The BIG thread of Shmup grievances.

[DJ Incompetent]

Maybe that's just cause I've been traumatized by stuff like Mega Man Zero, where everything is so static that you can beat the game once and it'll never be challenging ever again

I'm a pretty big Mega Man fan but I have to admit that this is kinda true. I even managed to beat Mega Man 10 from start to finish without getting hit once (as denoted by the Mr. Perfect achievement)...:

Wow. Respect!

[jepjepjep]

And, yes, I do know how the sweeping vulcan chooses directions. The difficulty isn't in the time when the stream starts moving, it's when it's near the end of its sweep and the streams are going closer to horizontal.

Try to anticipate when he is going to start the vulcan spread so that you can position yourself near the center of the screen horizontally. I find it much easier to dodge when you start near the center.

Anyone have any tips for the Black Heart Mk II vulcan spread?

His wings don't damage him. You have to shoot the center.
Did not know that. That explains a lot, and really worries me, since the only way I can consistently deal with his afterburners is to macrododge the attack when he comes down instead of staying in between them, and since I deal with his spreads by misdirecting them sharply instead of tap-dodging through them.

I think you'll have an easier time with BH if you stay in between the afterburners, that way you can deal a lot of direct damage (even more by using forward formation on your options).

[SuperSoaker360]

Oh boy, GundeadliGne. Where to start?

- Slow-movement delay is a stupid idea. Apparently it's intentional and not a bug. Nice job.
- Difficulty selection hardly makes a difference other than changing your starting phase-level and Advanced having Mana drops instead of Life Up drops.
- Rank control becomes a primary element for survival play. Why should I have to purposely get hit once before killing a boss in order to keep rank down? Personally it's a stupid idea since there are several bosses per level sections and killing one will raise your phase-level/rank up by one level, which is quite a lot considering that the highest phase-level is 21.
- True Last Boss requirements are too easy for a ridiculously RNG-based boss fight. I think there was only one occasion where I 1CC'd the entire game and didn't get the TLB. Bombing completely restores the TLB's health. That's stupid, especially since you basically have to fall back on the reserve lives in your stock. What makes it even more annoying is that once you get hit, you lose your rhythm and track of what you're dodging so you're very prone to getting hit again. Getting hit will not remove ANY bullets on the screen.
- Getting hit on the TLB with auto-bomb will automatically restore her entire health, so if you play with auto-bomb on, you pretty much have to no-miss the entire TLB from beginning to end... which is ironically a greater feat than a regular auto-bomb off 1CC.
- Michael. I don't even understand a proper way to beat Michael. All I know is you need planeshift to be active in order to deal damage but I've been doing just that and I hardly inflict any damage at all. Maybe I'm just doing it wrong...?
- Replays are a little weird. This is a bit more of a nitpick, but I wanted to study the TLB's health but the replay isn't completely synchronized. If you start watching a replay at Stage 5, the game will play out as normal but the TLB will not appear in the replay unless you start at a point in the replay where during the entire replay the requirements for the TLB are fulfilled. One of my replays ended in a game over on the TLB and when I watched it again starting from Stage 5, it apparently showed me clearing the boss, the replay ending where the TLB should have shown up (my character was still doing the replay inputs, flailing around dodging bullets that weren't there).

I'm very, VERY irritated at this game right now. I failed three 1CCs as Eryth on Standard because the True Last Boss destroyed me.

But on the plus side, this game has naked girls and DM Ashura did an exceptional job on the arranged soundtrack!

[Chaos Phoenixma]

So much about that game actually annoys me.

no life drops on the higher difficulties makes rank control impossible on them. There's bombing, but you don't get enough bombs to keep it in control.

Eryth/Sapphire's bomb doesn't heal the TLB, at least from what I've seen in vids. but Eryth Sapphire is tough to play well.


TLB's health regenerates over time, even if you don't bomb. TLB replays in Demonic Challenge for Nagi will desync because the replay will do no damage since the replay doesn't factor in the reduced regen in Demonic Challenge, so the damage is nulled, but for other characters they should work fine. Not sure what causes desyncs on the other Demonic Challenges.

TLB is static and can be memorized. Unfortunately, I think there's some differences between the in stage version and the Demonic Challenge. So at least there's something that helps.

