Jamestown Lives!

[TrevHead (TVR)]

No twin stick control if thats what you mean, with the gunner you move and aim with the left stick / dpad. While ive hardly used the gunner myself, imo it would control better with analog due to it having 360 movement so you can aim the gunner easier. And when encountering bullet hell sections like boss fights the player could switch to the dpad.

[Square King]

There must be a way to control the gunner I don't know about, then. In the vid, T-hawk can move and direct the secondary fire independently. I haven't used the gunner much, so I'm definitely uninformed.

[T-hawk]

I'm playing with a plain Logitech gamepad with a regular d-pad, no analog control.

You do have to move the Gunner ship to change its aiming. The one exception is if you press the special button without moving at all, the aim will align to the nearest 8-directional compass point. I use this on several occasions, most notably while milking the stage 1 boss to get the fire exactly horizontal.

With the digital d-pad, the Gunner can aim easily only on one of the 8 directions. But it takes a split second for the aim to rotate around to where you're pointing, so if you press and release the special button very precisely, you can aim more freely than the 8 directions. This takes practice but I've gotten the hang of it.

[Zosite]

Ummm... maybe it's me but there's something here I'd swear it didn't happen before the last update:

Whenever you lose a life your ship gets stuck until you lift the direction control you were pressing and press it again. I don't know if this is the case for anybody else but I tend to keep direction controls pressed so I can immediately maneuver the ship again after respawn so this comes to be a little annoying; it was much more intuitive before.

On the other hand maybe this is because of those control fixes implemented with the last patch and it's how it's supposed to work.

[Udderdude]

I also found that if you aren't holding a direction down and then hold it after you die, you won't move as soon as you respawn. You have to let go and press it again.

Sounds like a bug to me.

[TrevHead (TVR)]

I think you are correct Udderdude, I had the same problem 2 patches back where my ship would freeze after respawning, its probably the same bug.

[Observer]

They also did something pretty bad to Divine mode because it runs with additional slowdown now. Unless it was intended. It just doesn't feel like the "Cave slowdown" we are used to see.

But the worst is the Gauntlet mode. Horribly buggy (I lost a credit, suddenly I had zero!), the slowdown feels considerably pronounced there for some reason, although now you seem you can gain extends but... but you can't restart! This thing needs urgently a restart option to avoid going through all the freaking options over and over. And the pop up that informs you what the Gauntlet is needs to go or become optional ("don't show this again").

[Udderdude]

Overall thoughts:

Ship 1 and 4 are awful, Ship 2 is by far the best, Ship 3 is average. It feels like the devs tested the game with Ship 2 and ignored the other three almost entirely.
There's no interesting variables to play around with in terms of scoring. You go into vaunt, and then keep chaning gold until the end of the stage. There's no flexibility or experimentation on the part of the player.
The widescreen vertizontal + scrolling adds up to way too much screen real estate. Trying to cover the entire screen is impossible without ship 2.
The music is boring and doesn't fit a shooter at all. I'm not sure what the devs were going for, but it didn't work.
As mentioned, it needs a restart option, badly. And the level opening text needs to be skippable.
It also needs to save my control inputs. Having to press and hold the buttons I want every time gets annoying fast.
Boss explosions are underwhelming. Needs more booms, and less fading the screen to white then they're suddenly just gone.

Stage 2 intro has some really wierd shit where the clouds (which are all supposed to be under the player) scroll faster than the bullets and gives a really wierd sense of movement when you're scrolling left and right. Similar to that effect where bullets don't scroll with the background on cheap Korean arcade games, except worse.
Stage 3 is prob. the best in the game. 2nd place stage 1.
Stage 4 is pretty boring, those big floating platforms with X's popping out of them are not fun to fight at all. The mine carts hardly do any firing on you.
Stage 5 is a pain in the ass. There's way too much dead time where you're just blowing up walls and waiting for other walls to open up. Most of the stage is boring with a few spots where you have to memorize or die. Also the walls can crush you even when your ship should be invunerable (flickering or vaunt).

Boss 3 dies far too quickly to be any sort of threat. Feels more like a midboss. If you try to milk it for score it's just boring/tedious.
Boss 4 doesn't have much attack variety, and the power cores that pop up when you destroy the red orbs should make some sort of noise when they're vunerable or popping up.
Boss 5 1st form is a joke, all the other bosses are harder than it. Multiple safe spots, etc. As seen in T-Hawk's vid, the final boss also has safe spots with ship 2, and it's easy to avoid most of it's attacks with a well timed vaunt (Which you are encoraged to do anyway)

Not sure how the game stands up on Judgement skill, so some of the above may not apply to it.

