Rolling Gunner (Switch)

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Special World
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Re: Rolling Gunner (Switch)

Post by Special World »

finisherr wrote:
EmperorIng wrote:Getting really pissed off at this game again. I fucking hate stage 3. Stage 4 doesn't feel half as bad; 99% of my runs end at stage 3 because of fucking autobomb, retarded purple shit planes ramming my ass, and those fucking turrets.

Original is just such a huge fucking pain in the ass.
I don't get it. This game really isn't any harder than any other Cave game honestly. I can pretty much NMNB Stage 3 9/10 times.
For many of us, Stage 3 in your typical Cave game is a bullshit bastard (aka wall of difficulty)

Very rarely stage 4 is the wall (ESPrade) but... usually not. Different strokes for shmuppin folks!
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finisherr
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Re: Rolling Gunner (Switch)

Post by finisherr »

Special World wrote:
finisherr wrote:
EmperorIng wrote:Getting really pissed off at this game again. I fucking hate stage 3. Stage 4 doesn't feel half as bad; 99% of my runs end at stage 3 because of fucking autobomb, retarded purple shit planes ramming my ass, and those fucking turrets.

Original is just such a huge fucking pain in the ass.
I don't get it. This game really isn't any harder than any other Cave game honestly. I can pretty much NMNB Stage 3 9/10 times.
For many of us, Stage 3 in your typical Cave game is a bullshit bastard (aka wall of difficulty)

Very rarely stage 4 is the wall (ESPrade) but... usually not. Different strokes for shmuppin folks!
Oh for sure. I'm not good at Shmups though! I have never cleared 2 loops of any game. Rolling gunner is really just like a lot of these games. You have to solve these little tiny puzzles to find good routes then learn the routes. I think the thing about rolling gunner that is hard for folks is learning how to use the rotating turret to solve these problems. You can't play the game without using it effectively. Here are some survival tips for this game:

1. When popcorn enemies stream from behind and there is nothing else on screen there to kill you, kill them with shot by doing a sort of bunny hop motion. You basically want to repeat half circles to make the turret flail behind you and attack the enemies behind you. This will allow you to kill all of those popcorn behind you and get lots of medals. A good example of this is in the beginning of stage 3.
2. Learn how to get the turret into the position you need it in very quickly and attack with the stable shot (laser?). This is absolutely critical in this game and is really the only way you can clear the screen of enemies without getting murdered or bombing. This becomes increasingly important in stage 3 onward.
3. Once you've mastered turret manipulation, revisit areas where you would normally bomb and find solutions that allow you to attack as many enemies as necessary with turret AND your regular shot when in "stable/laser" mode. Every one of these stages can be NMNB with safe routes. Well, to be honest, I've only figured out solutions up to the end of stage 5, so stage 6 might be a different story. Can report back later when I pick up the game again for some dedicated play time.
4. Figure out when to use your "hypers." You should use them strategically so you can clear difficult parts of the game, but honestly, I use em mostly for getting more score. Towards the later stages you will need to deploy the laser to kill the enemies in time, but honestly, I've only needed the laser for survival in stage 6. That might change with practice however.

Hopefully this helps.
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finisherr
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Re: Rolling Gunner (Switch)

Post by finisherr »

Another tip for stage 3 is that the mid-bosses can be killed by completely macro-dodging. This is the easiest to do if you pick the fastest ship type (this is the ship type I run). With this ship, it's very easy to kill the mid-boss without hyper or bomb. Simply macro-dodge.
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CStarFlare
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Re: Rolling Gunner (Switch)

Post by CStarFlare »

CStarFlare wrote:Roo mentioned the slowdown in the original mode in 2.0 being much more common than in 1.2 - it wouldn’t shock me if they hardcoded it to remove the hardware differences. I guess it’ll take a few people comparing their runs to see if it’s running consistently. (I’ll try to throw together an Original run video when I have a chance)
I loaded up my Original replay and played it back on both 1.20 and 2.00.

Here are segment times from the above videos. Main takeaway is that the 2.00 video is about 50 seconds longer, though I guess it's possible forgetting to turn off the input display on 2.00 might have had a hand in that. Way too lazy to rerecord.

Code: Select all

_______________________
|_St__|_V1.20_|_V2.00_|
| 1   | 01:02 | 01:01 |
| 1B  | 01:29 | 01:33 |
| 2   | 02:28 | 02:30 |
| 2B  | 01:30 | 01:31 |
| 3   | 03:29 | 03:32 |
| 3B  | 02:15 | 02:17 |
| 4   | 04:31 | 04:34 |
| 4B  | 02:24 | 02:26 |
| 5   | 03:08 | 03:16 |
| 5B  | 02:52 | 02:53 |
| 6   | 05:53 | 06:09 |
| 6B  | 02:43 | 02:53 |
| TLB | 00:37 | 00:35 |
-----------------------
| End | 34:21 | 35:10 |
Stage 1 timing is just the result of bad second rounding tbh since I grabbed the times from youtube, and I expect most of the 1/2 second differences might just be down to that. TLB timings are interesting; you can see a couple of times in the fight there were some hiccups on 1.20 that didn't happen on 2.00; this might not be a version difference and just a recording fluke.

