Yeah, I wonder how many 1.003 copies are out there. They had already made version 2.000 prior to launch, so I would not be surprised if there are more copies of 2.000. I checked and I do indeed have 2.000.
I don't think I've ever gotten a 100% destruction rate. I have heard it makes rank increase by a huge amount if you get it, so I haven't gotten it yet. Still gotta clear the game eventually... I usually game over on stage 5, where I get my ass kicked, although I think I made it to stage 6 like once. Haven't played in a while, as the right side audio on my HD Retrovision cable no longer works and I really don't want to play this game (or any game that has stereo) in mono, especially with that glorious soundtrack! I think I have a composite cable somewhere that should still have functioning audio on both sides, and I think I'd be okay with composite video for now. I do play it on ST-V at the arcade sometimes, but I'd rather play it at home on my Saturn for free lolDMC wrote: ↑Sat Jun 28, 2025 10:26 amI also want to randomly bump into Yuichi Toyama in convenicence stores.Steven wrote: ↑Sat Jun 28, 2025 6:15 am Too bad you didn't ask about this last week; I just talked to him 6 days ago! Fortunately, the dude is inescapable. One of my friends who knows him swears that you can wake up at 0400 and go to any convenience store in Japan and somehow Toyama will be there. I'm basically guaranteed to see him again on September 14, so I will try to not forget to ask him. I somehow doubt that he'll remember what the supposed bug is next time, but it's worth trying. Believe me, this is something that I have been wondering about ever since he told me to always play on Saturn and never on ST-V, and I want to get a definite answer if I can, but...
One thing that is unclear to me is whether there are two separate rank systems, one for end-of-stage bonuses and one for other things like power-ups and deaths. The reason I suspect this is that getting 100% of the enemies on a stage will lead to some boss attacks on the next stages regardless if I die or powe-up. toyama probably forgot or don't care about those details now though.
Another thing I'm curious about is how much he and Yagawa influenced each other. Since Battle Garegga and Soukyugurentai were developed around the same time, was Toyama influenced by Yagawa and vice versa?
Since neither of them is credited on any of the other's game I presume the influence was rather small.
But yeah, Toyama would've known Yagawa, now that I think about it, as they were there at the same time. The shooting game dev community's actually really small, and everybody in shooting is friends with everybody else. I just learned that Toyama was apparently the game's director, or at least Japanese Wikipedia says he was. In practice it didn't really mean that much to be director on a shooting game back then, as the programmers were the ones that did basically all of the game design, and of course it wasn't uncommon for the director to be also a programmer, but in either case it looks like this game was Toyama's baby. Even with the weird rank system and how it makes it so you basically never want to power up your regular shot (which isn't really a big deal anyway because the lock-on shot is better for everything aside from enemy homing missiles, which as you know are crazy fast in this game and can be super dangerous), I still think this is one of the best games in the genre.