Shmup Goals 2015 - The REKT'ining

[EmperorIng]

RayCrisis is better by a country mile (not that I'm not practicing both).

[Strikers1945guy]

Biggest achievement of 2014 for me

1cc mushihimesama original & maniac modes
1cc Ibara (low rank low score run only)

Goals for 2015

Letter score Ibara (even an A I will take anything)
Learn how to properly play this pink sweets pcb I've owned for a while and never given any real love to

[professor ganson]

Main shmup-related goal: get to know the PC Engine shmup library much better. Expensive goal, as I plan to buy the games complete and in good shape. Sadly, I'm having to re-purchase a number of these and the prices have gone way up. E.g., Magical Chase is 3x more expensive than when I bought it in the past. I can live with it, though. Really glad to play this again!

[Ikazu-san]

Biggest Screw-ups of '14:
1) Not training enough
2) Unexplainabely epic failing to do simple dodge or other trivial objective all the time

Goals for '15:
1) Stop being lazy
2) Get the hell back into top10 scores of CCWI Unlimited Type III
3) Clear any loop other than 1st in ChoRenSha, bonus points if actial 2ALL

[Skykid]

Achievements of 2014:

- Clearing Dariusburst AC on nearly all routes, specifically seeing off Great Thing on my birthday.
- Getting a 2-3 on Contra Spirits in four attempts

Goals for 2015:

- Drink more
- Go to the arcade more

[CHI]

Personal Biggest Screw-ups of 2014:
- Not taking my stick with me to shithole Monaco, wasted 6 months not playing or practicing any shmups
- Now i have my stick with me, i'm wasting my time playing older games and not getting anywhere... WHY WHY WHY
- Missed out on a couple of good deals at the Trading Section due to being in this shithole

Favourite Achievements by Others of 2014:
- DEL's Muchi Muchi Pork Manpuku 2-All, i still think DEL should carry on and start playing Harahara AND Manpuku 1.0
- Kamui's New Battle Garegga WR, i've seen her play a few times, watched many of her replays, but the rank on this one is just crazy

Goals for 2015:
- Take MAME more seriously: play a few shmups at a time, learn to record my own runs, etc...
- Start playing my consoles more seriously (same as above) once i'm back home, don't know when that's going to be
- Travel more and arrange more WorldShmupMeets

CHALLENGES TO OTHER PLAYERS:
BRING BACK STGT

[spadgy]

CHALLENGES TO OTHER PLAYERS:
BRING BACK STGT

This! This many times over. I fear I've not the time to host it (in terms of running the boards and allocating points/positions each week, but I would love STGT to return. It's the best way to play shmups; great fun, rewarding, gets you playing better, good for bonding with other members.

Anybody want to step up?

[Jeneki]

Screwups of 2014
Not playing Zed Blade through to the 1cc, even though I got to the end a few times.

Favorite aciebements by others
Watching Aquas dedication to Batrider.

Goals for 2015
Currently playing Giga Wing 2 and would like to see one of those sexy green numbers. Should also take R-type a bit more serious and go for a clear, as I've been farting around with that game for decades.

Run some STG and arcade scoreplay panels at the local conventions.

Organize a local STG meet. It's overdue.

Challenges for others
The "Leave your Cave" challenge. Play some old stuff you've never played before or only casually tried, find one you like, and spend some time learning it.

[chum]

Personal Biggest Screw-ups of 2014:
Burning myself out on StB on purpose as a challenge to myself. At first I could play it 8-10 hours a day on average without feeling bad but when I started doing this later during the timespan in which I only played StB, I began hating the game more and more while I was playing. It ultimately led to me not being able to enjoy StB the same way again because I'd feel frustrated while playing. The positive side of this is that I've felt liberated since I quit and switching my focus to FW and reducing the hours-per-day grind was a good decision.

Favorite achievements:
Overall score of 66,3 million in StB and in particular 818k in 9-6. It was by far the most amount of work I've put into these games.

A fair collection of FW scores including 7 (out of a possible 25) WRs. difficulty-wise this is a much lesser achievement, but I feel happier working on this game, so it currently feels more important.

Just barely winning the PoFVGrillz5 tournament against ElD, those were hands down the most exciting and demanding matches I've ever played in my life, ElD totally forced me to play as well as I possibly could to win. I'd go so far as to say that this was the most memorable and amazing time I've ever spent with STGs.

