The BIG thread of Shmup grievances.

[TLB]

[No, but unless you can have a decent stab at scoring or at least using the principles of scoring, playing without feels hollow and pointless.

That's still a stupid way to approach the game. There are very few people in the world who have chained everything in the game and only one person in this forum has chained the whole first loop.

As if beating the game isn't difficult enough, you'll then find out that the route used to beat it is completely useless for scoring.

Depth is a bad thing now?

I've always wondered how people can say that these games are so deep, but there's only one way to play them. (Later on, the same groups of people will say that there are many different ways for people to enjoy shumps, not just sperging/never getting out/drawing maps/memmerah-zizin'/being intelligent.)

[dunpeal2064]

.

[DrTrouserPlank]

[No, but unless you can have a decent stab at scoring or at least using the principles of scoring, playing without feels hollow and pointless.

That's still a stupid way to approach the game. There are very few people in the world who have chained everything in the game and only one person in this forum has chained the whole first loop.

But unless you are trying to chain I don't see the point. You don't have to chain the whole game, but you've got to have some sort of plan as to how you are going to chain some of it, otherwise playing it to beat it seems pointless because your score is beatable in no time by someone who can just chain a full stage for example, whilst you are busting your ass trying to clear the game for an inferior score.

As if beating the game isn't difficult enough, you'll then find out that the route used to beat it is completely useless for scoring.

Depth is a bad thing now?

It's not, but the games are difficult to clear full stop, and that accomplishment is greatly diminished if after clearing it you realise that your score is rubbish and that clearing the game has taught you nothing about how to score well.

I'll probably get in trouble for this, but can we ban this scrub yet?

He is doing nothing for this community, no matter how much advice he is given.

Let's hope you do. Every one of your responses to me is just inflammatory or an insult. Fortunately I'm above responding to most of them.

[Bananamatic]

go play fucking psyvariar and don't post until you do so

[DrTrouserPlank]

go play fucking psyvariar and don't post until you do so

I played it on the DC. Psyvariar 2 that is. It seemed pretty difficult, certainly buzzing and scoring.

[Bananamatic]

Go play it again and put in some time

it's short and the scoring is simple to understand and fairly linear

[Naut]

As if beating the game isn't difficult enough, you'll then find out that the route used to beat it is completely useless for scoring.

Depth is a bad thing now?

It's not, but the games are difficult to clear full stop, and that accomplishment is greatly diminished if after clearing it you realise that your score is rubbish and that clearing the game has taught you nothing about how to score well.

Playing the game over and over again while going for a difficult clear allows you to memorize where enemies spawn and is the most important aspect of chaining. I too hate playing to memorize, but as I go for clears chaining just naturally happens as you start to have nothing to do on the first few boring stages.

You're a fantastic troll by the way.

[DrTrouserPlank]

Playing the game over and over again while going for a difficult clear allows you to memorize where enemies spawn and is the most important aspect of chaining. I too hate playing to memorize, but as I go for clears chaining just naturally happens as you start to have nothing to do on the first few boring stages.

Maybe. I guess chaining isn't as bad as galuda's scoring which is almost completely separated from the game itself. I've never got on well with chaining like that in DFK, mainly becasue the chain dies so quickly and I don't understand what keeps it alive.

You're a fantastic troll by the way.

[dunpeal2064]

But unless you are trying to chain I don't see the point. You don't have to chain the whole game, but you've got to have some sort of plan as to how you are going to chain some of it, otherwise playing it to beat it seems pointless because your score is beatable in no time by someone who can just chain a full stage for example, whilst you are busting your ass trying to clear the game for an inferior score.

.

Ok, but what is "trying to chain?" Do you have a game plan, or do you just try to chain as you go through the game? You aren't gonna happen upon a full stage chain.

Saying that its not worth doing because someone else could beat your score is silly. its a 2 Loop game that people have been at for 10 years, you expect to drop down a score that people will have a hard time beating?

Maybe you need to compete with people closer to your skill level. Deca and I are usually at the bottom of any scoreboard, and surrounding our posts are tons of scores way better than ours. So what? I still improved based on how good I was before.

Instead of worrying about if others can beat your score, worry about whether you can beat your own score, or someone of your skill level. These games were meant to last REALLY GOOD players a REALLY long time. You will not just come in and throw down with the best.

Finding a game you actually enjoy scoring in might help too. DOJ is not intuitive, and like you said, you drop it and that score for the stage is gone.

is there a scoring system that you enjoy doing?

[DrTrouserPlank]

....is there a scoring system that you enjoy doing?

AKS was ok. I don't have a problem with DFK's except that I've never managed to chain any amount of it, and then you've got the problem of which 'type' you play as...

[Erppo]

Maybe. I guess chaining isn't as bad as galuda's scoring which is almost completely separated from the game itself. I've never got on well with chaining like that in DFK, mainly becasue the chain dies so quickly and I don't understand what keeps it alive.

You could start out in DFK by using tons of hypers everywhere since it's easy to hold the chain during those. Then start leaving some of them out when you think you can chain parts without them and learn how to get most hits out of your early hypers. Other thing to note is that while Power has the hardest time with survival, scoring with it is easiest.

You're a fantastic troll by the way.

Don't. We love your work!

[DrTrouserPlank]

Even playing the first level of DFK it's just so confusing. The chain dies so quickly that you've got almost no chance of holding it. Between keeping half an eye on the chain (which just dies when it feels like it) I couldn't tell you what order the enemies appear in and from where, and there's so many..... I dunno, that doesn't seem like something I'm going to enjoy.