Not sure what's up with people reporting PC specific slowdown, but this should NOT happen under any circumstances. Especially considering how even an older PC should be able to run it perfectly. If it's true, it should be possible to lag the game intentionally and play it in slow motion, and then it'll be 10 times easier.

Overall not a bad first effort. Stage 5 pisses me off so much that I doubt I'll play it much more, though. Especially since the stage 5 boss is such a let down. And no, I don't care how the multiplayer turned out. Unless someone does a double play run or something. :P

Misc:

What is up with the system requirements for this game? I don't expect it to run on a 486 or anything, but goddamn. Why do you need any sort of 3D graphics for an entirely sprite based pixelated 2D game? I'm actually afraid to see how it would run on my netbook. And what's up with 512 MB RAM? Are they duplicating the low res sprite art 200 times in memory or something? The entire game data files don't even come out to over 100 MB of space.

Processor: Intel Pentium 4 @ 2.4 GHz / AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Memory: 512 Mb
Video Card: Any OpenGL 2.0 graphics card with 256 MB+ video RAM

Also the steep price tag (For an indie game) and lack of a demo probably hurt sales tremendously.

[TrevHead (TVR)]

@Udderdude I agree with you on the ships, the gunner (ship 2) is way overpowered compared to the others, The Normal ship (ship 1)which is a DDP type C is too slow imo especially when trying to move from one side of the screen to the other. The bomber (ship 4) is just a ship for lols which is fine for me

If the devs dont change the balance of the ships (which might annoy other players if they did) I would like to see them add another ship that has a wide angle shot and is a little faster, Im not really into the gunner ship as I just want a standard fixed shot but still want a wideshot to kill the popcorn.

While I havnt bothered with it myself you should give Judgement difficulty a go as its quite different from the rest. It has green bullets that pass through the vault and is very much a bullet hell. Gunner ship seems to be a must if youre playing this mode.

As for stage 5, I quite like it personally, having walls in a vert is quite a rare thing.

[Udderdude]

On the stage 5, I quite like it, having walls in a vert is quite a rare thing.

Problem is they're done so poorly that it's worse than if they hadn't added them at all.

Walls that create deadtime and 'wait for me to open!' sequences, and are hardly visible aren't fun. It actually took me awhile to notice the forcefield walls. I thought I was running into nothing and the game had an invisible wall stuck there.

While I havnt bothered with it myself you should give Judgement difficulty a go as its quite different from the rest. It has green bullets that pass through the vault and is very much a bullet hell. Gunner ship seems to be a must if youre playing this mode.

I've seen some videos of it and while it does look harder, most of the green bullets that are invincible to vaunt are not new, they're just the red or blue bullets changed to green. The main difficulty increase seems to be that the bullets are all faster. You won't be using vaunt more than once during the stage anyway, since you're supposed to full chain it in vaunt mode. And it's not useless to use vaunt on the bosses. It will leave the green bullets left, which still means 50% of the bullets are gone as opposed to 100%.

[Observer]

Well, that might apply on Judgment if you use the Gunner ship. Use any other ship and you are screwed. It's clearly designed for a constant on/off of the vaunt combined to the "ignore those green bullets" but enemies fire way too much, way too fast and way too randomly, as seen on the first stage where it's just ridiculous.

And I hate the Gunner ship. I actually hate the firepower of most of the ships... It's just way too erratic.

I actually loved the music, heh. Except that it just doesn't work on Stage 5. It needed more grandiose exaggeration.

Uh, god dammit, it's already going for $6 on Steam.

[Udderdude]

Well, that might apply on Judgment if you use the Gunner ship. Use any other ship and you are screwed. It's clearly designed for a constant on/off of the vaunt combined to the "ignore those green bullets" but enemies fire way too much, way too fast and way too randomly, as seen on the first stage where it's just ridiculous

Yup, if you play for score on Judgement with anything but Ship 2 you are pretty much scrwed. The other ships need some major rebalancing in terms of damage and movement speed. Adding a speedup button would help, although I really doubt that's going to happen. There's just too much screen real estate to cover for anything but Ship 2.