Favorite achievements by others:
So much happened but the personal obvious standouts are the following
Naya's absolutely monumental score of 3,6b for PCB. Just the number baffled people across the globe, but when I finally got to see the replay myself, it is just an unbelievably tight, but not unrealistic run.
e-splice finally taking the overall WR from shin in UFO, and by such a trivial amount!
DATA reaching 100 million points in FW Extra after a ridiculous number of attempts. Waiting patiently for a 101 million run and a WR!
Zil besting that old PoDD highscore which I've always suspected was played with a large amount of slowdown since that easily happens on an actual PC98

Goals:
I began last year expecting myself to play a bigger variety of games, but that ended up not being the case. I spent almost the entire 2014 playing either StB or to a lesser extent FW. My goal for 2015 is just to do my best at FW, meaning that I want my runs to communicate to others that it is a very worthwhile game.

Challenges to others:
Zil: I really want to see you reaching your PoDD goal and perhaps dabble more in FW.
ElD: Please return to Touhou. You are a skilled player and I think you quit way too early, you never even got close to hitting your stride.
Fairy Warriors: Show those fairies how awe-inspiring your abilities are. Get to it, freeze all the danmaku. As you know, I'm happy to share my knowledge.
Raizing/YGW players: Play more Batrider. If you really like YGW so much then it is a travesty that my un-practiced kusoplay is at the top on the farm. I want to see someone (who isn't me) submit a K score at the very least in 2015!
Misc farmers: Clearing things is fun, but at least to me, scoring a game you love is much more satisfying. Try spending more time with the game you love, that special someone.

[CStarFlare]

Where can one find this 3.6 bil PCB run? Last I checked Royalflare the top was 3.3

[chum]

The replay isn't public anywhere, so you need to be a bit sneaky to get ahold of it

It's worth mentioning that Yu-suke's 3.3b run was done with ReimuB and that SakuyaB (naya's shot) is higher scoring on Lunatic.

[SuperSoaker360]

Personal Biggest Screw-ups of 2014: Letting Khoa get me into rhythm games

Goals for 2015: Make up for neglecting the STG genre last year and 1CC ten different games. Doesn't matter which or if they're easy as shit, as long as I'm at least still semi-active in the genre.

[Aleksei]

Raizing/YGW players: Play more Batrider. If you really like YGW so much then it is a travesty that my un-practiced kusoplay is at the top on the farm. I want to see someone (who isn't me) submit a K score at the very least in 2015!
.

Didn't Aquas do that?

[Cats]

Personal Biggest Screw-up of 2014: Can't say I have one; I fail at a consistent level. foreverrekt

Goal for 2015: Conquer Touhou - Imperishable Night. Clear all the modes with all the teams and all the solos, and then capture all the spell cards. I'm still stuck to this particular Touhou game.

[FRO]

As I mentioned in the 2014 thread, I got back into shmupping this past December via another forum's competition, so I plan to go back to some of those games during 2015 to see if I can play well enough to actually finish the games. Among those titles are R-Type Final, Sin & Punishment: Star Successor, Xyanide, Gradius (NES), and then also I'd like to complete Lightening Force on a higher difficulty level. I always played on Easy as a kid, and nearly beat it during the week I had to play for the competition on Normal, so I'd like to beat it on Hard, maybe even Maniac if I can dedicate the time. My own personal backlog is so huge that I may not get to that this year, but I'd like to think I could dedicate the time to try, at least

[Dumple]

Getting back into shmups in 2014 after a long hiatus.

Shmup Achievements 2014
1cc of R-Type Leo

Goals for 2015
Three more arcade shmup 1ccs - hopefully including DoDonPachi and Giga Wing
1cc Satazius on Hard -> cleared!

[PurpleTheGuy]

Doujin main players, try out more arcade stuff.

Understood! I kind of already did this, to a certain extent. I'll be doing this more and more, when I get further and further into the Touhou games & play other Doujins, to where I'll be able to pursue my greater goals, Touhou-related, other Doujins, & arcade games.

Fairy Warriors: Show those fairies how awe-inspiring your abilities are. Get to it, freeze all the danmaku. As you know, I'm happy to share my knowledge.

Clearing things is fun, but at least to me, scoring a game you love is much more satisfying. Try spending more time with the game you love, that special someone.

I know. I should get to try to score more in GFW sometime, along with other stuff. I know I'm currently pursuing typical goals that are pretty cliche, like 1cc'ing all of the Touhou STG games on lunatic mode at least once (PC-98 & windows), play & 1cc other Doujins, then play more arcade shooters & 1cc them, but it's really something I want to do first, before I can really start to comfortably go play for score in a few games. Otherwise, it'll bother me a lot, and I wouldn't be able to do much of anything then.

