TRP-STGT 2017 Conversation Week 2: Last Resort

[CloudyMusic]

Yeah, I dunno, as I posted yesterday, I'm still having fun with it after 4-5 hours. It's got some flaws, it's derivative, and it's pretty easy, but it's still mostly competent. I'll take this over Bakuretsu Breaker 100 times out of 100.

[Shepardus]

The worst thing about this game I've seen so far is the slowdown. This game gets sloooowwwww. It gets so slow that the button to lock the pod in place sometimes stops working.

[Bananamatic]

that's my biggest issue with this game
it's just so goddamn slow and boring
if you're going to pick a memorizer pick something where you don't have minutes of dead air with no effort required
idk if it's sprite limit or bad emulation but your ship also flickers or disappears

[CloudyMusic]

The worst thing about this game I've seen so far is the slowdown. This game gets sloooowwwww. It gets so slow that the button to lock the pod in place sometimes stops working.

It seems like the H subweapon is the biggest offender, but yeah, it's still pretty slow in certain spots even without it. The dropped inputs are definitely one of the biggest annoyances.

[Sean_A]

Playing this game honestly bores the hell out of me. How bout we just do another week of Bakuretsu Breaker?

[Shepardus]

I'd rather be mildly bored than actively hate myself like I did when playing Bakuretsu Breaker. Granted, there's still six more days for that to happen with Last Resort...

[egg_sanwich]

The worst thing about this game I've seen so far is the slowdown. This game gets sloooowwwww. It gets so slow that the button to lock the pod in place sometimes stops working.

It seems like the H subweapon is the biggest offender, but yeah, it's still pretty slow in certain spots even without it. The dropped inputs are definitely one of the biggest annoyances.

Try the levelled up G weapon at the start of stage 4, things slow to a serious crawl.

In all seriousness I quite like Last Resort. Autofire helps, but I tend to enjoy it more without it - it makes strategic use of the charged pod shot that much more important.

[Perikles]

The checkpoint still might be worth it without the final boss on account of the numerous turrets, I don't have any hard numbers for now, though.

Looks like the final boss times out after 60 (might not be quite correct, should be about that number, however) laser beams. You can theoretically kill more than enough turrets in order to turn this into the most lucrative checkpoint of the game, but it's deceptively difficult not to kill the boss in the process. You could sit all the way up or down for the most parts (thus preserving the ephemeral life of said bio-mechanical monstrosity), yet that denies you a lot of points. And it also seems like you indeed gain invincibility the same instant you take out a boss, making a double K.O. prohibitively hard.

Autofire helps, but I tend to enjoy it more without it - it makes strategic use of the charged pod shot that much more important.

The charge shot is arguably much more important for all the tricky sections, anyway, I wouldn't recommend playing just with autofire.

[Kyper]

It looks I can get around 50k a pop when milking the latter checkpoint/boss of Stage 2-5:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ie_RXzBG6Ho

There's a helpful glitch that causes the bottom left turret to spawn a little more to the right; I guess its positioning is messed up when it spawns and the screen is still scrolling. Definitely makes things safer, but still possible to milk here without it

[Zerst]

trap why

[mycophobia]

Kinda diggin' this game. The ship disappearing when there's a bunch of sprites onscreen really sucks though.

[copy-paster]

The best way to get rid of slowdowns is overclock the game to 250% through MAME's slider option. The problem is to activate this you must enabled the cheat option. Against the rules!

[trap15]

Yeah, please do not do that.

[KAI]

At least I can play this on my PS2. Thanks to Terminal Reality for shitporting this.

[DenT4F]

Rules are clear but just in case, would playing the PS4 version be acceptable? ACA versions seem quite accurate.

[trap15]

Yup, ports are fine, just make sure to mark it in the system field.

[DenT4F]

Excellent.

I'm not sure if it's doable on MAME but on PS4, it's possible to use auto-fire and to charge your shot. Wondering if I can or cannot make use of that for the event.

[Icarus]

Excellent.
I'm not sure if it's doable on MAME but on PS4, it's possible to use auto-fire and to charge your shot. Wondering if I can or cannot make use of that for the event.

I think it depends on the game, and your settings. In Twinbee Yahhoo! for example, I had a setup where I could fire and spawn/charge my Options at the same time.
In most cases, though, if you can make use of it, it's probably a worthwhile advantage, since you can utilise the charge shot without the downside of stopping your shooting to charge it - ergo, extra damage output.