There are clearly a few spots where there's more slowdown in 2.00; would be interesting to hear of other people feel the 2.00 looks like it runs on theirs, or on Switch.

EDIT: Also, anyone waiting for a chance to get their hands on Over Power, it has officially been sent to shops and should start showing up to purchase (the physical version) online.

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EmperorIng
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Re: Rolling Gunner (Switch)

Post by EmperorIng »

Does anyone know if this game only saves your best score, or if selecting the "restart the game" or "restart the stage" option negate your score being saved? I could have sworn I have gotten better and farther into the game, but my scores don't always seem to reflect that.

Thanks for the tips on the midboss, though I find my deaths now usually coming to the swarms of purple planes when coupled with the larger purple ships.
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Re: Rolling Gunner (Switch)

Post by guigui »

EmperorIng wrote:Does anyone know if this game only saves your best score, or if selecting the "restart the game" or "restart the stage" option negate your score being saved? I could have sworn I have gotten better and farther into the game, but my scores don't always seem to reflect that.
Of course "restart stage" negates your score. But weirdly, "restart game" also does !
I lost a lot of good runs this way too, have no idea why they would do that.
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EmperorIng
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Re: Rolling Gunner (Switch)

Post by EmperorIng »

What the fuck. Why are these Japanese devs so fucking stupid.

How in the fuck did Takumi figure out, in the Dreamcast era, that "Oh, you want to restart stage 1? That's ok, we'll still save your score!" is a good, friendly feature?

Did all the fucking morons end up working for Cave? I guess being surrounded by lolipiss bottles melts your brain.
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Re: Rolling Gunner (Switch)

Post by CStarFlare »

guigui wrote:
EmperorIng wrote:Does anyone know if this game only saves your best score, or if selecting the "restart the game" or "restart the stage" option negate your score being saved? I could have sworn I have gotten better and farther into the game, but my scores don't always seem to reflect that.
Of course "restart stage" negates your score. But weirdly, "restart game" also does !
I lost a lot of good runs this way too, have no idea why they would do that.
Are we talking about disallowing switch leaderboard entries? Because I use Restart Game all the time on PC and it saves my score. (Is that what the little asterisk beside the scoreboard entry is for)?)
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BareKnuckleRoo
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Re: Rolling Gunner (Switch)

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

That's really weird if it's denying it on the Switch port for some reason. I'm in the habit of never using Restart Game honestly, both to avoid this sort of thing (which is common in a lot of shmups...) and because the opening's cool.

This is how my attempts today went:

Image
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Re: Rolling Gunner (Switch)

Post by guigui »

CStarFlare wrote: Are we talking about disallowing switch leaderboard entries? Because I use Restart Game all the time on PC and it saves my score. (Is that what the little asterisk beside the scoreboard entry is for)?)
Yes, on the Switch both "restart stage" and "restart game" disallow your score from being recorded in the leaderboard. Since "restart game" does not work the same on PC, maybe it is a bug in the Switch port.
And iirc, the little asterisk next to a score means the replay has been saved ?

Autobomb is your biggest ennemy in this game, it lasts so much shorter than regular bomb.
The worst time to autobomb is during your green hyper (before triggering the red hyper). If you autobomb there, you get back to normal state with your hyper counter back to 0, naked.

Also about bombing, did anyone here managed to trigger the TLB in Original or higher mode ? To do this, one has to clear stage 6 boss with a rank of at least 15. Considering manual/auto bombs decrease rank by 2 (or 3, see earlier for figures), this is quite a hard thing to achieve.
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EmperorIng
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Re: Rolling Gunner (Switch)

Post by EmperorIng »

Is there a good way to contact the devs to fix this? It basically makes "Restart Game" useless. The shittiest thing about older shmup console releases is that to restart the game you have to exit to the main menu and sit through a bunch of load screens (Psyvariar 2 is particularly bad about this). This is the exact same type of aggravation.
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Re: Rolling Gunner (Switch)

Post by guigui »

Oh, BKR did the TLB 1CC, congrats. I'm linking to you : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obxgz3H9Ngo

Very nice skills here. Can you explain the whole "trigger red hyper then bomb right away" thing ?
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Re: Rolling Gunner (Switch)

Post by CStarFlare »

If you trigger the red hyper you convert all bullets into large medals, and if you bomb you immediately leave hyper state. So when those medals are collected, you recharge very quickly, giving yourself two extra bullet cancels for safety and a bit of damage:

1st cancel: Green Hyper, ride it until you feel unsafe
2nd cancel: Red Hyper
3rd cancel: bomb, do damage and get more medals via pointblanking
4th cancel: Green Hyper

And so on until you run out of bombs. It's not good for your score (as those medals you get for going into red hyper are worth a lot) or your rank (you skip the rank gain from collecting those medals in red, as well as lose rank for bombing) but it IS good for survival especially if your red hyper can cancels enough bullets.
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Re: Rolling Gunner (Switch)

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

I recorded all the voice clips for the game that's included in the PC release, Galaxy Frontier, for anyone who wants to decipher them or something, haha: https://youtu.be/4nBCVAruTkU
guigui wrote:Oh, BKR did the TLB 1CC, congrats. I'm linking to you : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obxgz3H9Ngo

Very nice skills here. Can you explain the whole "trigger red hyper then bomb right away" thing ?
Thanks, it was a really difficult clear, was unsure if I'd actually be able to do it or not... FYI, it looks like to trigger the TLB in Original or Expert you have to beat the final boss at Rank 16 or higher, not Rank 15. I'm pretty sure I've seen Rank 15 fail to trigger it.

CStarFlare's covered the Limiter -> Bomb recharge technique nicely. Basically, the trick is the same as in Deathsmiles: generate a ton of items then use a bomb to quickly exit your power up state and collect all the giant items to rapidly recharge. It's not good for scoring here, but during a tricky boss using Limiter and then immediately bombing to collect all the medals allows you to get all that bomb damage + have a recharge ready to go. It helps for the TLB in particular where bombing does no damage, so hypering as much as possible to cancel bullets is ideal for getting safe windows to damage it.

If you just do Limiter Release (red hyper) and you have to bomb when there are no medals onscreen, at best you'll usually get about 400 energy by pointblanking the boss. If you're going to be hit soon after going into Limiter Release, you might as well bomb anyways and get back up to 1000 energy for survival's sake sometimes.
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Re: Rolling Gunner (Switch)

Post by guigui »

Nice technique Limiter Release to Bomb. I’ll definitely try that.

Any plan on trying the Expert mode ? Having more items’spawning may chane a lot of things.
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Re: Rolling Gunner (Switch)

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

I'm working on a 1CC. My current best is about halfway through the final stage. I'm not sure I'll be able to get a TRUE ALL clear but a normal ALL clear should be doable.
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Re: Rolling Gunner (Switch)

Post by clippa »

BareKnuckleRoo wrote:I'm curious to see if all the extra slowdown is a glitch, or if it's a deliberate change. We'll know when the Switch version gets Over Power, I guess.
You're definitely onto something here, there's something weird going on. Ran through over power original difficulty on two separate pc's and on the first one it felt like deathsmiles 2 at times with the framerate dipping down really low when there were a lot of suicide bullets and medals flying about.
On the other, beefier PC, the game ran with loads less slowdown and my score took a hit as a result.
I should add that the weaker pc isn't terrible by any standards, i5 2500K overclocked to 4.4ghz, GTX 970

First clear on the weaker pc, I got 12,859,690,840
On my hairier pc I got 8,984,769,130.
I did get some intense slowdown at times on the newer pc, but only when the screen was chock full. On the weaker PC, it was like a slideshow at times.

I suppose it's only fitting that a pc game from ex cave devs would have wonky slowdown.
Tying the games speed to the framerate was a mistake to start with, but I'm not sure if that's entirely the issue here, it doesn't seem to be taxing my cpu too much, though it does seem to be only utilising 2 cores mainly and hammering them quite hard, it seems like maybe the way the game calculates when to add slowdown, and how much, is borked. Hopefully it's something that can be smoothed out with future patches.

It's not a huge issue if you're just playing to get your jolly-bobbles, but you can't really be comparing your score to other peoples since it doesn't seem to play consistently across different configurations, which is essential for a pc game.

You saying that the original game is also like this both before and after the patch is really disheartening.
Such a shame because it's a decent game.
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Re: Rolling Gunner (Switch)

Post by CStarFlare »

I think it’d be nice to see comparisons between good PCs rather than using one that might not be up to snuff. But yeah - switch might be the version people play if they want to be serious about competition.
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Re: Rolling Gunner (Switch)

Post by finisherr »

BareKnuckleRoo wrote:I'm working on a 1CC. My current best is about halfway through the final stage. I'm not sure I'll be able to get a TRUE ALL clear but a normal ALL clear should be doable.
Godspeed. I've played this game on and off since it came out. A few weekends ago I put in about 4 hours and was able to figure out stage 4 and some of stage 5 finally. I think I'll clear Original but I'm not sure how challenging stage 6 is. I haven't played it much yet. It's easily my favorite new game to get released since SDOJ.
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Re: Rolling Gunner (Switch)