I've also never understood why power supposedly scores more. Every time I play with it (like for like runs on the first level lets say, no-miss) my score is about 1/10th of what it is using strong for example

[Marc]

Come on man, even I can chain the first two stages in DFK. I think what might be doing you is what I didn't get at first - once your hyper is full you have next to no time before your chain breaks in between hits. Chaining while using hypers is easy, using one to raise the mutiplier then trying to chain with a full meter you can't use is brutal.

And I would add, stop getting so hung up on score. I'm never gonna be an Icarus, Sapz, Gus or whoever but I'm cool with it. My own score is my target, as long as I see some improvement on my best I'm happy.

Out of interest, is there anything even remotely old-school (as in surviving = scoring) available on 360? How are the Raiden Fighter games in this respect?

[Naut]

Eschatos is "kill all enemies" and survive. Pretty fun. Lots of difficulties and options.

[Deca]

Power keeps the chain gauge up easier and when you hyper bullets in Boost mode you're replenishing Hyper gauge to get that bonus multiplier active faster. Also they build hyper much faster to begin with and move faster in Normal mode.

I'm currently learning DFK and you're right, it's really obtuse and confusing initially. I spent 5 hours last night working out how to hit the first extend in st1 and finally got it. I still have no idea how to get into Ura route if I hyper in the beginning of the stage, but if I don't I can score decently with just a hyper at the midboss. The game makes more sense the more you play it, and chaining isn't really that bad once you get used to where enemies are coming from. I find B-Strong to be relatively forgiving, I got the st1 full chain a lot faster than I did in DOJBL.

My only fear if you start playing it is how you'll react to the laser wheels, I anticipate unprecedented DTP antics.

Marc: The Raiden Fighters games have pretty obtuse/awesome scoring based around memorizing secrets and, at high level play, grazing constantly. You won't post a decent score without dialing the st1 X-Medal activation at the very least, preferably maxed out X-Medals.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

How are the Raiden Fighter games in this respect?

Raiden Fighters definitely have some 'interesting' scoring mechanics. Looking to get a good score purely by survival isn't gonna work.

I guess there's always that indie game Shoot 1UP that's got fairly simple scoring mechanics from what I remember. It's not so much oldschool in that the ship mechanics are a bit unique, but it wasn't that bad. Worse comes to worse look for some indie games like Prismatic Solid or something; they're fairly cheap so if the game doesn't grab your attention for long it's not a huge investment lost.

Looking for something on the simple side like this?

[Bananamatic]

isn't Raiden IV pretty simple?(at least Raiden III was)

[Hagane]

Scoring in the Raiden Fighters series is anything but simple.

[Marc]

Raiden 4 would be ideal if I could buy the bugger here. I just miss stuff like Flying Shark and SlapFight, and rather than all the convoluted stuff doing the round at the min, I think a revival of a proper classic could do quite well.

[AntiFritz]

DFK - too difficult and scoring is extreme memory because it's all about chaining.

I've played roughly 30 hours of dfk and I've gotton about a bomb or 2 away of taking down shooty, the game isnt very hard with all those autobombs. And in this time i've managed to learn how to chain most of stage 1 and from the start of stage 3 till about the midboss. I'm no means a good player at all but I don't think your even trying.

[TrevHead (TVR)]

I love the chaining in DFK 1.5 (strong C) compared to DDP. I think its the wide angle shot that does it for me, so chaining is less about following a linear path, atleast for just chaining a stage.


@DTP why dont you go and play DS, and bomb past that TLB. Do you have fun playing these games or is it the winning thats fun? If its the latter, you'll never have fun as you cant win, and you'l never win as you dont have fun

BTW has anyone analysed his replays to see where he is going wrong? if so did it help?

[Gus]

mesh control has the right idea.

[DrTrouserPlank]

I'm tempted to give AKS another go because I always liked the game and it's got a bit of an Espgaluda 2 type scoring system to it with it's bullet canceling which I actually quite like, despite some of it's flaws as I see it. The last two bosses do put me off though. Other than that the game looks do-able, although I can say the same of Under defeat despite not being able to beat it.

I credit fed to the laser wheels in DFK before. Was fun

[NTSC-J]

Hi guys. I've just started playing the DC version of this again, and I'm finding it a lot harder than I remember it being.

Does anyone know a site that has gameplay movies of trigger heart, or a walkthru of some kind so I can see what I'm doing wrong? There used to be a site I used but I don't have the bookmark any more. I'd persevere but I think I'm trying to weave through an impossible barrage of shots where I didn't used to.

I have a real issue with this game which is that you can't tell where the "kill-zone" is on your character, consequently you can spin through a lot of bullets completely at random and not get hit, but of course eventually you will die.

I've seen videos of people playing but there is categorically no way they can be spinning through the swarms of bullets and actually be able to be actively avoiding being hit on whatever part of your character kills you. You spin and move way too fast and the bullet clouds are just too dense to be able to navigate like this. It just seems like it's blind luck.

Is it literally spin and hope, or just not spin at all if you want to navigate the bullets consciously?

Just bought this.

It's alright I guess, but I don't think I've ever seen a game with such ridiculously unfair difficulty. It's getting to the point of being stupid by chapter 3, but I credit fed it til then end and frankly it's not even funny. A screen awash with a random coverage of bullets that are unavoidable.

