Shmup Ticker: What are you playing RIGHT NOW?

[Stevens]

Still at Mars Matrix with a little Raiden IV to break things up a little.

[ACSeraph]

Been playing the Fami a lot lately, cleared Abadox on Monday, and decided to play Gradius II a bit last night. I made it to the end but got cheesed out in the speed rush by one of the closing gates and was unable to recover. Typical Gradius bullshit. I'm guessing I'll nab the clear tonight and then think about what follows. I've been doing mostly easy-ish stuff lately, so it might be time to jump into a bigger challenge and finish off Metal Black.

[pegboy]

I'm playing Strike Gunner STG on the SNES, which is usually listed as one of the worst shmups on the system. I can see that argument, the graphics are generic, the enemies predictable, and in general it's all very boring. However...if you turn up the difficulty to max, it becomes almost an entirely different game. The bullets are insanely fast, the action picks up like crazy and it actually becomes pretty badass.

[Stevens]

Under Defeat - one day I'm going to one-credit this mother on normal...

I'm holding you to this:D

What are you hung up on?

[Anesthetize]

Holy shit, Darius Gaiden is kicking my ass right now. Either it's harder than I was expecting, or my skills are much lower than I thought (probably the latter).

Also played Shikigami 2 for an hour or two last night. I like how Kuga2 can turn it into pure bullet-dodging fun. Need some more practice on stage 5 before I can get the 1cc.

[Jonst]

Under Defeat - one day I'm going to one-credit this mother on normal...

I'm holding you to this:D

What are you hung up on?

I bottled trying an under defeat clear in favour of ketsui... I hope I'll return to it at some point to try again. Great game but the style of play required is to precise for my sloppy style!

[Stevens]

I bottled trying an under defeat clear in favour of ketsui... I hope I'll return to it at some point to try again. Great game but the style of play required is to precise for my sloppy style!

I find that funny Jonst, because I am fucking TERRIBAD at anything by Cave. I much prefer watching people clear Cave games than playing them myself. Although maybe I will try again at some point.

[Jonst]

I remember asking you for ud tips a while back, all good but I just know there's no way I would make it into the final stage with any resources and I def would not be able to hold it together on a single life for the final boss! I'm super crap at any game that does not give you any extends!
I have to allow for plenty of ridiculous mistakes in my runs!

Yeah man, go for a cave clear one day

EDIT: nice change of avatar Stevens!

[LordHypnos]

Was just playing Life Force (NES). I keep entering restart hell in the first stage due to bumping into enemies when trying to kill them or brain matter spawning on top of my ship. Seems pointless to try to recover, so far, as well.

@Stevens and Jonst: I tend to agree with Stevens on this issue. I think that Mars Matrix actually allows more sloppiness than most CAVE games, because the gaps between bullets are huge. Perhaps if you can get used to the single pixel bullet and ship hitboxes of CAVE games those gaps would actually be pretty big, too, but they seem to require a lot more precision to me. Mars Matrix has pretty small hitboxes, too, anyway. You could probably be constantly wiggling your ship and still avoid running into the majority of bullets assuming you were used to the patterns, and not playing for score.

[Jonst]

I dunno LH... The last time I tried mm it fucked me up good and proper! I barely made stage 4 (after quite a few tries) I like both mm and ud... I've never really thought about trying to clear mm though. In the meantime, I've been set a challenge to clear progear this year, which I shall rise to before I think about anything else!

[LordHypnos]

I dunno LH... The last time I tried mm it fucked me up good and proper! I barely made stage 4 (after quite a few tries) I like both mm and ud... I've never really thought about trying to clear mm though. In the meantime, I've been set a challenge to clear progear this year, which I shall rise to before I think about anything else!

Yeah, the big gaps don't really stop it from being hard. You've still got lots of patterns to learn to read, very fast bullets to react to, and local rank that can almost completely change what you have to deal with, not to mention a difficult weapon system to master. However,it lets you move pretty sloppily in the process .

