Herr Schatten wrote:Thanks, Dex, for another STGT.
Thanks also to the rest of Team Oldschoolers. I feel very proud of what we have achieved this year.
Yeah, we beat our rivals (aka former teammates) this year
We faltered a bit on the final game, losing several places (myself included... went from 4th to 8th) in the final standings, but 8th place overall still puts us in the top 10, so kudos to the players who got us there. You guys did good.
As for the games...
Cyvern- Fun little game.
Xexex- Had a blast playing this.
Mars Matrix- Was never very good at the game, and it's more fun to play to win than for score.
Raiden Fighters 2- Loved this one.
Dangon Feveron- I don't intend to play this game again... ever. That fucking cat pretty much wore this game's welcome out for good.
First STGT for me and I think it was very good. The great results surprised me a bit, overall 15th place for me and 3rd place for Fatloli Luftwaffe. Thanks to everyone who made this possible including our fellows who don´t or rarely post on Triggerzone: clp, m3tall1ca and EPS21!
For the individual games, I posted my thoughts in each thread, I´d rank them in this order:
Mars Matrix
Cyvern
Raiden Fighters 2
Dangun Feveron
Xexex
So basically three very good, one kinda ok and one horrible game for me. All in all I had lots of fun, yet I´m glad it´s over now as I couldn´t take much more. I´m a little burned out and happy to get back to a more relaxed style of play. For this tourney I had plenty of time, will most probably be less in the following years. So I´m also content with all of my scores except Dangun... most could have been slightly better, but that´s ok.
Thanks a lot to dex and the others for organizing this! Next year really needs some Psikyo (have I already mentioned Gunbird 2? )! And a good hori, too. How about Gradius IV for torture week?
Next up: Dreamcast version of Mars Matrix (I´ve already played it a little bit during the last two weeks of the tourney). Aiming for Plasmo´s and AVE´s scores and thus the 13th digit, too. Also I gotta unlock this fucking background option, but I´m not even halfway there. Needs 100-150 more Elite Mode Stage 4 score attacks.
@ clp
Batrider has already been part of a STGT before, so I guess (almost) no hopes for this.
First STGT for me and it was an absolute blast. While I'm hardly what I would consider a good player, I didn't fail completely and coming in around the middle of the field felt good. Glad to see my team of noble Underdogs held their own with Matasunaga and Juganawt clearly giving the team the boost we needed to succeed.
Great fun, can't wait for next year.
As for the games...
Cyvern- Didn't get to play as much as I wanted due to vacation plans, but what I did play I enjoyed. The chain medaling system was straight forward and easy to maintain, while the epically huge bosses provided some nice excitement and a kick to the end of each stage. Never did quite figure out the hit-box though
Xexex- Reminded me why I hate nearly all Konami Hori's. All the frustration with none of the charm of Parodius. Scoring was equally wonky. If i ever play this again it'll be too soon.
Mars Matrix- Had numerous friends bugging me to play this for years and sadly I feel that built up hype may have ruined it for me. As a game played for fun I probably could have enjoyed it, but as a title played for score it just fell flat. The one button control scheme was neat, but because I couldn't get the timing of the piercing laser down I kept dying unnecessarily.
Raiden Fighters 2- Game of the tournament by far and a great leveler. Chain medal system may have created a huge gap in scoring, but for those who finally mastered the 100k unlock on the first stage it was a great feeling. Barely made it into stage 4 and I felt I still had a presentable score. Loved it. Looked forward to playing it. Look forward to playing it again.
Dangon Feveron- I've often enjoyed just fucking around with this title but playing for score is just wrong. First there's the issue of the cat. Allow Uo Poko may not have forced players to use him for scoring, but it sure felt like it did. As such I imagine a lot of less experienced players faced a lot of painful deaths. On top of that there's the issue of the scoreboard. If an average player can't even place on it, then the game is what's needed for the tourney. The mere face that a blank high-score table needed to be provided in order to reasonably record our scores shows this was a bad idea.
My three recommendations for next year's event:
1. Keep scoring simple - Chain Medaling like Cyvern and Raiden Fighters 2 worked because they were easy to get into and easy to understand. Mars Matrix on the other hand was just needlessly complicated and intimidating with 50 Billion things to keep track of and way too much for someone to master in a mere week.
2. Maintain the Status Quo - Allowing Uo Poko was just a bad idea. Even though we didn't have to play as him, it felt like we did in order to even have a chance at a decent score and for me that was just frustrating. It'd be nice if in future tournaments we took that imbalance into account and tried to kept the playing field a little more level across all games.
