Went back to Eschatos to take a stab at Hard mode, not quite at the point where I'm getting the clear. I'm not good at speed shifting game where you gear shift - it's hard to do it naturally in the middle of a fight so you more have to memorize what speed to use where and shift in advance. Or just use the max speed all game long.
After clearing
Monolith on Hard Mode, Sudden Death with the default weapon and no upgrades I took a stab at a few more relaxing, casual runs. I ran into a frustrating issue when I was using a Sword weapon with slow keywords (Giant, Triple, Heavy). It was a great weapon, but during a boss I realized that like the player sprite, the Sword is drawn on the top layer
above enemy bullets - with a slow swing speed, there were bullets being spawned underneath the giant Sword sprite and travelling towards me I couldn't see and react to properly between sword swings. Normally with a fast speed Sword it's not an issue you'd notice cause you're cancelling bullets with each swipe. Brought it to the dev's attention, hopefully it gets addressed - bullets should always be on the top layer unless you have a small visible hitbox drawn on top of the player sprite. It's not a huge issue in Monolith as the player ship is pretty small (and the actual hitbox smaller still) but there's still a small portion where bullets can pass under the ship out of visibility but still be dodgeable. Only other shmup I can think of that draws player ship above bullets is Judgement Silversword / Cardinal Sins, and like Monolith, it's one of the few if any design flaws in the game I can think of (where slow patterns like double Mirror Shield can sneak bullets under your ship where you can't see how close they are to your small hitbox in the center).
Apparently there's Monolith DLC coming out with extra content. Hoping this gets addressed, mainly because aside from this layer issue the base game feels really slick as it is and nearly perfect, as I can attest to having played Monolith pretty obsessively.
I'm also playing Rayforce - is there an issue with the audio in the latest version of MAME that wasn't in the older versions? ShmupMAME has a bug where a miniboss doesn't properly fire a specific (and easy to dodge) attack, but the latest version of MAME has the audio glitch out when I get a gameover and play a second credit. Effectively I have to reset every time I get a game over, or the music and audio does weird stuff.