[Jonst]

You haven't sold it to me mate! Maybe I'll leave this one for you Stevens!

[LordHypnos]

You haven't sold it to me mate! Maybe I'll leave this one for you Stevens!

I'm not really trying to, actually. hahaha. Just pointing out that there's a lot of pretty serious challenges in Mars Matrix, but very few places where moving a few pixels too far in any direction due to sloppiness (or at least what I generally think of as sloppiness) will actually kill you. I think this is why I'm so bad at touhou, and Blue Wish Resurrection, and CAVE games, and what have you.

Then again, extends can help a lot with different kinds of sloppiness, and Mars Matrix definitely isn't too generous in that department (2 in the whole game)

[Stevens]

Didn't get to put time into MM until around 9 PM so it wasn't the greatest session...but I broke 800,000 XP twice and 900,000 once. I've been finishing stage 2 with around 375,000 XP and by the time I pass the fountain on 3 I had around 750.

And sonuvabitch....the hit box on the level 7 shot isn't the cockpit, but the small neck part behind the cockpit.

Played a credit of UD for the 1st time in about 3 weeks too. Never gets old.

[LordHypnos]

Didn't get to put time into MM until around 9 PM so it wasn't the greatest session...but I broke 800,000 XP twice and 900,000 once. I've been finishing stage 2 with around 375,000 XP and by the time I pass the fountain on 3 I had around 750.

And sonuvabitch....the hit box on the level 7 shot isn't the cockpit, but the small neck part behind the cockpit.

Played a credit of UD for the 1st time in about 3 weeks too. Never gets old.

...I don't actually think the hitbox ever changes. Pretty sure it's always the white spot in the center of the ship


(sorry for the bad picture quality... It's captured from my 1cc video)

[Stevens]

Wow. This entire time I thought it was the cockpit.

Thanks for clarifying.

[LordHypnos]

Wow. This entire time I thought it was the cockpit.

Thanks for clarifying.

This really cements what I was saying about the amount of space that you have for your ship in MM . Thank you for demonstrating this for me

[Stevens]

Happy to be of service. Even if said point was proved through my idiocy:D

Did I just play MM for 3 and a half hours? My eyes are bugging out. Couple of more 1 mill+ XP runs and I am crapping out around the 5th stage boss pretty frequently. The second attack of the stage 4 boss is still a fucking thorn in my side though. Still not comfortable with it.

Nope. I'm finished for today.

[Jonst]

Playing progear, it's finally clicked. Made it past the stage 5 mid boss tonight and beat my previous high score, also getting better at grabbing the stage 4 extend... Still a way to go, Progression is slow but steady.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Progear's one of those very unusual games that's incredibly fun when the mechanics finally click. You can do really well once you get comfortable with the timing for bullet cancels, both for score and safety. Aim for the loop!

[Jonst]

Yeah, I've tried to get into a few times but the scoring has never really clicked. I didn't get why some runs I was scoring much better than others... But I get it now, I always knew it was a cool game I just didn't quite get it but after a few chats and watching the stg weekly espisode and a couple of other clear vids I'm finally having fun with it! Second loop?! I'll see how long a 1 all takes first!

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Scoring is basically don't bomb ever. For a 1CC, you can easily get 6 or 7 extra lives by not bombing at all until you get to stage 4 (by then, if you grabbed all the bomb items without missing/bombing, your counter will get a huge boost, which really helps your score). Then bomb the crap out of Stage 4 and Stage 5.

Looping is tougher. You basically get 2 bombs in the first loop, which should be exclusively saved for the final boss, since they hurt your score less if you use them there (if you got all the bomb items and no missed/no bombed there you'll have a massive counter going into the second loop as your first loop score counter is doubled). If you're used to bombing patterns, it's a much tougher game to get into the loop as you really need to learn every boss pattern.