3. Keep up with the Less Known Titles - I'd never played Cyvern before and while it wasn't the greatest shmup in the world, it was really nice to play something new. Even Xexex, which i absolutely hated, was a blast because a lot of us had never really given it a shot.
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MX7 wrote:I'm not a fan of a racist, gun nut brony puking his odious and uninformed arguments over every thread that comes up.
Still think this year was way less competitive than even last year. It would be nice if someone else had access to the scoreboard so it could be updated more regularly. Maybe up the team maximum to 8 people as well, there's more than enough participation for it Having the gap week this year obviously didn't help, but keeping the energy up through to week 5 would be a big step forward.
Thanks to the organisers and well done to the winners and stuff. good work team tax haven too enjoyed it this year, thought the game choices were really good apart from xexex, shame i misseed 1.5 weeks (due to playing halo tbh) as i'd have liked to play more mars matrix and rf2.
regarding the cat, i was sort of glad we could pick it because to get a good score with the other ships you have to know where everything is coming from and plan in advance which i'm useless at, with the cat you can do a reasonable job of scoring just by motoring around all over the place as it kills stuff so quick anyway, survival is a lot harder mind.
Ed Oscuro wrote:What I was disappointed in was that the cutoff for late scores wasn't consistent, and that definitely didn't help me. In Mars Matrix week, t0yrobo got a score added at 1:37 am after the deadline, but at the end of Xexex week, my 12:58 pm score (one from earlier that week, so not an attempt to dodge the deadline) got ignored. 58 minutes late, versus an hour and 37 minutes late. Octopod should be more upset since his was just 22 minutes late (though his score boost would have been a lot smaller). I didn't want to raise a fuss at the time to be civil, but I figure it should be mentioned.
I was surprised that score went through myself, I just tossed it out there so that I might have something submitted. For the sake of consistency it should be a hard deadline.
This was my first tournament and overall I had a pretty good time with it. Played some games I wouldn't have otherwise, but I didn't play anything much. School's been really kicking my ass, the most play time I had was 3.5 hours on RF2, and I didn't even bother with Dangun. I thought some of the games were kinda hard to get into having not played them much before, especially Mars Matrix and Dangun. RF2 has my favorite of the bunch, I didn't have any problems with mame and once I got the miclus locations down it was a lot of fun. Looking forward to next year, it's nice to have some shmup motivation .
Great selection of games this year, especially RF2 and Cyvern (Dangun goes without saying). Just wish I'd had more time to compete. Seriously, ShadowWraith's commitment in terms of hours invested was quite a depressing read (forty-fucking-seven hours!?). The most I put in was for RF2 @ ~16 hours, and that only happened because I had a freak weekend with no other commitments, coinciding with my gf buggering off to her parents'. Looks like I'll need to take a week off work next year to stand a chance of hitting the top 20!
Thanks to dex, davey, and anyone else who made this happen.
MR_Soren wrote:I was disappointed by my team's lack of participation and lack of a private team forum like in previous years. However, their lack of participation allowed more of my scores to be count, and it was nice to feel relevant. (Last year, I never finished above 4th within my team).
I'd personally like to apologize to team ldst this year due to not really being too involved this year, mainly because I'm working 60 hours a week currently (and I've been doing it since the beginning of August). Free time is absolutely nonexistant these days, and for the first time in 5 years I lack a server to host things on. Factor in a choice of games I wasn't too keen on, and there you have it for me.
RGC wrote:Looks like I'll need to take a week off work next year to stand a chance of hitting the top 20!
Actually, if you spend, say, 2-3 play hours per day (dividing them into two sessions might be a good idea), which isn't all that much honestly, you'll rack up 15+ hours each week easily. Granted you don't lack skills, it'll safely get you into top-40 by the end of the tourney regardless of the games chosen, probably even higher if you put these hours to good use (look for Enhasa's post on how to practice shooting games for a reference). You can also take short snippets of time while at work or in subway to watch gameplay videos showing you how to do the problematic parts. It helps more than you might think. So no need to take anything off. :D
Matskat wrote:This neighborhood USED to be nice...until that family of emulators moved in across the street....
Maybe, with my old job, when I was home by 5pm every day. Now, I'm putting in 50+ hours per week, which barely leaves enough time to do the domestic "essentials" like food shopping, cleaning, washing, etc. Weekends are generally booked-up for me months in advance. My lifestyle (and I'd seriously de-emphasise style here) is based on binge activities, and just doesn't allow for doing the same thing every evening. Probably would've helped this year if I had participated in all weeks. Just wait til next year! :p
Total Rank
Rank Team Points Change
--------------------------------------------------------
25.) League of Generally Nice People 2261 - 11
I'm rather surprised by this, how did they lose 11 ranks (and compared to what?) Anyway, I was hoping they would do better, since it seemed that somebody from the League could always be found on the page, posting alongside their spiritual brothers from the Society (but then again, nobody ever mistook Philosophers for generally nice people).