Post by clippa »

https://twitter.com/rollinggunner/statu ... 2592547840
Project Rolling Gunner official
@rollinggunner
【Notice of Rolling Gunner Over Power Update】
Over Power, an additional content, has been updated. (Ver2.01)
The updated content is "Improved processing speed in some environments".
If you have already played, use your code again,
Try applying the downloaded file.
You have to use the same URL and code and download the new zip file.
I'll play this again on my weaker pc tonight and report back.
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Re: Rolling Gunner (Switch)

Post by EmperorIng »

There's some hope there. I need to find a way to reach them and hopefully they understand my complaint about the bug in the Switch version's score saving.
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Re: Rolling Gunner (Switch)

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

Thanks for this, can't wait to try it tonight. It's a very good sign to see that it's still getting active patches.
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clippa
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Re: Rolling Gunner (Switch)

Post by clippa »

Yeah, fair play to them, that way quick.


@EmperorIng - Mebius ported and published the switch version, might be worth getting in touch with them -
http://d-mebius.com/mailform/contact.html
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Re: Rolling Gunner (Switch)

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

edit: the devs have released version 2.10, no more slowdown issues

The slowdown as far as I can tell feels just as bad in 2.01 as in 2.00. I haven't tested the Over Power mode a whole lot to compare, so the improvements might be specific to that mode, but 2.01 still adds all the extra slowdown to the standard mode of the game.

Best way to compare is fire up 1.20 and run Expert training on the S1 and S5 midbosses. Those don't slow down at all. Then in 2.01, S1 midboss is slow almost constantly, and S5 is slow, with it grinding to a near halt (only 22 FPS for me) on its final phase.

The slowdown needs an option to disable it completely. It's not like X.X's games (Blue Wish Resurrection Plus, Eden's Aegis) where the slowdown is artificially induced but keeps the framerate at 60 FPS. Here, it looks like the slowdown is actually affecting the framerate indicator. Note that turning on the Frame Skip option in the menu breaks the game as is causes massive stuttering and inconsistent speeds whenever slow down kicks in.

If this isn't intentional slowdown and it's just the game engine for whatever reason running poorly in the Over Power updates... this is unfortunate.

Still sticking with 1.20 for now. Can someone with a Twitter account bug them to add an option in the menu to turn off slowdown? Maybe they'll respond and say the slowdown isn't intentional or something and explain what's going on.
Last edited by BareKnuckleRoo on Wed Apr 01, 2020 10:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.
seiatsu
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Re: Rolling Gunner (Switch)

Post by seiatsu »

About the restart/score logging concerns;

Just in case people are unaware, pressing "-" on switch is a quick restart that doesn't affect score. Sure it takes you all the way back but is still feels faster than pausing navigating to the correct menu option, etc, etc.

Not sure if this helps but I didn't see it mentioned here. I feel it's a much faster means of restart and it doesn't mess with the ability to log scores.
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Re: Rolling Gunner (Switch)

Post by EmperorIng »

Thanks for the tip! I'll try that out when I have the chance today.
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Re: Rolling Gunner (Switch)

Post by guigui »

seiatsu wrote:About the restart/score logging concerns;

Just in case people are unaware, pressing "-" on switch is a quick restart that doesn't affect score. Sure it takes you all the way back but is still feels faster than pausing navigating to the correct menu option, etc, etc.

Not sure if this helps but I didn't see it mentioned here. I feel it's a much faster means of restart and it doesn't mess with the ability to log scores.
Pushing minus actually takes you back to the menu screen, no prompt or whatsoever. Beware of your finger not ripping to that button in the middle of a good run !
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Re: Rolling Gunner (Switch)

Post by Udderdude »

It actually annoyed me that you couldn't re-configure that to none.

"What's this button do?" :main menu appears: "Fug :DDDDDDD"
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Re: Rolling Gunner (Switch)

Post by seiatsu »

guigui wrote:
seiatsu wrote:About the restart/score logging concerns;

Just in case people are unaware, pressing "-" on switch is a quick restart that doesn't affect score. Sure it takes you all the way back but is still feels faster than pausing navigating to the correct menu option, etc, etc.

Not sure if this helps but I didn't see it mentioned here. I feel it's a much faster means of restart and it doesn't mess with the ability to log scores.
Pushing minus actually takes you back to the menu screen, no prompt or whatsoever. Beware of your finger not ripping to that button in the middle of a good run !
Right, that's why I said "Sure it takes you all the way back but...". :) I still find it to be the fastest way to restart and negates the score logging concern.
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Re: Rolling Gunner (Switch)

Post by Austin »

I picked this up on sale and put a couple hours into it. First impressions are great, this really feels like an excellent game. Looking forward to putting more time into it.
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