Much of that love is probably from me, so take that for what you will. There's a two-stage demo available on DLsite if you want to give it a try. Do note that not all the weapons are available in it, and stage 1 is relatively slow and uninteresting in my opinion. It picks up a lot more in stage 2, though it's still relatively easy (as you'd expect from a stage 2 out of 10). In the full game you can start from any of the first three stages after you've reached stage 3 for the first time, and there are various other level skips available. I encourage you to give it a try - just don't go in expecting something really tight and refined, or even something really innovative but unpolished, because it's not that sort of game. It's just so cool in every area.Squire Grooktook wrote:I hear a lot of love for Cambria Sword. I honestly just cannot help but balk at the length, but I feel like I should give it a try none the less.
Yes, the number on the top-row bar is the bomb count. The icons next to it indicate which type of bomb you have, which depends on the subweapon you have. You have a main weapon and a subweapon which can be fired independently, and each main weapon has a regular shot and a charged shot that you use by not firing until the red bar fills up. A couple of the main weapons also have extra firing modes activated by, for example, holding a certain movement direction when firing the charged shot (these are detailed in the "extra disc" materials that come with the game). The blue weapon is the "luck bar" - it fills up over time or by grabbing the little blue/red items that first appear near the start of stage 2. When it fills up, it gives you one of several effects chosen at random. Usually it gives you an extra bomb or some weapon drops, but sometimes it gives you one of the special tokens you usually get from defeating a boss, which alternates between life, bomb, and points (the points is one reason why I don't think anyone in their right mind would seriously optimize the scoring in this - optimal score would rely on random chance to get more point items). It can also give you negative effects such as spawning a ton of extra enemies or spawning a life hunter or SP hunter that attempts to steal your lives or bombs. The systems are mostly quite conventional, if you don't understand something it's probably because it's random. The weapon drops at least are all random, including the very rare "rare weapons" - every weapon has a "rare" variant that in some cases is just a more overpowered version of the normal weapon, in other cases is a very different weapon. Unfortunately you don't see those much unless you play "Easy mode," which is actually the same as the normal game except with a much higher spawn rate of rare weapons. It's ironically quite difficult to unlock easy mode but I hex-edited my score file to unlock it.BareKnuckleRoo wrote:How does Cambria Sword work, anyways? I've watched video, and I can't figure out what the blue bar is for, or how the weapon system works at all. The number on the top row bar appears to be bombs but otherwise I'm not sure, it looks like you can fire a main weapon and sub gunpods separately?
You can find it in the list (along with some other interesting-looking freeware games that I haven't tried) if you click on "Games" in the sidebar. Here's a direct link to the download.LordHypnos wrote:@Shepardus: I thought the run down was pretty interesting, actually. Do you think you could direct me to where on the page the actual download link for Minishooter RS is?
It does get pretty difficult, I've only cleared the game on Anchor Easy, though I haven't even been doing that lately since the scoring techniques you can do on the stages 2 and 3 bosses (anchor on to something at the beginning and never release that anchor to raise the multiplier a lot) drive up rank a ton. I think this is the best video I've seen of Anchor mode.LordHypnos wrote:Also which weapon do you play Ringˉ²⁷ with? It actually seemed like a really interesting game to me, but I eventually gave up on it because even on easy it got way too hard, and there were no replays I could look at using anchor shot.
I've mostly been playing Anchor mode on Easy and Bomb mode on various difficulty levels. Bomb mode gets silly pretty quickly, but silly in a fun way. I'm not seriously trying to clear it but rather just seeing how many points I can rack up while I last. Note that you can choose your starting weapon (the weapon you have when you're not anchored to anything) by pressing left/right at the mode selection screen. Some of those could make your life easier, such as "Mirror," which has a very weak shot but reflects any bullets you come into contact with while you're holding the shot button (this isn't completely foolproof though, since it doesn't protect you from enemy collisions and enemies take up a lot of space in this game, and using Mirror all the time means not anchoring which is bad for score).
I haven't played the other modes as much, there's way too much for me to try in this game. In addition to the four difficulty levels (which I think are unlocked by credit-feeding through each difficulty) and the five modes (which I think are unlocked by credit-feeding through each mode), there are five more modes which can be unlocked by clearing the "Another" stage (accessible through the practice mode menu, I'm not sure if you have to do anything to unlock it). "Another" is an omnidirectional stage that can be kind of hard to wrap your head around, but I cheesed through it by choosing a homing weapon and bumping my lives up to the maximum. The five more modes are mostly variants of the existing five, but one or two of them are actually pretty different. Would be a lot of work for Despatche to maintain the high score thread if people actually posted any scores for it.