A for effort.
njiska wrote:My three recommendations for next year's event:
1. Keep scoring simple - Chain Medaling like Cyvern and Raiden Fighters 2 worked because they were easy to get into and easy to understand. Mars Matrix on the other hand was just needlessly complicated and intimidating with 50 Billion things to keep track of and way too much for someone to master in a mere week.
I am sorry, but this is just wrong. Perhaps you were just approaching it wrong, just like I was obviously approaching Dangun Feveron wrong (but I had FEEEVER i swear it). It happens that some games will seem off. Mars Matrix was really hard when I started trying it out some years ago (only for some minutes at a time) but for some reason it clicked this time - I can't really say why I had some good weeks in this tournament. I don't like to play the "I win u sux" card, but you got a score of just one billion, where I managed 14 billion with no real in-depth experience of the game before. All you have to know is how to reflect, and then learn to hold onto and build the chain. When you look at the game as being that simple, it makes the game simpler, even though the scoring chain requires some in-depth knowledge of when enemies appear. Raiden Fighters 2, well, whoever said that there are too many hidden secrets to memorize in just a week was spot on. I still love the game even playing without caring about Micluses after the first stage, but I think that (and Rob will approve of this statement) Mars Matrix is a more "pick up and play" game while RF2 is more of a long-lasting game. Which is not to say that you can't do well in RF2 (mainly because the stages up to S-6 are easy, at least the way I was playing it) or that there aren't hidden things in Mars Matrix (points fountain on the right side of stage 3 would've been a big score booster if I could have survived through it).
Scoring systems:
I actually enjoyed that Mars Matrix had a scoring system that allows for more thought than just "get as much items as possible". See it as an intellectual challenge to figure out how this actually works and what you gotta do to get a good score.
Play time:
I would really like to know how much time sikraiken has spent on each game. I just fear that his RF2 score was maybe the third credit and not even the third hour of playtime
The tournament was great, other than the first two weeks. I'll never play Cyvern or Xexex again. I always kinda liked Mars Matrix, now it's top ten for me. Dangun is ok, I may play it again someday. I did somewhat ok overall this year, a little better than middle of the pack. I'll be sharpening my skills for next year, watch out top 20.
Ed Oscuro wrote:I'm rather surprised by this, how did they lose 11 ranks (and compared to what?)
Scared me into thinking there was a bug in my scoring.
They only had one participating player this week, so they dropped 11 slots from week 4 (from 14 to 25).
Anyway...
I promised up front that my participation would be somewhere between minimal and non-existent... man, did I deliver.
Cyvern: Sounded interesting, but I was too busy.
Xexex: I don't even need to play this to know I'd hate it.
Mars Matrix: I tried to like this back in the day, but I just couldn't get into it. I can only imagine how frustrated I'd get with it now, especially for a one-week competition.
RF2: I stopped liking RFJ as soon as I started playing for score, so I didn't want to bother with this. I was hoping for Gunbird 2, and when that wasn't picked I thought I'd end up not participating at all in STGT '10.
Dangun Feveron: It's sad that 19 other people beat me at my favorite shmup, but oh well.
Second year for me. I thought it was great as usual. Hated DF but liked the rest. You can't please all the people all the time and as I have said before 3 out of 4 ain't bad.
My one gripe was that scoreboard should have been updated a bit quicker than it was.
^lol(i)
I had allot of fun, this being my first STGT. Big thank you to everybody that helped put this on. Thanks to everyone that shared strategy and replays. Thanks to my team for being helpfull.
A big congrats to SFKoa on the Mars Matrix counterstop!
Skykid wrote:
My mind is blown. I can't believe you put that many hours into each game. The most I gave was about 3 hours to RF2, and around the same for Xexex.
Man - you race classic motorbikes, pilot dirigibles, organise a badger baiting ring, fence, hand carve mahogany smoking pipes, do medieval re-enactments, restore Spitfires, customise diving bells, tailor fine tweed jackets, poach game birds, embroider silk gentlemans' napkins and freelance as a private eye. Don't feel bad that you haven't got much time left. You're making the most of your time here.
I had awesome fun in this year's STGT. Great to be pushed in some new directions and play for scores that mean a little more. Thanks so much to Dex. We all owe you one.
LOL, that was great!
(I don't do any of those things though... well, maybe one.)
Skykid wrote:
My mind is blown. I can't believe you put that many hours into each game. The most I gave was about 3 hours to RF2, and around the same for Xexex.
