Guxt: a new shooter by the maker of Cave Story

[jiji]

Pixel, the guy responsible for Cave Story, has released a preliminary, incomplete version of the shooting game he's been working on for quite a while. It's simple, but neat, and the graphics are done up sort of Game Boy-style.



Download: http://homepage2.nifty.com/rochet/storage/guxt_0800.zip

[Turrican]

LOOKS AWESOME

More "Shades of gray" stuff please!!!

[Ghegs]

Pretty nifty. Cleared the game in few attempts...after getting proper autofire from using joy2key. Charming lil' game, lots of different weapons (anchor's cool, but feels too hard to use) and there's even few secrets of sorts.

I did die one time from whoknowswhat, but other than that the limited color palette didn't bother me. Stage 5 did get a bit hairy though, there's lots of crap to dodge there.

[szycag]

Cave Story has to be one of my favorite games of all time. I'll play anything this guy does, he's amazing. Thanks for the heads up.

[bay]

Cave Story has to be one of my favorite games of all time. I'll play anything this guy does, he's amazing. Thanks for the heads up.

cave story ftw!

yah pixel is pretty cool, the guy is a factory for cool things and games. =]

[Dandy J]

I'm getting a real old-school Truxton vibe from this. I don't think people that knew Pixel for Cave Story and Ikachan are [EDIT: AREN'T, wow I hate when that happens] going to like this.

Some observations -

Everything is the same hue, so bullets can become disguised. This is the worst problem, and needs to be changed. I realize he made it to look this way (well, possibly not, maybe he's still deciding how to color stuff), but it needs to change, cool looking or not.

The other thing I think he needs to change, is create 3 checkpoints per stage instead of 2. Beginning, middle, and boss, instead of just beginning and middle.

It uses lot's of old-school standbys, such as a bigger then average hitbox (compared to modern games), no fast rapid fire, enemies that come from behind with no warning, slow speed/no weapon to start with so you can get fucked after you die. So I have a feeling some will love this game, some will hate it. So far I think it's pretty cool.

[Arznei]

Looks great.

[PROMETHEUS]

I don't really appreciate dying to a stupid plane coming from behind with no warning, indeed -_-
What's so cool about this game? It's just really really old school, obsolete gameplay @_@ You die without a chance if you don't know every detail by heart. If you do though, you'll clear the game easily. Cool...

Anyway still had a little fun playing it, somehow.

[icepick]

This game is really addicting. I've stopped typing this reply a couple of times because I was thinking about what to say first, which made me want to play the game again, which I did, only to come back and leave again.

At first I was having kind of a hard time with it, but once you pick up the flow of the game, it's a lot of fun. Nice direction, variety in the stages and enemies, fair control and difficulty. Things get kind of out of control with all the shields and that star and everything, so I actually don't mind it so much when I die and go back to zero since playing with the stock ship and a max-speed, ultra-shield, wide shot ship are like playing two different (but both good!) games.

I think that I like it more with grayscale (or whatever color it is) rendering, as opposed to full color. I tried imagining it with what I'd imagine to be typical coloring for a game like this, and it made the game seem to blend into the background more, as in losing a level of uniqueness without quite gaining anything substantial.

The other thing I think he needs to change, is create 3 checkpoints per stage instead of 2. Beginning, middle, and boss, instead of just beginning and middle.

I was thinking the same thing, but on the other hand, it does give you a chance to at least get a speed powerup and maybe a new weapon, although the default is pretty powerful and useful as it is.

Anyway, I like it a lot though too, thanks jiji!

I'm interested in where he'll take this, even though I'd still enjoy it as-is. I haven't defeated the stage four boss yet, but if he went so far as to let us see what our high score is after losing our last life, then we could start up a high score thread.

(Also; For some strange reason, when I first played the game I was getting terrible frame rates, but now I can run x3 screen size and it stays at about 50 FPS.)

[Dandy J]

I was sick of dying because I couldn't see the bullets, and decided to try and mess around with the data files. Here is how to change the bullet color to whatever you want using Photoshop. Note that this also changes the color of explosions, bullet hit sparks, item pick-up effects, and your ship's boosters. Furthermore, it does not change the color of the boss lasers and meatball machine guns. If I find out which pximg file contains those I'll let you know.

In the \data folder, find 'caret.pximg' and rename it to 'caret.bmp', open it in Photoshop (or PSP or whatever). Go to Image -> Mode -> RGB color. Now there are 6 colors total in the original palette: black, 2 shades of extremely dark blue/purple, 2 shades of gray, and white. You only need to change the 2 shades of gray and white. Use the color picker and select one of the colors. Go to Select -> Color Range..., and make a selection using sampled colors and fuzziness at 0. After it's selected use the pencil with some big ass size and smear whatever new color you want for that shade into the selection. Ctrl+D to deselect. Do that for all 3 colors, change the color mode back to indexed (Image -> Mode -> Indexed) using exact palatte; there should still be only 6 colors. Save it, rename it back to 'caret.pximg' and viola, see-able bullets! I used Cave-ish blue for mine.

This makes the game much easier, I 1cced it on my 1st try after changing the color.

edit: If anyone doesn't have an image editing program or is lazy, here's my edited caret.pximg file. Just put it in the game's \data folder.

caret.pximg blue

[cigsthecat]

This is awesome. It's so simple but it really has just about everything needed for a solid game.

( I do hate all the old-school stuff like checkpoints, speedups, etc etc but it's just such a charming game)

[dave4shmups]

Thanks Jiji; great game! I wish there were more free old-school PC shmups out there. Seems to be mostly bullet-hell.

[PC Engine Fan X!]