I would like to see someone do a full chain run of Judgement though. Are there really random bullets on Judgement?

Ship 4 is so useless, I felt like I wasted my gold unlocking it. You'd be lucky to make it past the first stage with that piece of junk. Seriously. Farce mode and Ship 4 should both unlock at the same time .. :P

I actually loved the music, heh. Except that it just doesn't work on Stage 5. It needed more grandiose exaggeration.

The epic symphony orchestra thing has been done better with soundtracks like Ikaruga, RSG, Souky, etc.

Stage 5 was so overblown that it didn't even match the gameplay at that point. Oh boy, a guy in his undies in a yellow crystal. That's epic. >_>

[Observer]

Stage 5 was so overblown that it didn't even match the gameplay at that point. Oh boy, a guy in his undies in a yellow crystal. That's epic. >_>

Well, as overblown as it is, I like it The music I mean. Agreed on the other thing, that's why I complain. You put me the grandiose symphonic choir and orchestra... with a dude in his undies. Turn him into Cthulhu or something! I would rather have Xiga doing some kung-fu fighting. Or pulling another Stone-Like relative. The guy has a big family across shooters.

Regarding Judgment, on later stages bullets come in cleaner patterns but the small tanks on stage 1 are an absolute nightmare without gunner.

I still feel the worst things is the lack of restart/change ship options in Gauntlet. It really prevents me from trying to 1cc the thing...

[Udderdude]

Stage 5 was so overblown that it didn't even match the gameplay at that point. Oh boy, a guy in his undies in a yellow crystal. That's epic. >_>

Well, as overblown as it is, I like it :P The music I mean. Agreed on the other thing, that's why I complain. You put me the grandiose symphonic choir and orchestra... with a dude in his undies. Turn him into Cthulhu or something! I would rather have Xiga doing some kung-fu fighting. Or pulling another Stone-Like relative. The guy has a big family across shooters.

It would have actually been cooler if the yellow crystal thing eats/kills the main bad guy, then proceeds to fight you.

I just noticed their company name is Final Form Games, yet their final boss's final form is the same guy but in his undies. teehee.

One thing I forgot to mention .. no midbosses anywhere. Come on, if you're going to make a 25 minute, 5 stage game, you might as well at least add some midbosses.

[TrevHead (TVR)]

Well, that might apply on Judgment if you use the Gunner ship. Use any other ship and you are screwed. It's clearly designed for a constant on/off of the vaunt combined to the "ignore those green bullets" but enemies fire way too much, way too fast and way too randomly, as seen on the first stage where it's just ridiculous.

Yeah I felt the same about the the stage designed for strategic on / off usage of the vault, thats with me playing stage 1 with the beam ship. However I refrained from saying anything in case it wasnt so much as the game but that I suck (which I do anyway lol)

I would also call for a rapid restart option for gauntlet, especially when it takes me a few restarts to get into my stride. Ive got a funny feeling that the devs have left it out on purpose to force the player to make every credit count. But for me personally thats a hard thing to do when I havnt payed real money for the credit or if my brain isnt firing on all cylinders due to tiredness or a cold (which ive got atm).

While we are nitpicking ill add that those homing saucer things in stage 3 can be a pain if you miss one and it later comes from the bottom of the screen and kills you unexpectedly. Also those homing shot ships in the beginning of stage 2 have a slight cheap death feel to them as the have a habit of firing an extra shot after it leaves the screen. Saying that they arnt as bad as a raiden sniper tank and are easy to deal with once you know theyre there.

Even with its faults I still think its a decent game It seems to do its own thing which I admire. I have no problem with its simplistic scoring system (destroying ships in a certain way to earn a special bonus is a very nice touch) as it encourages perfect play. For its cheap price I would recommend it to any shmup fan, It has good artwork and soundtrack (which I think fits the game) and there enough content for most players to amuse themselves playing solo aslong as they dont mind a change of pace to their complex Cave danmaku.

The games greatest strength is in getting new ppl to play vertical shmups as unlike Cave and Touhou which scare ppl away this game wont and is designed in a way to keep them improving and moving onto the harder difficulties. Anyone who has friends and family who are gamers shouldnt think twice about picking this up.

[Observer]

Well, TrevHead pretty much said it all there.