I know people don't like the idea that these games are made like this to generate money rather than so that they are challenging, but this really is just a game that wanted to be fed non-stop. It's one thing to have a fairly slow moving maze that covers the screen, but when it's 3 mazes all moving in different directions as fast as I've seen in any game, then I think someone is just having a laugh at our expense.

I'd say this is my problem with it.

The better you play the easier it becomes in the sense that the better you play, the more bullets you cancel.

I always find games where you have an option other than dodging difficult to play, because that other option is almost required to navigate the game rather than something that just makes it easier for you. With that in mind the game almost becomes a puzzle where you have to work out how to use that "power" to avoid bullets rather than just dodge them.

Having real trouble with this, I really find using the shikigami causes me more problems than it solves, however in the interest of scoring I don't have much choice. Really struggling to 1cc stage 2 let alone any respectable amount of the game. I can get about halfway through the boss fight but I'll usually die. I'm aiming to chain the level; I suspect that with autoshot I could probably clear it.

Sections causing particular trouble are:

The vertical assault of spiders/plants prior to the boss..... I just don't seem to get the bullet cancellation that others manage.
The Boss' final attack (streams of "arrows" combined with blue orbs)....... I sense that once in position the streams of arrows are largely not an issue as they merely confine you to a portion of the screen and don't actually hit you, but controlling the shikigami whilst avoiding the orbs seems very difficult; I find it hard even with the mobility that auto-shot provides... any tips. (other than play better :p)

Dodging I'm fine with, generally I do a lot better just using auto-shot because I know exactly where I am. Shoot and dodge.... simple. With the shikigami I end up delaying bullets but cause myself more trouble if I fail to get them canceled (as in the boss fight)

Is there nothing else to it though? I've watched replays and they get 3-4 times as more bullet clearance than I do. The shikigami basically just causes me trouble by backing up bullets on the bosses that I can't get rid of, and just making me a sitting target in the levels, and I get more overwhelmed by using it than by just using autofire and doding. Enemies take far longer to die for me than in the replays meaning that I simply can't move that stupid thing around the screen quick enough to cover everything that appears. As a result I spend all my time trying to dodge, and getting hit, whilst trying to launch the shikigami and get some sort of control of the situation.

This is by far and away the most difficult shooter I have ever played.... by a hell of a long way. Unless something suddenly clicks into place soon I think I'm going to leave this one alone because it's difficult to the point of being ridiculous.

I'd have to say that I personally wouldn't consider a 1cc on anything other than (at minimum) default settings a "true" 1cc..

Chances of me 1cc'ing a game..... pretty low on the games I play.

Really don't feel like I'm making much progress with this game. Struggling with original. Had it a couple of weeks.

I was able to get to level 3 on one credit and with minimal or no deaths fairly quickly but since then I've been pretty much stuck.

Can't 1cc level 3 (nowhere near) struggle to get to the boss in one credit, let alone beat it. Think the rank thing is an issue because I score reasonably heavily in the first two stages (heavily for someone who then loses all his lives so quickly, 35Mil+ after stage 2). I don't like using bombs because I don't see that as solving the problem, only avoiding it.

On scoring runs I've had to start bombing as I'm just too inconsistent and can get hit by nearly anything, certainly in boss battles. I've given up trying to avoid the mass-purple orb attack of the stage 2 boss as I can't guarantee I'll miss it (mainly because sometimes it's far simpler to avoid than others and you just can't tell which one he's going to throw at you.)

The little practice I've had on stage 4 I found it far easier to get to the boss than stage 3 (probably due to stage 4 being in almost constant slowdown).

Don't really know how to go about getting better. When I play stage 3 in training I almost always die at the same point, and it's not because that's a difficult point, it's just that I shed lives randomly through the level and it just happens to be about the same point at which I lose my last life. That's why I just don't feel any progress is being made.

Any ideas on how to improve?

It is around the Woodlouse area that I lose my last life in training. There's a reasonable amount of slowdown so usually I'm able to get in-between the beams of shots that cross each other, but like a lot of my deaths it just seems to be carelessness that causes me to get hit by something that I think I have avoided. Without at least one bomb I'm sure I'd get boxed in and die however.

My problems on that level are the big brown "beetles" that appear all the way through the level. I can deal with them as long as I get a shot on them early enough to negate their last attack, but the longer they are on screen, the more likely I am to die (If I'm trying to deal with some popcorn elsewhere)
The f'ing praying mantis that pops up repeatedly, once again if I get shots on him ASAP I can kill him before he sprays the screen with too much trouble, but I'll almost always lose at least 1 life to him.
And the praying mantis/beetle/woodlouse section at the end of the level; all the same problems rolled into one.

Seeing as I imported this game I always assumed that I would buy BL just to get my money's worth from the game. In playing 1.5 normal I had hoped to make some progress and intended to buy BL as something to look forward to after I had dealt with 1.5 normal. With the way 1.5 is going (frankly I see absolutely no way I'll ever clear half the game in a credit, let alone the whole game with a "no miss") I almost don't see the point in buying it. It's another mode that I have absolutely no chance of clearing... well I've got maniac and ultra for that and they're free.

I've got about 3500 points on my account. Those are reserved for Radiant Silvergun (which I will incidentally hate because it's a puzzle shooter like Ikaruga but I'll no doubt buy it) and maybe bullet witches NEO when it finally comes out (if it's decent) couple that with the PAL release of Deathsmiles (my first chance to play that game) and I have to ask myself "Do I need 1200 more points more frustration" with a game I seem to be failing at pretty badly.

