness, though.

I just 1CC'd the game with 1P Type-B for giggles (and got a decent score for messing around!), and I didn't notice anything too different with rank. I think my suspicions were correct though: I had a much trickier time with some sections because I lacked the fire-power to kill everything quickly. For example: Type-2C's spread means you can safely stay in the middle of the st2 boss's spread pattern and kill both sides of the blimp. Type-1B simply cannot, meaning you need a different position and increase the risk of you getting hit. Though with Napalm a lot of enemies still go down quick, including the final boss's first phase!

[Blinge]

how 1up item triggering?
=o

[Square_Air]

how 1up item triggering?
=o

By destroying the stage 5 midboss before it flies away. You can manipulate the fireballs to give yourself ample time to do it pretty consistently.

[Blinge]

Me playing shmups:

Oh i didn't damage that sub enough, now it's gonna fire an aimed shot, better watch ou-
*changes course to fly directly into bullet*

Oh that building drops a charge powerup don't wanna pick that up again cause it fucked me up last ti-
*immediately sits on building and picks charge up*

the fuck is wrong with me.

[copy-paster]

Just watch Kyper's st3 boss milking strategy, I assume the boss has no timeout (he ended milking and start killing him) so the WR maybe was achieved by killing turrets as much as possible.

[Vanguard]

Just watch Kyper's st3 boss milking strategy, I assume the boss has no timeout (he ended milking and start killing him) so the WR maybe was achieved by killing turrets as much as possible.

He can time out and you don't get the 80,000 points for killing him if he does. Kyper's video earns about what my testing suggests is the maximum possible amount that can be milked off of him.

[TransatlanticFoe]

I wish the Saturn port didn't have those graphical issues (who knows about score changes).

Starting close to xmas, couldn't commit enough time to register for this but bloody love me some Gekirindan so threw a few credits into the Saturn port today. Never got the score boost on stage 3's boss, so not sure what triggered it in the Youtube videos. Interesting to see if anyone else can replicate it.

Graphically it's all a bit Donpachi Saturn - muted colours and slowdown. Shame they couldn't do the rotating O'Neill cylinder effect at the start but damn it slows down enough with it static!

[Shepardus]

I still don't know the optimal way to get the raw AVIwrite from MAME to show up as a pixel-perfect resolution scaled to youtube, but it looks good enough.

I don't know what you use to edit/encode your videos, but in FFmpeg you can use the "-sws_flags neighbor" flag to get nearest-neighbor scaling instead of the default bicubic. There may be a similar option in whatever you use. Doesn't save the video from becoming a blurry mess at the stage 5 midboss though.