I will repeat once again: this game SHINES when played with 2 or more people. That's where the money and the fun is. The hilarity, idiocy or plain tension of some situations really make it worth it. But, sadly, I don't get to drag three buddies every day, nooo. With work I can barely drag my brother with me. I have a cold too and I echo the sentiment. Don't play shooters with a heavy cold, wryneck and a headache. Let alone Beat Hazard or Jamestown on Divine/Judgment. As Udderdude pointed: there is just way too much screen space to cover with only one ship. That's why Gunner works so damn well: you can have full screen coverage with little movement. Causes far less mistakes than moving like a maniac trying not to miss enemy waves.

[mjclark]

Yup, if you play for score on Judgement with anything but Ship 2 you are pretty much scrwed. The other ships need some major rebalancing in terms of damage and movement speed. Adding a speedup button would help, although I really doubt that's going to happen. There's just too much screen real estate to cover for anything but Ship 2.


Ship 4 is so useless, I felt like I wasted my gold unlocking it. You'd be lucky to make it past the first stage with that piece of junk. Seriously. Farce mode and Ship 4 should both unlock at the same time ..


The epic symphony orchestra thing has been done better with soundtracks like Ikaruga, RSG, Souky, etc.

Stage 5 was so overblown that it didn't even match the gameplay at that point. Oh boy, a guy in his undies in a yellow crystal. That's epic. >_>

@Udderdude: I'd be really interested to know what independently developed shmups produced in the last five years you think are well made and worth playing.

And yeah- Jamestown needs an online co-op feature so badly!

[DocHauser]

@Udderdude: I'd be really interested to know what independently developed shmups produced in the last five years you think are well made and worth playing.

Let me guess...XOP Black Ultra

[Zosite]

@Udderdude: I'd be really interested to know what independently developed shmups produced in the last five years you think are well made and worth playing.

And yeah- Jamestown needs an online co-op feature so badly!

Word. Some would vote for ZUN's (b-but... but... if it's ALWAYS the same) stuff and everybody *MUST* agree on holy Crimzon *blahblahblah* Clover. But JT is indeed worth those few bucks and even some more IMHO, not to mention those poor fellas at Final Form who are clearly struggling to patch/improve it the best they can (and it's far from being perfect).

However... Udderdude is perfectly entitled to his criticism (we even share a couple of points there) and as long as he has bought the game he's already supporting it. May all his complaints serve to improve Final Form's next piece of (pixel) art.

[Observer]

Complaints aside, I need the OST badly. Please, let it have a physical release like the Shatter OST did... I'm just such a sucker for orchestral "epic" soundtracks. Knowing it's from a fellow latin american artist makes it even better.

Well, hoping they'll add an Extra Stage for the masters with a TLB. Would like to see a western approach to a martian Hibachi taunting you in spanish.

[TrevHead (TVR)]

[Word. Some would vote for ZUN's (b-but... but... if it's ALWAYS the same) stuff and everybody *MUST* agree on holy Crimzon *blahblahblah* Clover. But JT is indeed worth those few bucks and even some more IMHO, not to mention those poor fellas at Final Form who are clearly struggling to patch/improve it the best they can (and it's far from being perfect).

However... Udderdude is perfectly entitled to his criticism (we even share a couple of points there) and as long as he has bought the game he's already supporting it. May all his complaints serve to improve Final Form's next piece of (pixel) art.

I agree, anyone who is a shmup fan with a decent PC and hasnt bought it should hang their head in shame. I mean how often to we see a western developer create such an homage to 2D pixel art Japanese STGs? Especially a Japanese styled STG that has managed to make it to Steam despite Valve been the anti Japanese Nazis that they are. I would of expected this thread to be full of fans congratulating Final Form on what is their first project, something that has taken all their savings to come to fruition. (not that this thread is empty but still...) I really hope Final Form make enough money from this game and create DLC and later other shmups using what they learned with Jamestown to make them even better. (Like an widescreen twinkle star sprites clone with online co-op nudge nudge )

Atm the JT has 33% knocked off due to the steam sales £4.68 http://store.steampowered.com/app/94200/?snr=1_4_4__13

[Udderdude]

I would of expected this thread to be full of fans congratulating Final Form on what is their first project, something that has taken all their savings to come to fruition.