I'm miserable I know but this does just feel like the first game I have ever played where I'm not really making progress no matter what I do. I've been playing this kind of stuff since the late 80's and it's just a bit disheartening

I've decided I don't like this game.

There's a difference though between something being hard, and something being designed to be virtually impossible and additionally require an extraordinary amount of luck to get through as well.

I've lost count of the number of times I've said "F'ing ridiculous!" whilst playing this game after being washed off the screen by an undodgeable barrage of random shots that are never the same twice.

Played the S3 boss 30 odd times in practice and I frankly believe some of his patterns are random, and some are undodgeable (2nd form final attack is impossible unless you are lucky or bomb, 3rd form pattern is impossible once it speeds up, unless you are lucky or bomb). Got through those patterns maybe 1 time in 10 that I even reached them by randomly moving. Occasionally I killed him in 3 lives but no less. Plenty of times I just got wiped out at random spots because the patter is too fast or a different, more awkward shape than before.

Did a run on score attack, had maybe a 12-14k multiplier on the 3rd stage. Had to bomb the final part of the mid-boss and bombed pretty much all of the bug section. It was impossbible with the multiplier I had (it's ridiculous enough as normal) Got to the boss with about 8k on the counter. He chucked his random patterns (faster), bombed a couple of times killed his first form (normally I'd do it without bombing and just die if that's how it panned out, but frankly you can't not bomb because you'll just end up with a wasted 15 minute run). Got wiped out soon after by random pattern number 582. A whopping 65 million for all that.... so no hope of any extra lives coming my way for help... one's your lot pal!

Long story short (but not very short) I still believe luck plays as much of a role as knowing what is coming. Maybe you don't need as much luck on the stages, but on the bosses I think you're on a pretty low percentage chance of getting a no miss on any given run.

I did read the replies concerning abnormal palm. Just because I was asking which was being used in the video doesn't mean I haven't read everything else that has been posted.

It's a bit immaterial anyway. I've gave him a try and went back to using Reco, after trying him again today it reminded me why I didn't like him in the first place. The lack of a wide shot and his slow speed makes the game even harder. Whilst he does get rid of bosses quicker that's not a lot of help if you can't get through the stages with him.

Fluked my way through the 3rd boss. Lost about 3 lives. Bombed all the undodgeable patterns, didn't do much for my score of course. I'll just have to find a way of factoring the loss of (at best) 3 lives on the 3rd boss into my run; which will be hard seeing as I won't get a 2nd repeat. Also not having any bombs left for all of stage 4 will make it even easier.

1 life to beat stages 1,2,4,5. That should be pretty easy.

The final pattern it does in it's 2nd form. It traps you with 2 lines of purple shots and fires walls of pink shots down the center (the first 2 have gaps in, the third wall doesn't, then it repeats getting faster until you stand no chance). I have to bomb or lose a life

The pattern it does in it's final form. Lots of pink dots and circular arcs of purple orbs come faster and faster. Can't dodge both patterns at once, and I wouldn't even be able to dodge the purple orbs alone once they get faster.

I'm struggling on with stage 4 normal. Whilst I haven't perfected stage 3 by any means, nor the boss which I'm still convinced is pretty random regarding precisely how it throws certain patterns at you, I've got them down well enough for now; that is to say I'm sick to death of playing them.

Stage 4 is pretty busy. Frankly I have difficulty trying to remember what is coming next. I've designated the level into sections. The start-the catapilla section-the land cannon section-midboss- the batshit loopy section.

I try to clear the flying things that hatch quickly, and in the batshit loopy section I try to clear the biggest threats as soon as possible before they flood the screen. Occasionally I get pinned to one side of the screen by a stream of shots and have to bomb which is annoying.... that's a result of being unable to recognise/remember what is coming next and where I need to be afterwards in order to eliminate the biggest threat.

Maybe I'll buy black label so I can complain about unfair it is on here as well.

Give me time; I haven't even started to vent about stage 5 yet.

As for it being "virtually impossible"... it is!

It's just that the "virtually impossible" met the "virtually improbable" in my run to stage 5. Luck was on my side; many a run ends long before my own highscore considerations even come into play.

Aside from knowledge I still say that luck stil............. ah nevermind.

I take back what I said about this game's difficulty. It's severely inconsistent. Too easy on rank 3. A quite hard once the suicide bullets kick in. Impossible on the gorge and castle on suicide level 2, and the last bosses are well beyond a joke. Makes the final boss in Futari look extremely easy by comparison.

Used about 20 continues with Casper just to see what it was like. Incidentally is there any reason to play as anyone other than Rosa? other than making a very difficult game more difficult with weaker characters.

I went back to playing this a day or so ago and it seems even more impossible than before.

I gave up on it in February after about a month of trying to 1cc normal 1.5. I'd gotten to stage 5 with about 120M but was frankly nowhere near to clearing it as stage 3 and boss is complete luck and stage 5 and its boss are well beyond ridiculous and seem like a case of needing to know it inside out and wait for that one-in-a-million fluke run where you get through it.

I love to see these people claiming they clear these games after a couple of hours. Frankly I'd like to see anyone do three 1cc's back-to-back because I think the chances of that happening are absolutely zero.

Seeing people's replays is all well and good, but if they are only clearing it once in, say, 100 attempts then it's a bit of a futile effort in trying to beat the game I think, as that just shows that there's as much luck involved as there is knowledge.

There's too many to mention really and they're hard to describe

2nd boss attack where it floods the screen with large purple balls: Sometimes these have a clear pathway through, sometimes they are undodgeable and there's no chance of weaving through them by reaction. This is more just a wasted bomb really, but it's annoying.