[ACSeraph]

So I got Muchi Muchi Pork and Pink Sweets on the cheap mostly because I wanted to play MMP. I've been trying to also get a feel for Pink Sweets but damn that game feels like garbage for a cave game. The first time I played it I didn't read up on it so I was using the charge up attack and absorbing bullets and picking up power ups like a madman thinking to myself that the game was really fun and interesting because of all the options you had with your ship. Anyone who has played it will know the game became impossibly hard pretty quickly going by that strategy because of the rank system. I looked into the ST to get a feel for the right way to play it and was dumbfounded by how derp the way you have to manage your rank in this game is. Why put in all those cool ass ship abilities and then force your players to abstain from using them with a stupidly unbalance rank system? This game is the ultimate tease. I'm still going to put some more time into it using the ST but considering I'm now raging in front of my 360 trying to get my shot frequency to level up I have a feeling I'm not going to stick with this for long. Can anyone defend this game?

[SuperSoaker360]

TLB is static and can be memorized.

Really? Well there's something new.

I don't think I'll be sticking to this game very long. I'll just get my Standard 1CC with Eryth and be on my way.

[AntiFritz]

Pink Sweets is as if yagawa threw everything into a blender and out came a mixture of the most delicious and tasty crap imaginable.

[SuperSoaker360]

Played Hitogata Happa

What the fuck.
I'm not even going to start.

[Pretas]

I agree that Pink Sweets would have benefited from an arrange mode that greatly reduced or eliminated the rank. The boss patterns are so obviously designed around the charge -> shield -> burst mechanic, and it just feels wrong when you can't use it until the last couple of stages.

[Uzumakijl]

I agree that Pink Sweets would have benefited from an arrange mode that greatly reduced or eliminated the rank. The boss patterns are so obviously designed around the charge -> shield -> burst mechanic, and it just feels wrong when you can't use it until the last couple of stages.

That's what the 360 arrange is...

[trap15]

No it's not. At all. Pink Sweets Arrange is vastly different from the original.

[ACSeraph]

No it's not. At all. Pink Sweets Arrange is vastly different from the original.

Interesting, maybe I should try it out then. I pushed through with it for a few hours last until I realized I had heaps of shooters sitting on the shelf and it was stupid to try to force myself to like it. But if arranged is totally different there might still be some fun to be had.

[trap15]

If you like Bakraid, you'll like Pink Sweets Arrange.

If you don't like Bakraid, you'll probably not like Pink Sweets Arrange.

[Uzumakijl]

Yeah, that's what i meant, Pink Sweets Arrange is glorious, i think the only hard mechanic about it is killing the enemies with the proper shot/rose/bomb and so on, but the game is really really fun. Also Time Attack or Score Attack whatever it is called is great.

[ACSeraph]

Just read up on it in the strategy forum and it seems way better than the original version to me. I look forward to trying it out when I get home tonight.

[Battlesmurf]

I'd be surprised if it hasn't been mentioned.

Any shmup with bullet wobble. Particularly Raiden 4. Such an awesome game, but the bullet wobble irritates me to no end.

[Aquas]

Was looking in the clear for a 1cc on my friend's candy cabinet for Dangun Feveron with 1 life in stock on the last stage, where the huge fleet of power-up carriers appears with a bomb within one of them as well. I destroy a bunch of them, releasing the bomb item, go into to grab it, grab it, then am shot down immedietely afterwards. Morale goes down the drain and game over at the beginning of the boss. Fuck!

[ACSeraph]

Pink sweets arrange mode is insane fun, it's everything I wish the original version was. Totally changes my opinion of the game, thanks for mentioning it.

[oboewan42]

Played Hitogata Happa

What the fuck.
I'm not even going to start.

Just wait until you figure out the core mechanic... you'll hate it even more.

Unrelated note: Vasara 2 is a great game, though it would be better if you could actually, you know, kill stuff by shooting at it. Though it doesn't really matter, since the scoring system is set up so as to actively penalize you for using anything but charge shots. Why'd they even give you a gun?

Also, Sol Divide. All of it. Just all of it.

And finally, I wish I could go back in time and tell all arcade developers what an aspect ratio is. Particularly pre-Neo-Geo SNK, NMK, and especially Capcom. Progear actually plays better widescreen, what the hell. It's especially bad with Capcom games - most of the time it seems like half the team was optimizing for aspect ratio and the other half wasn't.