I would expect half the reason for this being that they went from a true vert shmup to a widescreen vertizontal. And probably had to re-do all of the artwork made for the game up to that point, in addition to reprogramming most of it.

Pixel art at that scale is a lot more costly and time consuming, as they've no doubt discovered ..

There's plenty of people that like the game despite it's flaws, so mission accomplished, I guess. If they can make another game that's better, that would be cool.

[mjclark]

There's plenty of people that like the game despite it's flaws, so mission accomplished, I guess. If they can make another game that's better, that would be cool.

@Udderdude: I'm still really interested in what recent games you'd recommend or enjoy playing yourself.
I'm not being sarcastic or trolling (honest!), it's just that you clearly have an excellent understanding of game building and an eye for detail.
Your XOP series is magnificent as almost everyone agrees, and I'd love to know what other game developers command your respect
Fuck, I'm sounding like one of those kissasses now...

[TrevHead (TVR)]

@ Udderdude, Yeah you do have a point, folk here do love their verts and seeing the game change from a full on 2 player vert to widescreen 4 player must have put some ppl off. I know im moving into crackpot conspiracy theory territory here, but it wouldnt surprise me that part of the reason why FF changed the game was to get it onto Steam.

[Voxbox]

I for one think the game is excellent. Not perfect of course, but really solid and in multiplayer down right fantastic. This is great for boosting interest in the genre.

A restart option in gauntlet would be very nice. As would being able to use the Esc-button to go backwards in the menus. There's imbalance among the ships for sure, especially when playing on the higher difficulties.

Beam is near decent. The spread isn't really good enough, neither is the beam, or rather the movement speed is so slow that you can't actually dodge anything while using it.

Charge I'm not really feeling. Mostly it's the lack of spread that's the problem. All the orbs are too fast to actually cover ground pre-emptively, even the large ones. First I thought the DPS was too low, but if you actually manage to aim it's seems really good. A hassle timing your shots though. Perhaps some sort of charge-indicator in the HUD would help.

Bomb, oh Bomb... Actually detonating the bullets is nearly useless, as it doesn't seem to increase your DPS against bigger enemies and just makes you kill popcorn enemies in a slower pace. Maybe if the explosions lasted for a little while, dealing damage. As for the actual "bombing"... after exiting Vaunt you're fucked. The other half of the screen is crawling with bullet-spewing enemies (since movementspeed/shield time isn't enough to clear the screen) and the "coins" for your kills gives you nothing because you're in cooldown, so you can't Vaunt until you've somehow managed to dodge your way underneath the enemies and then surviving there until your peashooter kills something. That could be fixed by letting you refill your Vaunt during it's cooldown.

[T-hawk]

Anyone still want more videos? Here's the final stage on Judgement (the hardest) difficulty. Full combo and #1 solo score rank.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXKmi8M3gPQ

[linko9]

Anyone still want more videos? Here's the final stage on Judgement (the hardest) difficulty. Full combo and #1 solo score rank.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXKmi8M3gPQ

Awesome videos, keep 'em coming man.

[Udderdude]

Anyone still want more videos? Here's the final stage on Judgement (the hardest) difficulty. Full combo and #1 solo score rank.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXKmi8M3gPQ

That was pretty nice except for the last boss, which you said yourself doesn't matter. In fact I just noticed continuing doesn't reset score .. oh well.

Having your last boss able to be credit fed through with no score penalty is kind of meh.

[DeathAxe]

I'm using a ps2 stick (custom using the 15th anniv fight pad) through an adapter. This game (no other games or emus) the direction randomly stopps working in game. I pause, the curse still moves fine... unpausing it still wont work... then I pause and go to rebind then it works fine for a bit... then stopps working again...

anyone know what is going on here?

[Veracity]

There's a score bonus for remaining credits, isn't there? I think a bigger concern if you're interested in leaderboard competition is that there's one solo filter when there need to be four. I don't personally see the problem, necessarily, with ship types being "unbalanced" - if someone wants to figure out how to survive Croatoa on Judgment using bomber, good luck to them. But ranking their score equivalently to gunner is just comical. 'course, Takumi does that, as well.

I enjoyed shooting a man in his underpants to overblown orchestral backing as a sexagenarian Walter Raleigh. Don't know, but I think it's just meant to make you smile. Certainly did me. Agree the Conquistador boss more or less just rolls over and dies, though that might be at least partly a hit point issue.