Most of the 3rd boss' attacks have the potential to hit you. Most have to be weaved at high speed and you have to make it up as you go along. It's unlikely you'll get through them all without getting hit.

3rd boss final form attack, waves of purple balls increasing in speed and red shots. Might doge 2 waves of purple balls but then any more you miss is luck and you are certain to get hit eventually. This is another bomb gone.

4th boss is more made up as you go along. Worst pattern is final attack, shots and cascading pink lanterns. Dodgeable for a while but your movement is somewhat limited and you get boxed into an area where the lanterns fall or the other shots will get you. Would bomb but I doubt I'd have any left after stage 4.

Stages 4 and 5 have the same problem. Get boxed on one side of screen by diagonal shots from enemies and wide-shot becomes unable to clear them so you have to (a) bomb or (b) die. happens multiple times at random spots.

5th boss. Haven't really even bothered. First attacks are way too fast and have no rhythmic movement that will dodge them. Making it up on-the-fly isn't possible. This is incidental anyway becasue I'm nowhere near to getting here. Would certainly have zero bombs left and no lives though even if I did.

Plenty of others I'm sure regarding general loss of live in levels, and random deaths on bosses from patterns that I file under "do-able, but are still luck"

I made that list from memory based on what I remember being a problem at the start of the year.

I lose 3 lives getting half-way through level 3 now... I found it ridiculous when I was playing it in January, but it feels 10 times faster now. I can't even see the patterns quick enough to consider weaving let alone actually do it now.

Edit: what's the pattern to the 3rd bosses final attack then? because there's absolutely no way you are visually dodging that as it comes at you. There must be a point you line up on your bomb counter and a sequence you basically hit in rhythm.

Yeah, that's a bit difficult when there's 2 different patterns crossing each other in an irregular manner. If you are dodging a wave of purple balls that require you to predict where the gap will be when they reach the bottom of the screen, you can't also be looking at the small stray bullets that are all over the screen.

Even the purple waves get too fast eventually, even if they were on their own.

Because if I spent my time looking at the ship and trying to dodge bullets that are milliseconds away from hitting me, I'd avoid nothing.

The waves of purple balls come from the top and the gaps appear so you predict where the gap will be based on how they are falling and move there preemptively. In this situation I can't be both looking at my ship and making a judgment on the purple balls which needs to be made much further up the screen with increasing regularity.

I think a lot of patterns are avoided before the bullets even reach you and you move to a position that will avoid it without even needing to look at your ship. Sometimes you might glance back at it briefly to make a minor correction, but other than loose projectiles any patterns of significant speed and complexity need to be judged at least halfway up the screen or you'll be too late to avoid it.

Well I don't know.

Something's changed because it's much harder than it was at the start of the year. The patterns feel a lot faster, even stuff that I found simple is a real problem to avoid now. Stage 3 would probably take me about 6-8 lives now. I could do it in 1-2 consistently before.

If clearing the game basically boils down to having an instruction set of movements and timings memorised for every event in the entire game with no movement for deviation, then I can't see that ever happening; and then what if you can't play it every day? you'll forget the routine eventually and be right back at square one.

Other than a few priority targets that I know I need to eliminate asap, it feels like learning the entire game from scratch again....

That's a pretty condescending opinion. I'm going to assume you don't have the mental acuity to distinguish situations as being anything other than black or white based on your assessment of my complaints.

Getting back to the scoring which someone else mentioned, I know how it works. If I could turn rank off I would because I don't need the game screwing me even more if I dare to get my multiplier up. 120M is pretty much everything being hit with the correct shot up to stage 5 with 4 deaths killing the chain at various points.

I think I must have spent (although it's difficult to be precise) around 20-30 hours playing this game but it could easily be more. Now whilst some of that gained knowledge was lost when I took a break I obviously didn't go right back to scratch. I'm worse than before I stopped for sure, but that in itself is another matter.

I'm still nowhere near getting a 1cc. Absolutely nowhere near.

Stage 5 boss.. forget it
stage 5... 6 lives minimum at a guess
stage 4... played it hundreds of times. Still die here, still die there, could die anywhere. If it wasn't practice I'd have to bomb 3x as much because I couldn't take the risks I do in practice. Probably would take 4-5 lives average including boss.
Stage 3.... Played it hundreds of times. Clumsy deaths at random spots, bombs usually needed, would need more in a proper run for safety once again. 3-4 average I'd say including boss.

Cant really see me ever having time to finish this game, but it would surely take at least another 100 hours on top of what I've already put in for a survival clear because my rate of progress is absolutely zero from session to session, day on day.

Not as such, but playing this game is like trying to knock down a brick wall by blowing through a drinking straw.

I think I could easily spend the next year playing this game and still be no closer to clearing it. Frankly it feels like work because all you can do is play the same stage over and over and never seem to get consistently better. It wouldn't be so bad if you could break that up with some scoring runs here and there, but that's not really an option either.

When you look at the task (which is to clear the game in 3+2 lives) and avoid all the stitch-ups on the various stages so that you have many lives left for the last stage and boss.. it seems very unlikely.

Edit: I'll have a look at that guide and try it later

Just did a run.

To Stage 5 with no lives remaining, 112M, had to bomb in loads of places I don't want to because you can't afford to take the risk not to. Although I lost lives at silly points I'd still consider this a lucky run. Would probably take me another 3 or so goes to get to stage 5 again.