I'll do it eventually, for sure, once I go get to see the greater STG world out there! I'll do some actual scoring in some of the games, in some way or fashion! ^^

[x91]

Personal Biggest Screw-ups of 2014:

Left Shanghai in September. Lost access to all the games Liehuo arcade center owns.

Favourite Achievements by Others of 2014:

DKA_Darius' Battle Garegga Gain 10mil+ clear, perhaps the first clear with alphabet score in Chinese shmups community;
DKA_Darius' Ikaruga Easy 26mil clear, bring the life of classic back to the crowd;
117's Strikers 1945 Zero Fighter 2,269,800 clear, 10 years of struggle finally paid off, feel glad for him and wish him luck with 2,300,000.
MrMonkeyMan's Ketsui 400mil+ URA score, man you know what you've got to do.

Goals for 2015:

Battle Garegga 10mil+ clear with Silver Sword, thanks to our contest back in June, Raizing's getting popular here now.
Crimzon Clover World Ignition Arcade Original 1cc, do it the hard way.

CHALLENGE TO OTHER PLAYERS:
Gotta say it again, MrMonkeyMan, smoke my 450mil Ketsui score. You have the skills to do it.

BTW, I apologize for any provocation made in the forum before. Didn't mean it. Way to learn speaking properly.

[horaceappleton]

Biggest achievements of 2014

Garegga clear with iron mackerel using a home-brewed consistency route
better-than-hoped performance in trp-stgt

Biggest mistakes of 2014

playing games i don't like
losing four lives (& the credit) on nose lavagghun mk. 2

Favorite 2014 achievements by others

Kamui's K.83 oh my gosh

Goals for 2015

clear Garegga with another ship. (probably gain? gain is just really fun to play he gives you so much speed and shot power)
return to Radiant Silvergun, my first love
attend a meetup
decide soberly whether to put time into Phantasmagoria Trues scoring
clear Ikaruga in co-op :V

[mimiroru]

Goals for 2015

play more saidaioujou expert
ragequit pink sweets forever

[ACSeraph]

Personal Favourite Achievements of 2014:

Took the unofficial (based solely on leaderboard submissions) world record score for Lilith Default in Caladrius Vanilla, and the unofficial world record for overall default characters in Caladrius Blaze Original, and Caladrius Blaze Evolution also using Lilith.

Also somewhat insignificant, but I was really proud of beating Fatty Glutton Route G using the laser in Darius Vanilla, and going on to clear Z'. Extra is for sure the better game, but I'm more proud of the Vanilla clear due to its sheer difficulty.


Personal Biggest Screw-ups of 2014:

・Not knowing when to quit and rest to avoid rage and despair


Favourite Achievements by Others of 2014:

・DEL and Kamui's utter destruction of their respective games

・Blinge working his ass off and defeating my Darius score in the last few hours of Wolfman's tournament. Most fun week I've had participating in a tournament so far.

・LordHypnos finally clearing Mars Matrix. Dat dedication!

・Kollision's spectacular Kei Default performance in Caladrius Vanilla which inspired me to get back into the game and seriously learn a non-custom character.


Goals for 2015:

・Buy less, play more
・Calm my burning rage and find inner peace
・Clear G Darius
・Clear Metal Black
・Clear Super Darius II
・Clear Raiden
・Clear Eschatos Original
・Clear Ikaruga Dot Eater


Challenges to Other Players:

・Kollision: Learn to no miss your Kei route in Caladrius. I'm fairly certain you can easily take the Kei Default world record in both Vanilla and Blaze Original if you do.

・Jonst: Let's Akai Katana-ing!

・Everyone Else: Give modern releases not developed by Cave a chance. Qute deserves your love and respect!

[Tregard]

My goal for 2015 will be to finally 1cc an R-Type game. It's my favourite series, and to my eternal shame I've never managed to beat a single entry. Not sure which one to try though... I put a lot of time into Delta in the past and was able to consistently get to stage 5, but the thought of trying to get through the second half of stage 4 again fills me with dread. R-Type 3 has that godawful foundry stage which I could never get down. Final might have been a choice back in the day but I can't remember the best ships anymore. Leo doesn't really feel like a proper entry, R-Type 2 has that bastard fifth level...

Think it's going to have to be the first one.

[Lyv]

Personal Biggest Achievements of 2014 :
Dragon Blaze 2-ALL

Personal Biggest Screw-ups of 2014 :
Getting tired of Gunbird 2 and Strikers 1945 II
Not going to Stunfest

Favourite Achievements by Others :
Zil's 123m PoDD run
DEL's Manpuku clear
Jaimers and Erppo winning all the tournaments
Many others I'm forgetting...