Man - you race classic motorbikes, pilot dirigibles, organise a badger baiting ring, fence, hand carve mahogany smoking pipes, do medieval re-enactments, restore Spitfires, customise diving bells, tailor fine tweed jackets, poach game birds, embroider silk gentlemans' napkins and freelance as a private eye. Don't feel bad that you haven't got much time left. You're making the most of your time here.
I had awesome fun in this year's STGT. Great to be pushed in some new directions and play for scores that mean a little more. Thanks so much to Dex. We all owe you one.
LOL, that was great!
(I don't do any of those things though... well, maybe one.)
Man, I would love to see Dash Yarou / Rally Bike in a tournament some year.
The funny thing is that although I obviously knew of STGT's existence, I had never bothered joining in past years for some reason. Mostly I was afraid of games getting picked that I had absolutely zero interest in playing. But that's what the team aspect is for, huh. Anyway, sikraiken wanted me to join TCACTRM and after mulling it over I decided why not, there was no way a buff-ass team like ours could lose. Bring it!
My thoughts on games:
Cyvern - Awful game. Something about it completely rubbed me the wrong way. I was having absolutely no fun playing it, and didn't feel like I could actually see myself improving that much on it as I played. It was just completely inconsistent. I could see that my team would have 3 good scores on this anyway, so I just gave up and never bothered to submit a score. (I kind of regret it since it gave me a lower player ranking, but oh well)
Xexex - Random extends? Seriously? Jesus christ. I got through the loop which was all I really wanted to accomplish. I was disgusted at the number of 2-loop clears there ended up being.
Mars Matrix - PIG DISGUSTING. Okay it's not the worst game ever, but I can't stand games where scoring is overly reliant on chaining nowadays. So many friggin restarts. I practiced the last level and last boss a shitload, and despite playing for like 5 hours on the last day I just couldn't manage to pull off a clear, which disappointed me greatly.
Raiden Fighters 2 - Good game! Shame about the problems involved in getting in running on emulators though. Double shame that it has a scoring system that doesn't make sense unless you look up how it works. A lot of players could have done better if they'd done a little research. I was pretty satisfied with my score but felt like I could have done better, seeing how I dropped chain once and missed a miclus.
Dangun Feveron - Cat breaks the game, nuff said. Haaaaaate having to use a ship that's so twitchy that you can't accurately slip through tight bullet patterns, but the game was strangely addicting for a while, until I hate the stage 4 roadblock. Once I finally got to stage 5 I stopped playing it entirely because I figured it would give me a decent placing, and the tournament was a wrap anyway.
Biggest criticism about this tournament - Break Week should not have been between weeks 2 and 3. Didn't make much sense to me to have it before the halfway mark. It seemed like there was less participation after the break week, even though the last 3 games were better than the first 2.
BBH wrote:Biggest criticism about this tournament - Break Week should not have been between weeks 2 and 3. Didn't make much sense to me to have it before the halfway mark. It seemed like there was less participation after the break week, even though the last 3 games were better than the first 2.
I completely forgot about that part but you were right. Just when the tournament was building speed it had it's feet cut out from under it. Breaking between weeks 3 and 4 would not only have offered some release from the complications of Mars Matrix, but it also would've avoided having a tournament week the same time Halo: Reach launched. A friendly, non-tourney score related challenge during the break week would also have helped keep momentum.
spadgy wrote:pilot dirigibles
Dirigibles. You sir are my hero.
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MX7 wrote:I'm not a fan of a racist, gun nut brony puking his odious and uninformed arguments over every thread that comes up.
- thank you, organizers, for one more year of fun and for all your effort in planning and making things go well!
- thank you, teammates (from both teams), friends (from the other teams) and everyone else, for giving me an opportunity to compete
- sorry for my ranting on Xexex and Mars Matrix, to those who like these games (Cyvern had less ranting from me)
this said..
- why did I like Varth, Thunder Dragon 2 and Battle Garegga past year? Because what you had to do in order to score in them (I'd call them goals: surviving without pods, killing white plane formations completely, getting items, reaching 7/8 bombs quickly and trying to stay with 7 bombs occasionally spending your 8th and trying to not die -- thus losing these bombs and resetting point item value --, chaining medals, bombing certain things, shooting certain things at the right times with the right shot) allowed (and didn't punish) freestyling in between important keypoints (look, a medal/bomb/item! what can I do to get it while staying alive? A lot of possibilities, and there's still a lot of time to think about them). Strikers 1945II felt restrictive because there was need for a lot of effort to get the medals at the right time, there was too many of these "keypoints", which also yielded frustration if you didn't get the 2000-point medals even after spending effort trying to get them. RFJ felt fair because, even though you had to practice stage 1 and learn how to enter DX Medal mode, you could choose the amount of risk you could take, and the reward for it.