No chance of memorising a sequence for stage 4, it's too chaotic so I just have to make it up.
Stage 5 similarly except you get pinned to the side all the time so bombs and lives will go very fast.... never going to have enough lives left for this and the boss.

Well stage 4 is too long anyway and after halfway its just a mess. I sweep across the screen all the time but eventually one of those sweeps gets me pinned by another flock of ladybird, or just too many enemies flooding the screen.

Of course I can sweep around the caterpillars and whatever to clear the screen now and then but it's just relentless and impossible to actually memorise what is coming from where and when, especially when I'm trying to kill things that aren't even on the screen yet.

As for stage 5 I think that doing that in a run where you can't take any risks is beyond ridiculous.

Here's a question.

'Is there any value in runs (as opposed to drilling a stage in practice) even if you aren't clearing the game?'

I've been belittled for my paltry 121M but I still think that's ok. I'll still think it's ok if I score 160M when/if I ever clear the game. I know it's not a good score, but surely seeing some improvement in either how far you get on a run, or how much you score is better than trying to drill a stage to the point where you feel that someone ought to be paying you to play this game such is the monotony involved in making seemingly no progress in practice mode.

Well, I don't consider practice mode to be "little girl mode". Without using a method to practice stages at the click of a button, the time to clear a shump would increase exponentially. It's a "productivity tool" as it were. A way to help you clear (in my opinion) a very difficult game.

I find runs more fun although they are not without their problems and are largely 40% wasted time even for me; as the first two stages are trivial for survival. I can play with the scoring a bit and I can come on here and get laughed at when I say I started stage 3 with a new high of 52M etc.

At least with runs (and some practice under my belt) I can at least feel as though I'm making progress when I see my high-score improve. Whilst I appreciate highscore may not be an indication of movement towards a clear, in my case it probably indicates less frequent deaths or deeper progress towards the end as a whole.

Found I can break up the practicing of stage 4 and 5 with some original runs and some maniac runs for variety.

Managed to get through stage 5 a couple of times but it's not great because I'm getting a 35M repeat which I obviously wouldn't get on a run, and I'm grabbing the 1up; so in total I'm losing 4 lives in order to get to the boss along with a fair bit of bombing when I end up backed into a corner. Still not clearing the boss of course. Haven't cleared it once in practice either

Playing stages endlessly in training mode is sure to bore me to tears eventually though, especially if I'm making little progress. I might run stage 5 about five times, then give 4 a couple of goes and do a few more 5's and a boss or two, but at least having a run on original to beat my immense 121M or practicing maniac to try to get the 100M achievement breaks it up and doesn't feel as restrictive.

Ultimately I need to do some runs anyway or else my knowledge of the game will be almost theoretical having been honed in practice mode with little experience of doing a run and the different mindset that comes with it (as opposed to "no consequences" training mode)

I think that's a little unfair based off my last post. I don't expect it to roll over, but I do "expect" to see progress or at least some sense peering out from within the madness.

I'm actually thinking of buying the MMP/PS limited edition because I can get it at a "reasonable" (lol) price at the moment. I still don't expect that it will be a patch on Guwange (which although in my opinion is a memoriser) is still one of the hardest Shumps I have played.

In honesty its not that simple though.

I can watch a professional Snooker player on TV and even anticipate how he goes about making a big break and what shot he will play next, but that doesn't mean I will be able to get down on a table and replicate it.

I think I'm a lot better than I represent myself as being on this board.

BS aside the fact is that I do OK on runs (other than the odd one that goes down the crapper now and then) and whilst I berate myself for not making progress, I am a lot better than I was when I started, and a lot better than I was when I picked this game up again at the start of the week. I just have very high expectations of myself and what I feel I should be achieving (to almost impossible levels of expectation).

The game certainly isn't the blur-a-thon of impossible patterns that I couldn't even see (despite knowing their shapes) that I was expressing earlier. My eyes have speeded back up and I have that extra bit of time to weave and mess around. I still think putting everything together in one run will be a monumental task and it will require luck regardless of how much people believe this game can be controlled down to the last pixel. Two runs are never the same no matter how much you try to replicate movements.

Espgaluda 2 is on the way though, and MMP/PS LE is looking good for 80 bucks or so.

I still prefer this game to things like Ikaruga, which whilst beautiful in its own way is like trying to memorise the order of 4 decks of playing cards without error.

Is it hard? I could use a new project to complain about

(brief intermission)

Incidentally, I do appreciate those who have taken the time to offer constructive advice in this thread; even those who have been somewhat stern in their assessment of my position yet have still managed to keep their posts from descending into an elitist rant against me.

I'll clear this game on original eventually, maybe I'll clear it on maniac one day. Maybe you'll see me in the ESP2 thread or the MMP thread complaining about something or another.

Let's put it this way. In my life I have invested far more time in other endeavors that have turned out to be utterly fruitless, and whilst this task is ultimately fruitless other than from a personal viewpoint; I intend to see it through.

(intermission over)

Definitely not gonna happen.

Even if I could clear certain parts without needing 5 lives, I could never do it all consistently enough to get it in a single run.

No progress made is about right.

With the amount of time I've spent on this in total it is ridiculous how far away from clearing it I am. Runs frequently end before I even get to stages and sequences that I have trouble with. Lives drip away over the course of the game like a leaking tap, and I can't get anywhere near my high-score.

All that considered it would be a bit surprising or indicative of me living in some sort of denial if I thought that a clear was just around the corner.