Goals for 2015 :
Find a game with an enjoyable scoring system
1cc UFO or PoDD Lunatic
Get a LNB in a Touhou game
Clear another Psikyo game
Socialize a bit more about shmups (IRC, twitch, forums, whatever...)

Somehow, I feel the first and last goals will be the hardest ones.

[pegboy]

Biggest personal achievement:
Clearing 5 loops in a 6 hour run of Gradius V using Weapon Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra-X6L2kLT4

Biggest flop:
Buying way more games than I'm playing. Only playing a single series for the entire year (Gradius series).

Outlook for 2015:
Start on doing 1CC runs for a new series of games (Most likely will start with the Raiden series)

[jepjepjep]

Personal Biggest Achievements of 2014
1cc of Battle Garegga, Esprade, and Ketsui first loop.

Personal Biggest Screw-ups of 2014:
Missing a letter score in Garegga by 300k.
Reaching last boss of Batrider Advanced but didn't keep going.

Favourite Achievements by Others of 2014:
Waking in the middle of the night to catch the Stunfest streams live.
Watching Softdrink117 play Ibara like a boss.
Watching Frenetic make Progear look easy.
Watching the TGM crew play live during the STGWeekly episode.

Goals for 2015:
2-All one of the 'pachi games.
Clear the first loop on Tatsujin Oh or Gradius IV
Play more!

[Lilium]

1cc UFO or PoDD Lunatic
Get a LNB in a Touhou game

Combine those two!

[Anesthetize]

Personal Biggest Achievements of 2014:
My second child (a daughter this time) was born in December

Personal Biggest Screw-ups of 2014 (and 2013, and 2012 for the most part):
Didn't play shmups

Favourite Achievements by Others of 2014:
Didn't follow the scene at all, but catching up now and it appears several of you guys had some pretty nice accomplishments. Congrats!

Goals for 2015:
Really want to clear some more games. I only have a handful under my belt at the moment. Some that I feel I'm pretty close on:
Shikigami no Shiro II
Battle Bakraid
ESPGaluda
DDP SDOJ 360 mode
Triggerheart Exelica

Another goal is to pick a game and start learning to score well. Any suggestions? (current 1CCs include Mushi Futari BL Orig., Deathsmiles, Deathsmiles 2X, Armed Police Batrider amongst others)

[ARF]

Personal biggest achievements of 2014: Got my first ever "real job" AND managed to keep it all the way into 2015! Got on better terms with my parents, moved out to live with a bunch of new friends and learned to cook food (normal 1cc level ;_;)! Got the highest score in Touhou 14.3 Impossible Spell Card and posted it on the japanese scoreboards, literally the only 20m+ score posted in all 2014!?

Personal biggest screw-ups of 2014: Mainly going after low-effort obscure "achievements" in touhou, and doing badly at them.

Favourite achievements by Others of 2014: E-splice stealing away the UFO WR from shin! Chum winning the fairy wars, getting the highest overall score of all time... wow! Zil doing the same with PoDD!? Cactu's improvment in EoSD, his routes are totally genki now!

Goals for 2015: Get one of those controller-things-with-buttons-and-stuff-made-for-playing-videogames-with AND a mechanical keyboard. I'll try to play some cave games and become eligible to vote in the top shmups of all time thing :3 Play the new touhous. And maybe fairy wars, but only a little.

[FRO]

I'll probably get shit for this...but I do NOT like Raystorm.

I have a love/hate relationship with it. I much prefer it to RayCrisis, because the latter has some spots that require such precision movement that I don't have the patience to learn the boss patterns so that I don't die. I suspect a 1CC will never happen for me with that game. RayStorm is great, but when the difficulty ramps up, I hit the wall and haven't been able to get far enough to really say I've accomplished much. I think I prefer RayForce overall, because it's probably a bit more well balanced, but then I much prefer RayStorm's soundtrack. RayForce has a good soundtrack that I enjoy listening to, but RayStorm joins Darius Gaiden and G-Darius in what I consider the holy triumvirate of ZUNTATA shmup soundtracks. It's just so flipping good, and the fact that the alternate soundtrack is just as good just blows my mind.

That said, I should probably get back to both of those games this year. I may never 1CC RayCrisis, but at least I beat the "dishuman" boss using few enough continues to unlock the final "infinity" boss, and saw the good ending. Until I become more of a shmup master supreme, I'll probably be happy that I accomplished that much. I suppose setting a goal of a 1CC on the 1st 2 Ray games is not an insurmountable task, but I'll need to balance that with all the other games in my backlog I haven't finished

[Jeneki]

Currently playing Giga Wing 2 and would like to see one of those sexy green numbers.

Well that's one goal down at least.
Now comes the hard ones.