- why didn't I like Cyvern as much? too many deaths trying to milk the first and second boss. (these didn't feel optional or a secondary source for score, like they feel in ESP Ra De)
- why didn't I like Xexex as much? random powerups and too many things that can kill you if you have bad memorization. Why do I complain about the random powerups? These make planning your gameplay more difficult, more trial-and-error looking. (maybe I'm comparing Xexex with X-Multiply a bit too much?)
- why didn't I like Mars Matrix as much? too easy to lose your chain (or to die trying to chain) if you have bad memorization (example, you must know that enemy x will come firing aimed shots at you so you must be on a place where you can misdirect it, hope your timing is right and hope that you're not too near/far away from it so that you can still collect the items without messing your timing on that enemy). Losing chains in this game is very punishing, really frustrating. At least that's what I felt. Did I also mention that freestyling is really prejudicial in this game, as exp counter is really important on it? (and even less forgiving than Giga Wing?)
- RF2 felt more forgiving than RFJ, in that it rewarded survival more (the further you can get, the more miclii and other bonuses you'll find), at the expense of multipliers. It was a fun game like RFJ, since it was mostly memorizing some important parts for survival (though I didn't enjoy much having to memorize the order of appearance of the side trains, which caused some medal chain breaking)
- I've played Feveron before, and the first impression was that it destroys my right wrist more than Raiden 2 destroys my left one on an arcade cab. But speedkilling is fun, and allows you to make the game become as hard as you want it to be.. though for greedy people such as myself, it's rewarding enough. Dying or not killing things fast enough didn't feel frustrating, but losing chains was restart-worthy. About the cat's gameplay? Even though it's not the best thing to do for more experienced people (than me), I just treated the shots like.. "do I need to kill a more resilient enemy faster? If so, is approaching it not safe due to nearby enemies or the enemy itself shooting at your face? Then focus, and return to spread later". For the cat's movement, I tried to tap directions to move to certain sections of the screen rather than rely on my positioning precision and timing, and if I got walled or rammed into bullets, I felt that it was my fault, so it was okay. Once again, my inability to memorize enemy attacks killed me, followed by my (average) coordination.
edit: Raiden 2 destroys my right wrist, the one I use to shoot things >_< (not that I'm good at it, I still use the toothpaste laser on the first stages :p)
I love the STGT, I have rarely time for random shmups and this way at least once I year I can concentrate on some cool games I wouldn't play otherwise. Too bad the STGT is at a really bad time for me: There are two big movie festivals during it, and one after it for which I have to do some work. About the games:
Cyvern- Excellent competition game, had fun playing it too
Xexex- Great game, I hope to see more this kind of gameplay in the future STGT's. Too bad I hadn't enough time to play it, was making good progress all the time (wasted many good runs on the stage 4 boss though, when trying to exploit the safe spot, even though it's mad easy by just blocking the upper tentacle with the Flint and so on). The random extends were good and bad, good in the sense that they made the boring grinding of first levels more bearable ("maybe THIS time I'll get three extends"). I'd be most interested in seeing a replay of sikraiken actually getting extends systematically, or at least hearing the exact method of getting them...
Mars Matrix- Pig disgusting It's just down to memorizing and pointblanking the whole fucking game to keep the chain alive. Not my idea of fun. Well, it could be, if I was on a deserted island for years and it was the only game I had.
Raiden Fighters 2- Now this was cool. Too bad one week was not enough to learn it, I kept experimenting with different planes/slaves and digging up Miclii and finally didn't have time to score.
Dangun Feveron- Never liked it, and after this, even less. Although I did kind of learn to control the cat, it was still mostly down to a whole lot of memorizing to know where each and every enemy appears. Too bad there's no autofire in MAME OS X, so I couldn't try the autofire trick gotten from a fellow Oldschooler.
Anyway, big thanks to the organizers, things went smoothly and I think this surprise game -system is better than voting, saves time for players. Also big thanks to the all-mighty Team Oldschoolers for all the tips and congratulations on being such bad-ass players and ranking up so high.
Before Pope John Paul died he decreed that Aliens were also GOD's creatures and we should treat them with respect.
)! And a good hori, too. How about Gradius IV for torture week?
Having the gap week this year obviously didn't help, but keeping the energy up through to week 5 would be a big step forward.
It's just down to memorizing and pointblanking the whole fucking game to keep the chain alive. Not my idea of fun. Well, it could be, if I was on a deserted island for years and it was the only game I had. 
