Salamander: how do you stop the bouncing balls spawning?

[bcass]

Arcade version - how do you stop the bouncing balls spawning at the stage 4 boss? The video below doesn't spawn any bouncing balls:

https://youtu.be/xHnY1WEUE74?t=503

When I do the same thing, I get bouncing balls. Does anyone know?

[Klatrymadon]

IIRC, playing on the second credit of the day after having lost your first at the st4 boss or beyond causes it to do nothing on subsequent games. There may be other conditions that produce the same result, but that's the main one, I think. (I'm not sure if you have to beat the boss on your first credit before this happens, or if it happens on the second go regardless of your progress...)

Edit: the uploader's own comments suggest you do have to get past the boss once for this to occur, but I'd have to check, tbh. It's been years since I played it remotely seriously. Thankfully, if they're right, the boss stays 'deactivated' until you reset the cab.

[BIL]

^^^ Yeah, I've heard similar - as long as the machine has seen at least one round of Blue Balls that day, it won't bust 'em out in subsequent credits.

SHAMEFUR TACTIC (and game design... or "game design," hard to tell sometimes with ol' Sally )

Happily, there are ways to counteract Blue Balls without blowing your credit. There's the lower-right safespot, which I find a bit touchy (walls kill), as well as spoofing methods. My own humble submission - trap even a handful of the bastards for significantly more breathing room. Meanwhile Pegboy flat-out kills the thing in his Deluxe Pack SP-Hard run, the balls-out BEAST EATER option.

[Rastan78]

There's the lower-right safespot, which I find a bit touchy (walls kill), as well as spoofing methods.

A good general tactic for edging up to a wall or ceiling in shmups is to use diagonal movement. It's slower than horizontal or vertical movement speed provided the game has normalized diagonals.

Also found this to helpful in early stages of Gradius III when you don't have a wider shot like the ripple laser. This game constantly expects you to edge right up to the ceiling to hit the little bitch ass sniper turrets that are all over the place. Hold straight up and release at the last second and you're pretty much playing a game of chicken with the ceiling, especially with emulation/ LCD display lag in effect. Swooping in on the diagonal is much more forgiving.

[Klatrymadon]

Ah, your method is really nice, BIL - a halfway house between completely cheesing it and dealing with the full nightmare. You still have to watch your ass!

[BIL]

There's the lower-right safespot, which I find a bit touchy (walls kill), as well as spoofing methods.

A good general tactic for edging up to a wall or ceiling in shmups is to use diagonal movement. It's slower than horizontal or vertical movement speed provided the game has normalized diagonals.

Also found this to helpful in early stages of Gradius III when you don't have a wider shot like the ripple laser. This game constantly expects you to edge right up to the ceiling to hit the little bitch ass sniper turrets that are all over the place. Hold straight up and release at the last second and you're pretty much playing a game of chicken with the ceiling, especially with emulation/ LCD display lag in effect. Swooping in on the diagonal is much more forgiving.

Indeed, I like using diagonals and where possible screen edges to muffle movement slightly. In that Salamander safespot, I'll keep the ship pressed to the lower edge of the screen while nudging the Vic's wing over the scenery marker (been a while, but there should be a nice rectangular groove in the metal wall... too far out, and you'll get Blue Balled, too far in and you'll hit the wall and blow - this is like a Dick Stock post without the Dick )

Ah, your method is really nice, BIL - a halfway house between completely cheesing it and dealing with the full nightmare. You still have to watch your ass!

Thanks! That's exactly what I was going for. It's easy to set up and the remaining fight is still considerably dangerous.

I almost wonder if Contra III's last boss references this palava - the "Bouncing Blue Balls" roulette pick. Miki Higashino even worked on both games, haha. Last time I played seriously, I was surviving it maybe 25% of the time, with deliberate heavy bombspam slowdown... actually worse than its infamous STG counterpart, imo, if that is indeed what it is.

[Sly Cherry Chunks]

My own humble submission - trap even a handful of the bastards for significantly more breathing room.

This is pretty much my method. You can tuck your nose right into the wall there so you can use the last few seconds before BALLZ to position your multiples horizontally across the screen and take the cores out with missiles. As demonstrated above, the trick is to get the balls bouncing left to right. You might have to move out of the safe area to get the last core - leave the powerups on screen in case you die. Your dropped multiples fall off the screen but the powerups wont.

I have NEVER got the lower-right safespot to work.

Sometimes the NO BALLZ trick fails to work. Not sure what Im doing.

[MathU]

What I do is quickly shoot out all the barriers on the center target and then park my ship right up close in the space where the barriers were. This causes the other two targets to launch orbs at a sharp angle where the orbs get stuck bouncing around harmlessly inside the wall behind the rest of the play area. And then I go play the Japan release of Lifeforce, where this boss is much fairer and doesn't have cheesy safe spots like that.

Edit: Ah yes, what BIL demonstrated.

[StrzxgvNuvWvfld]

There's the lower-right safespot, which I find a bit touchy (walls kill), as well as spoofing methods.

A good general tactic for edging up to a wall or ceiling in shmups is to use diagonal movement. It's slower than horizontal or vertical movement speed provided the game has normalized diagonals.

I always use the top-left safespot and it's easier to pull off when you're fully powered up as all of those lasers and missles combined with the boss fade-in effect causes quite a bit of slow-down. The Arcade Archives release seems pretty acurrate to the PCB for slow down where as it's harder to pull off on the PS/Saturn port where there's less of it.

Going back to the original question, I thought you had to destroy the boss as opposed to timing it out for it to not shoot on subsequent play-throughs, but also I'm fairly sure there have been times this hasn't worked (or maybe it worked once, but then not on the next go).

[Rastan78]

This is via auto translate so bear with me:

The stage 4 boss "Fortress Valis" keeps spitting reflected blue balls until it breaks a specific hatch on the ground, but in the state immediately after the power is turned on, there is a hatch in a position that can not be defeated, so it is inevitable I have to wait for the suicide bomb while dealing with the blue ball.
If you make a self-destruct even once, the hatches that cannot be defeated at the same time will be broken, so in the second and subsequent plays, you can stop the firing of the blue ball just by breaking some hatches.

The ground hatches in stage 4 are kind of annoying to destroy since you need to hit them with your missiles Xevious style at a specific spacing. Would need to do some testing to see which hatch or hatches need to be destroyed.

One's aim must be true to get a missile in the open hatch and alleviate the suffering of infinite blue balls.

[BIL]

Interesting. That almost sounds like the infamous choking-on-balls onslaught was just an oversight, and you were meant to speedkill the hatches before it reached that point. Sounds fun, tbh...

Unless they designed the boss with that shutoff condition, then deliberately put one of the targets where you can't hit it, just to be balls. I mean dicks.