I don't know what magical format the practice you seem to be prescribing takes, but if I'm practicing levels for the umpteen hundredth time and I'm still dying because it boils down to patterns being too fast for me to dodge and there not being enough room to move, I don't see what else I can can do. Play the level again? done that. Sometimes I get through, sometimes I don't.

I'm still dying on patterns that I died on the first time I ever saw them, and it's not because I don't know the pattern. I've seen them enough times but it doesn't make any difference. If I am still dying it's because it's too fast or too tight, and what I find odd about this game is that patterns are relatively dense seeing as they move so fast you can't even see them sometimes.

Albeit that I did have to bomb a lot of the latter 1/4 of stage 5 as it was barmy and 17k+ on the counter wasn't helping things.

Why do I play so badly in score attack?

I find it strange that you would find that particular attack of the 4th midboss hard, or that you'd have trouble getting the 1up safely when I find both of those pieces trivial. But surely this maybe explains why I'm having such difficulty. I am simply having difficulty with bits, or difficulty with more bits that most people encountered when they were learning the game.

I do have a phobia of using bombs because I don't see it as solving a problem, more just avoiding it; but that in itself comes at a price because it's a problem you may encounter later that can't be bombed. I usually hit the bomb half a second too late (when I'm not getting caught by lazy deaths) but in order to compensate I have to bomb a second too early and sometimes it turns out to have been unnecessary such as managing to kill the bullet-cancel enemy that was taking too long, or avoiding the last milliseconds of a boss pattern.

I suspect that the rank-issue does make it much harder to get the 1up consistently, and if what I read earlier about chaining the lanterns making them score for increasingly more each time is true then I appreciate that you may have other things on your mind than simply nailing the 1up.

I did have a go at stage 5 with max rank in practice and I have to be honest, I didn't find it much worse. What I can avoid I still avoided, and what I couldn't avoid I still got hit by. The only thing I find distracting is that the game feels like it's playing on fast forward in the sense that the enemies move faster as well as their bullets. It's an odd phenomenon. Like playing a very old PC game on vastly superior hardware and the game plays at the wrong speed.

Is the TLB in 1.5 original mode for a no-miss run? I was surprised to skim through the replay of the no1 score and see that he missed several times and obviously didn't fight the TLB. Obviously his scoring must have been excellent, but I was just surprised to see a less than impeccable run with the top score.

My problem is that until I am down to zero lives remaining I don't play how I should do. I play conservatively and it either gets me killed or means I have to bomb in situations I could have avoided.

When i'm down to zero lives on stage 5 and it's a case of "find the gap or die" I miraculously find the gap...... how can you take those risks earlier though?... if you die you'll regret it for being reckless.

Got to the last boss again, this time with 2 lives.

I need to find a way to beat her. In practice I've never managed it without losing 4 lives, and I'm pretty unlikely to make it there with 4 remaining either.

Not for me it doesn't.

I'm running it in practice and bombing lots and I can only do her with 7 lives maybe 1 in 20 times.

Pretty much every pattern needs to be bombed at some point and costs lives otherwise.

Bought black label last night. Not sure why really.

Not too convinced about it being easier. Granted that you tear through bosses quicker but there's more bullets in general.

Can clear Larsa's first and second patterns consistently.
(well relatively consistently, I don't see it being a high-success-rate task ever)

3rd patter gets too much...

2nd form, 1st pattern is stupid as I've yet to develop the ability to move each of my eyes individually so that I can look at two things at once.
2nd pattern is "ok" relatively... it's do-able.

3rd form 1st pattern... ridiculous.
2nd pattern.. must be blind tap-dodged because it's way too fast to react to
3rd pattern.... don't understand how it works... if you have to react to it being semi-random then it's stupid.

Right. 1st and second patterns are understood and just need more practice.
3rd pattern is still too fast and would actually need 2 bombs on a real run, otherwise I'd get hit by a stupidly fast shot after the invincibility wears off.

2nd form, 1st pattern is a bit easier now that I know you can force those side wall away a little bit. Still hard though.
2nd pattern I still get caught on quite often even though I have an idea what I want to do.

3rd form, 1st pattern can be dodged for a bit but may need up to 2 more bombs,
2nd pattern is trivial now that I know where the gaps are each time
3rd pattern is just hope that not too many waves are fired at you in succession.

Did her with the loss of two lives once, but that's the best so far, and still not good enough or anywhere near consistent enough.

I really don't understand this at all

If you hold b and kill stuff then they spawn suicide bullets right?
if you press b and kill stuff the bullets cancel to gold.
gems are basically your meter?

if I hold b, kill stuff, get suicide bullets, do I then have to double tap b to go out and back into (slow-mo mode) to cash the bullets into gold? or is there a way to cancel them in (holding b) mode.

what is the point of (red bullet mode)? other than making you auto-bomb it seems completely pointless when you might as well be dealing with slower bullets and collecting gems.

I realise that these modes have names, but they might as well all be the same word so I've gone for the much easier descriptive method.

I don't understand the scoring at all. It seems to crawl no at the same rate no matter what I do (yes I've read the first post)

So how to do people rate MMP in terms of difficulty?

Let's just talk about first loop, playing for survival. No clever rank management (ie: a new player trying to score by killing everything and collecting lard when it won't get them killed)

Seems fairly hard to me. Credit fed to the later stages and then sat in the corner and cried for a bit.

I'm playing 1.01 but I think I must be playing a different game to other people.

I think futari 1.5 is pretty ridiculous but MMP is something else. Some of the stuff I saw at the end of the game was categorically unavoidable (unless by scoring you end up with about 30 bombs to use or something).