[Blinge]

Shmups where it's very hard to regain your powerups after you die, especially when they're floating around the screen still but rushing for them will probably spell your doom.. *cough*strikers1945*cough*

damn, what an odd cough I have..

[Special World]

Pink sweets arrange mode is insane fun, it's everything I wish the original version was. Totally changes my opinion of the game, thanks for mentioning it.

Pink Sweets arrange is, in fact, the shit. I love vanilla Sweets as well though. The only thing I wish was that Arrange had a more normal curve; it feels like I absolutely dominate the first few levels and then get my day wrecked all of a sudden. Needs a tougher beginning with a gradual buildup.

[trap15]

A related one to Blinge's: games that take away all of your powerups upon death, and have no ranking system/checkpoints.

[oboewan42]

A related one to Blinge's: games that take away all of your powerups upon death, and have no ranking system/checkpoints.

My thoughts exactly.

Shmups should not explicitly punish you for dying. There's already a built-in punishment for dying. It's called death.

[Obscura]

Along those lines, I really hate it when I die near the edge of the screen in Garegga and lose all of my options off the side. Frequently, there's no way to recover if that happens.

[iconoclast]

The shell casings the DOJ stage 4 midboss drops are really annoying. There's probably some way to predict exactly where they're going to spawn (I assume it's based off of your current position), but they seem really random to me at the moment. That makes them a pain to deal with since you need to hit two or three of them if you want to continue your chain into the next area.

[oboewan42]

Similar to what I mentioned about Vasara: Blazing Star would be a much, much better game if its scoring system wasn't a steaming pile of monkey shit.

[Hagane]

Shmups should not explicitly punish you for dying. There's already a built-in punishment for dying. It's called death.

Leaving you without power ups may be too extreme, but you should always be punished for your mistakes and pretty much every worthwhile STG has a way to do so (from reduced firepower and scoring penalties to not being able to access loops and bosses).

[oboewan42]

Two more Vasara/Blazing Star grievances:

1. The Vasara mechanic in Vasara (thankfully it was fixed in Vasara 2). Basically, you charge up a meter by collecting gems, and when it's full, you can release an overgrown charge attack/invulnerability period. Because it counts as a charge attack, and because Vasara's scoring is based on hitting multiple enemies with a single charge attack for a combo multiplier, it would make sense to save it for an enemy-rich area to maximize points.

Except that you can't.

You see, the Vasara attack replaces your next charge attack. I guess you could just not do any charge attacks, except that, as I mentioned earlier, Vasara's scoring system emphasizes doing nothing but charge attacks (not to mention that the enemies are often hard to kill with your normal shot). And it takes so many gems to charge up, and the gems are often so hard to collect, that any prospect of planning out a route is out the window.

2. Bosses without health meters, especially in games that give you multiple methods of attack (i.e. autofire vs. spamming charged shots) and no indication of which is the most effective boss-killer.

[Obscura]

My grievance: Actually buying Alltynex 2nd instead of just getting Kamui and RefleX.

Kamui is awesome, and RefleX is decent, but Alltynex 2nd is one of the biggest piles of shit I've ever seen. Bullets that are totally invisible thanks to the awful 3D engine, huge aspects of the game's "controls" that the player has no actual control over (such as facing when using the sword or which enemy the big laser chooses to lock on to), literal luck in the score system and for raw survival (partially because the lock-on is apparently randomly determined, partially because certain patterns are partially randomized, partially because a bullet sometimes sneaks past the sword since its rhythm is so retarded), and some of the dumbest stage design I've ever seen (the whole game: wave of popcorn enemies with one big enemy. Wait 3 seconds. Repeat wave from the other side of the screen. Continue for 5 minutes until you get to a boss, at which point you sit in the point-blank safespot and hold down the sword button) add up to a complete shitgame.

And because I actually bought it, I feel compelled to actually spend time playing it, instead of just moving on. Fuck.

I can't believe that SiterSkain is reusing this engine for their next game.

[m0ng00se]

i've been playing jamestown and there's a challenge where enemies spawn from certain spots in the background scenery, and they can spawn DIRECTLY ON TOP OF YOUR ASS

dirty trick and it's like impossible for me to focus on the background art to make sure i dont accidentally park myself on a death spot.

if it's in any other games it would be just as terrible there