[DenT4F]

Excellent.
I'm not sure if it's doable on MAME but on PS4, it's possible to use auto-fire and to charge your shot. Wondering if I can or cannot make use of that for the event.

I think it depends on the game, and your settings. In Twinbee Yahhoo! for example, I had a setup where I could fire and spawn/charge my Options at the same time.
In most cases, though, if you can make use of it, it's probably a worthwhile advantage, since you can utilise the charge shot without the downside of stopping your shooting to charge it - ergo, extra damage output.

I meant that I don't know if it's allowed for this tournament. As you know, I'm not very familiar with MAME and when I played the game on it, I had to choose between having autofire or not. Playing with autofire meant no charge shot for me.

Since this is a 2 button game and I'd be using 3, I just want to make sure my crappy score is legit for the tourney xD

[trap15]

Oh, it allows firing while charging the pod? That's not acceptable, no. Sorry.

[DenT4F]

No it doesn't.

But I can use autofire on C, Lock on B and charge/regular shot on A. Allowing me to use autofire and still be able to charge shots (not simultaneously). When I played on MAME, I had only two buttons enabled. Which prevented me to charge shots if I used autofire.

[BIL]

FWIW, in MAME that situation can be gotten around with custom buttons - see Perikles' response here.

From what you're saying, it sounds like the ACA version replicates this solution - A: shot B: lock C: autofire - while still preventing you from shooting and charging simultaneously - so I'd imagine it'd be okay.

If a port were to let you shoot while charging, that's obviously something else entirely.

[DenT4F]

Ok, thanks!

[trap15]

Yes that sort of thing is ok.

[Kyper]

ports are fine

It sounds like the PS2 SNK Arcade Classics port has a different system for granting lives and doesn't sound like this or the difficulty can be changed according to:
viewtopic.php?p=1281859#p1281859

[Shepardus]

Excellent.
I'm not sure if it's doable on MAME but on PS4, it's possible to use auto-fire and to charge your shot. Wondering if I can or cannot make use of that for the event.

I think it depends on the game, and your settings. In Twinbee Yahhoo! for example, I had a setup where I could fire and spawn/charge my Options at the same time.
In most cases, though, if you can make use of it, it's probably a worthwhile advantage, since you can utilise the charge shot without the downside of stopping your shooting to charge it - ergo, extra damage output.

Yes, that's possible in TwinBee Yahhoo, though that's an unusual case because you can set fire and charge shot to two different buttons in the game itself without an external setup. The game lets you choose during ship selection whether you want the ground attack and air attack on separate buttons, or the same button. If you choose them to be on the same button, then both A and B perform the air and ground attacks. If you hold one of those two buttons and autofire the other one, you'll charge up your charge shot, but also perform normal air and ground attacks. While doing this your main shot actually doesn't fire because you're doing a charge attack, but your options and sidearms do fire, so if you don't have either then this trick doesn't work.

In most games (such as this one), even if you map two buttons to shot, one with autofire and one without, the game sees it as the same input so you can't hold it and tap it at the same time. As long as they didn't screw this up in the ports, autofire is also fine in those.

[trap15]

ports are fine

It sounds like the PS2 SNK Arcade Classics port has a different system for granting lives and doesn't sound like this or the difficulty can be changed according to:
viewtopic.php?p=1281859#p1281859

Urgh that's annoying. OK. In that case, Arcade Archives is fine, SNK Arcade Classics is not.

[Blinge]

It's alright for a Pulstar clone I guess

[Vanguard]

FWIW, in MAME that situation can be gotten around with custom buttons - see Perikles' response here.

From what you're saying, it sounds like the ACA version replicates this solution - A: shot B: lock C: autofire - while still preventing you from shooting and charging simultaneously - so I'd imagine it'd be okay.

If a port were to let you shoot while charging, that's obviously something else entirely.

Is there a way to do this in regular MAME? I don't see any custom button option. I downloaded Shmupmame and it works there.

Anyway I prefer Bakuretsu Breaker over this game. Breaker's jank is appealing in its own way. Last Resort is just full of dead air. I'd probably be harder on it if we had played both loops, though.

[ACSeraph]

So... I have the rom, but my usual MAME Plus can't find it in the directory and no other version of MAME I download seems to be able to play it. I even redownloaded the rom with no luck. Any suggestions?