STGT '09 Last Year's Straggler Week 2, RFJet - thoughts

[Ravid]

I've been playing this game for years and the bullet speed of this game can barely be called fast, except for maybe real phase 1 and 2, and even then it's not that fast. It's not like psikyo games where the speed is just straight up your ass.

I'm talking about dense, complicated patterns that I could not analyse in the time they take to go from the boss to the bottom of the screen. In particular I'm thinking of the Sim 45 boss and the last attack of the phase 1 boss (the one with aimed bullets) - the lack of bullet shading and the speed makes it difficult to discern where the gaps are going to appear, and as a result I just had no fun trying to avoid these attacks. I'm not a big fan of Psikyo games, but at least the bullets have perfect visibility both against the scenery and each other, so you have more of a fighting chance against complex patterns.
Maybe it's just because I'm not used to this sort of fast-paced action, of course.

[captpain]

I've been playing this game for years and the bullet speed of this game can barely be called fast, except for maybe real phase 1 and 2, and even then it's not that fast. It's not like psikyo games where the speed is just straight up your ass.

...

...yes it is.


But it's perfectly doable.

[Ed Oscuro]

It's not just fast bullets, but fast planes launching onscreen to shoot bullets at you from unexpected angles. Sweeping away in a straight line to get out of the way will put you at risk of a collision.

I dunno if the Strikers games speed up the bullets at higher speed, but there you can at least see them due to high-contrast graphics.

[nash87]

I admit the visibility isn't that great, but the speed....c'mon guys, it can't be called fast until real phase, and the visibility on both real phases is pretty clear. dark backgrounds against yellow bullets (not including the TLB), no excuses guys. the Sim levels with the not so great visibility had much simpler and slower graze-able patterns, granted you're not quick shotting everything just leaving the popcorn enemies to shoot their 1 or 2 bullets

[moozooh]

I was somewhat glad RFJ was picked because it gave me a good excuse at finally getting good at the game. I had a ~20 mil score previously that I got mainly on survival alone, and I increased it to 64.5 mil over the course of a few days. Not that bad, considering I didn't have a lot of time to play until Saturday.

The bullet visibility issues affected me on sim 30 and Phase 1 as well, so I mainly bombed through the parts where I knew I wouldn't be able to see bullets coming. I should also have switched to Ixion slave much earlier, as its bomb is vastly superior survival-wise, and just marginally worse for scoring due to shorter duration.

I'll probably go for a sim 50 ALL in near future, seems doable for me.