Playing more Turbo Force for Calice Cup 3, and when you really, truly dive deep into the world of Turbo Force... well, you find it's the shmup that keeps on giving. Or more accurately, the shmup that keeps on not giving a shit.
Glitches. Bugs out the ass. Randomly destroying the color pallet of a level because you either accidentally destroyed an invisible sprite, or (as I suspect) you caused two code scripts to run at the same time, override each other, and fuck up the programming (if that makes sense).
(look at the screenshot above to see the normal palette!)
Weird bugs happen almost all the time if you play long enough. The most damning and horrific is when you pick up a random lightning-bolt item while you are killing a larger mech enemy. Sometimes, the bomb damage from the lightning item and your shot will "kill" the enemy at the same time, which I suspect causes its health to go into negative and thus into an overflow. What's the result? Invincible enemies! Unkillable giant enemies that will continuously harass you as you helplessly are drawn into an embrace of death as the screen slowly scrolls you into it.
As most Calice players have discovered, you can skip 1/3rd of stage 3 by clipping into the wall of the stage and skipping two midbosses. This is actually the preferred strategy, in order to conserve like and ammo for the boss! And said boss
can do some pretty lol-tastic stuff too.
The rank in this game is utterly ridiculous. 1 extend at 200,000k. But if you want to 1all the game, you have to tactically suicide to lower the rank. This is most crucial for the insanely stupid stage 6 opener, with mech enemies (that can possibly become unkillable if you have an unlucky item spawn?), smaller enemies with way too much health, and tons of insanely fast bullets. Even crazier? If you don't kill everything in time, suicide/time-out missiles start flooding the screen. The epitome of utter assholish design.
That stage 6 intro (INTRO!) is as far as my journey has gotten. I don't know if I've got the willpower to continue from there in the wild and probably shitty world of Turbo Force!
Amazing that Video System could rebound and release Sonic Wings a year later. The gulf between the two is vast indeed.