I think such a PSP conversion of this little PC shmup ditty by the name of Guxt would be ace...don't you think so? ^_~

A Tate'd PSP conversion of Guxt would be even better... ^_~

The only two PC-based shmup titles that I can recall being ported for the PSP are:

rRootage and Noi2za

Still great to play "on the go" with the proper firmware enabled 1.50 PSP..... ^_~

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[sfried]

I think such a PSP conversion of this little PC shmup ditty by the name of Guxt would be ace...don't you think so? ^_~

I'd much rather see a GBA convertion. The game would look and play nicely on a Micro/DS.

[df0notfound]

I think such a PSP conversion of this little PC shmup ditty by the name of Guxt would be ace...don't you think so? ^_~

I'd much rather see a GBA convertion. The game would look and play nicely on a Micro/DS.

Me too, PSP is mostly played at home where you may as well play it on the computer with a joystick.
GBA Micro would be amazing

[Turrican]

Judging from the kana writing and the pics, I'd say the international title should've been "Gust".

[Dandy J]

New version up: http://homepage2.nifty.com/rochet/storage/guxt_0810.zip

You can zoom up to x5. Bullets are now bright red. Shields stack (did they do this before?). Shields also seem to be much more common throughout the 4th and 5th stages starting from the 3rd boss, who you can get 3 from milking the blown cores after you kill it.

Overall the game is really easy now. Hopefully he implements some kind of cool scoring system...

edit: Also there's got to be some kind of secret form/boss at the end of stage 4. You only ever destroy 3 of the bosses 4 cores. Any ideas?

[PC Engine Fan X!]

Is it possible to play this latest v.081 of Guxt in Tate mode using the "Zoom mode"?

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[Dandy J]

Is it possible to play this latest v.081 of Guxt in Tate mode using the "Zoom mode"?

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

Nah, but you could do it ghetto by using nvRotate and using x5 with whatever resolution makes the game fit.

So someone in IRC said they accidentally died on the 1st boss at the same time as killing it by shooting the final shot and getting hit before it connected so you could milk the respawns for points ala old-school shmups. It is definitely do-able, I was able to milk the 1st stage boss up to 10k.

Replay

Some notes: It takes 33 single shots from the default for double shot to kill the 1st boss. Machine gun takes way more and I'm not about to count. The way the extends work, I think I'll only be able to milk the stage 2 boss up to 16k or so, since the last extend is at 14k. Also note that you do not get an extend at 10k as well. So the extends go:

2000
4000
6000
8000
12000
14000

Also there HAS to be some kind of secret 4th stage boss/form. When it 'escapes', only 3/4 cores are blown, and you don't get any points.

[shoe-sama]

There's also a quick grab bonus of up to 100 points for powerups from powerup carriers.

Best weapon for 1 is twin, 2 it doesn't really matter, 3 is wide, 4 also doesn't really matter (I prefer harpoon though).

There's an anchor power-up in stage 2 in one of the right asteroids later in the stage.

The chains from the later stage 4 enemies and stage 4 boss have no collision detection.

[Dandy J]

25,970:
Replay

I think 30,000 is possible. I messed up milking the stage 1 boss, thus ending stage 1 with 10k instead of 11k. I skimped on weapon power ups and destroying the asteroid ships in stage 2 properly (while they still have the asteriod attached).

edit: The stage 3 boss, 3rd core takes 26 shots to kill from a wide (center bullet) or default shot.

Also I prefer harpoon on stage 4 because you can more easily kill all the chain swings, which are worth 100pts each.

[Iaspis]

version 0.900 is out... what a great example of simple, yet fantastic gameplay! and it's just about 280Kb...

[Kaiser]

version 0.900 is out... what a great example of simple, yet fantastic gameplay! and it's just about 280Kb...

Link please

[Iaspis]

http://homepage2.nifty.com/rochet/stora ... 900_wz.zip

[Ghegs]

The difficulty seems to fluctuate a lot in this one - I was able to clear the very first version fairly easily (the one where all the colours were shades of gray), had difficulties with the first coloured-bullets version and now I can clear the latest version easily again. I think some of the enemies take less punishment.

Also, there's now a TLB! After clearing the normal game via "Start", "Trial" becomes available (I don't remember it doing this in previous versions). It's the exact same thing, except after the Stage 5 boss TLB makes his appearance. Not going to spoil it, since it's a nice lil' surprise.

[poieo]

Judging from the kana writing and the pics, I'd say the international title should've been "Gust".

Maybe it's a "xylophone" kind of x.

I think most of the difficulty from this game comes from how awkward everything feels. None of the enemies are particularly threatening, but i'm still never able to be sure of myself when i play it. It's like Pixel's uncertainty bleeds through in the actual gameplay. There just doesn't seem to be a "groove" in this game, you know?

[Fenrir]

Well -er
I didn't like cave story at all *ducks* but this game looks awfully great. Can't wait to try it (*ducks again*)

EDIT
Tried it. Dammit, it sounds and plays (and looks somehow, maybe it's the font) like a PC-Engine shooter. This guy's got TALENT.

[PC Engine Fan X!]

Well -er
I didn't like cave story at all *ducks* but this game looks awfully great. Can't wait to try it (*ducks again*)

EDIT
Tried it. Dammit, it sounds and plays (and looks somehow, maybe it's the font) like a PC-Engine shooter. This guy's got TALENT.

A Guxt port to the PSP or GBA would be nice -- or even as a PC Engine homebrewed game (played on PCE flash card setup)..... ^_~

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[Dandy J]

Thanks god he made trial mode, boss milking as getting really gay!

The TLB is awesome! I think in the final he should add an extra loop!

[Kaiser]

I get to stage 3 so far on normal mode awesome game... good old memories of oldschool shmups