But you can reasonably get at LEAST 7 extra lives by the final boss on a decent run, and max out the life counter at 9 on a fantastic run, so with the bullet cancelling factored in, you actually have a decent number of resources at your disposal, even in a looping run. And of course, once you're in the loop, you have to spend those bombs in the stages, because dying in a stage resets you to the start. It's all about making it to each boss...

[Jonst]

Thanks for the tips man! I'll bare those in mind... Unfortunately, the proper playing won't start until I get a decent pad (playing on a modded 6 button md pad and the controls mapped to the top buttons. its really uncomfortable and sometimes unresponsive to play with), in the meantime, it's practice and feel, but I will be going for this one!

[BareKnuckleRoo]

I can understand that feeling. Finding a proper setup that's comfortable is a pain. I play on keyboard or arcade stick myself, but for a while my desk/chair setup wasn't really comfortable to play at. I'm hoping to make headway into the second loop now that I've gotten a better computer gaming desk setup. :3

[Jonst]

Normally it's not a problem but because I'm playing on the super gun, the pad it came with is a bit crap! I think I'll get a jp Saturn pad modded for the job, my favourite pad ever.

[ED-057]

Just credit-fed my way through Section Z.

My TurboGrafx had buzzy audio and was crashing randomly, so I thought it wouldn't hurt to redo the ugly old splices on its wall wart and A/V cables. The NES has wires hanging out of it for a "stereo" mod, and one of those came apart in the process of moving things around so I took care of that as well. So I went to test the NES. It had Megaman 4 in it, but in typical NES fashion, it wouldn't boot up without much fussing with the cartridge. So I put Section Z in, and eventually got the game to start.

Back in the day when I got Section Z, I didn't have the skills to get very far. I think the farthest I got was section 20-something. I never had the inclination to try it again, since my memory of it was that it was too much of a pain to spend a lot of time on.

So today I started playing, and I didn't even know the routes but before long I made it to the final third of the game. There's a boss that releases some green things that bounce all over the screen which is pretty wild. It makes the NES flicker, but not slowdown! At one point I got stuck in an infinite loop between sections 46,47,48, and 50. I started dying of boredom, and eventually paused the game and went to look at gamefaqs to find out what I was supposed to do. I went through one section where I had already beaten the boss there, thinking it wouldn't appear again. Oops, bad idea. When I made it to the final boss the first time, I died. Second time, died again. After that I did a few loops through sections 41,42,43 to collect powerups so the third and final time I got to the boss I had 50+ energy, M and B weapons, and a couple speedups.

[LordHypnos]

Happy to be of service. Even if said point was proved through my idiocy:D

Did I just play MM for 3 and a half hours? My eyes are bugging out. Couple of more 1 mill+ XP runs and I am crapping out around the 5th stage boss pretty frequently. The second attack of the stage 4 boss is still a fucking thorn in my side though. Still not comfortable with it.

Nope. I'm finished for today.

Yeah, I find that the hours just disappear when playing MM...

The second attack is really hard. After a while you learn to kind of read the pattern so that you know where you can get away with placing yourself. That being said I sometimes get hit one or more times there. I think it's a lot because I didn't keep on practicing for a long time. I think the best advice is really just a matter of practicing it over and over until it starts making sense. It kind of needs to be overcome by sheer force of will.

[Stevens]

Continuing to improve!

Score is up to 475 million, but more importantly I got all the way that triangle of giant bullet vomiting death incarnate just outside of the final boss. Moar practice.

[dspoonrt]

Had a buddy over for a Saturn shmup night last night. We played a lot of Guardian Force, since he really took to that game. Also got in some Batsugun, Battle Garegga, and Darius Gaiden. Good times.

[horaceappleton]

getting a handle on Zone Advanced in Phantasmagoria Trues, seeing how things fit together. my favorite interaction is probably how you can get a low-cost hyper release by deliberately running down your shot gauge. bad for scoring tho

update: Advanced Unseen 1 is ruining my life

PS: if anyone else gets into this game: that low-cost hyper release strat is no good

PPS: phantasmagoria trues needs more than 5 english-speaking players. the ceiling on this one is HIGH