As for the scoring.... 6.5 million when I die on stage 3

Right... is there any way to play either the final stage, or the final stage and the gorge without any suicide bullets? This game must have the most wonky difficulty curve ever. The sheer stupidity of adding suicide bullets at the end of the game makes me want to throw the TV through the window out of rage.

How much should I be using the bomb and slo-mo (B button) with a view to just surviving? I'll score where I can but let's leave that aside for now.

Is this game actually possible because it seems like a joke that only the programmers are in on?

Is there any realistic chance of beating Larsa if you get there with less than 4 lives?

Forget the 1 in a thousand run where you don't get hit or whatever, what's the number you need to guarantee 95% of the time to beat it?

I don't suppose that the JP release has a training mode that lets you practice the last boss without having to go all the way through the last stages does it?

The inability to go straight to the boss really makes this very difficult to even think about clearing.

The difficulty of the game isn't the issue as such. I do however think it's progression is completely wonky, and the lack of a decent practice mode doesn't help to correct that.

I'm not playing this anyway. Without being able to practice bosses which follow two fairly long stages it's a waste of time even thinking about it.

I think I'm going to have to give up on clearing this game and just try to break 200M before reaching the last boss.

The amount of time I've spent on it is ridiculous and I'm frankly nowhere near to beating it. I could probably spend another 30 hours working towards the 1cc and still not get it.; plus it just become a pure grind now.

I'm not sure it is. You have to be realistic about things, and I more than anyone else know how far along I am to finishing this game.

I could keep believing that the next run will magically be a lot better than I have done before and I'll get to Larsa with 5 lives and maybe kill her; but that's not realistic because no evidence points towards that happening. Most of the problems I have is that lives just go here and there... it's nothing specific but you lose one here and another one there on nothing patterns because you are asking for luck in many situations and you don't always get it.

If I can kill her in 3 lives, then how many runs do I need to do in order to reach her with 3? then what percentage of the times that I do reach her with 3 lives will I actually kill her? It's a very small number.

How many more hours would I need to sink into stages 3-5 in order to eliminate "mistakes" (or lack of luck which drains lives)? 5 hours more per stage? maybe more.

The evidence of the numbers is greatly staked against a clear suddenly popping up out of the blue, and failing that one has to assess the situation as it stands.

I'd love to play something else. I currently have DFK 1.5, Akai Katana, and DOJBLEX sitting here with no machine to play them on.

If Renchi.com would be so kind as to reopen I'd order my machine, but as it is I'm pretty much stuck with futari, ESPgaluda2, and MMP/PS for the time being.

Can't even get past stage 3 now

The luck you must need to clear this is ridiculous. I've played it so much that I know the stages back-to-front and can play them in my head but I still can't fluke a clear.#

Seriously, lets put the BS aside now.. does anyone here who's cleared it actually think they weren't the benefactor of an enormous amount of luck when they did? How often can you do it now? 1 in 10 attempts, 1 in 50?

I know them absolutely inside out.

Knowing the stages (or not) doesn't have any baring on whether you squeeze through a gap or dodge into a bullet.

A fraction of a second too much pressure on the pad one way, or not enough in the other is nothing to do with knowing the stages. It's about what the margins for error are and how many times you are asked to run your luck against them. Eventually your lives counter will be empty assuming enough of these situations are present (which of course they are).

My method of practice is to sit down and grind the f***ing stages over and over until I want to throw up. I can clear them all (1-4 pretty consistently, 5 less so, although the stage I can probably clear but forget about the boss). I know how to clear them, but there's a significant enough amount of times throughout the game where you'll have to squeeze through a gap and you'll get hit, or you'll get hit by a stray bullet coming from an unusual direction. It's no one thing, it's just how the lives drip away over the course of a run.

It's not that they aren't manageable is that you inevitably hit something that you don't mean to

I'm quite happy with how most patterns come at me. What I'm not happy about is how often you just die in nothing patterns; and it'll be at different points every time, absolutely anywhere. It's not the pattern it simply wears you down through attrition.

I've got Viva-pinata. It's in one of those wall-mounted glass boxes that says "Break in case of emergency".

Getting pretty close to putting my head through it if I'm honest.

I reached Larsa more than once I think, but that was never the point because reaching her and clearing the game are about as far apart as clearing stage 1 and clearing the game.

If there are 6 lives available in the game, I would need most of them to reach her. At an optomistic estimate I would need at least 9 lives + lots of bombs to clear the game from start to finish. I've practiced Larsa plenty and I just consider it (at best) a mandatory 2-3 life penalty that you have to accept and factor into the game. Based on that you need to lose no more than 3 lives during stages 1-5 excluding Larsa. That's a tall ask, and is beyond purely your control.

I also think that peoples' predictions of what their success rates would be when just trying to clear the game are very bullish as well. Seeing as there doesn't appear to be any real data on this, my impression is that people got their clear and then ran the hell away before the game got another chance to beat them.

I'd play something else but I don't see what it will achieve. I hope my J360 arrives next week so I've got more games to play.

and once again the use of the phrase "I would also be willing to bet" makes it sound more like conjecture rather than what has actually happened. If you have since gone away and cleared it umpteen times in a row then it's a different matter.

Just going off to play this game again.

Brace yourself for incoming rage.

I did nothing of the sort.

I pointed out that assuming you can clear the game a high percentage of the time just because you have a high score or have played it a lot was probably misguided because (as much as people want to believe they are in total control) luck is still a massive factor in clearing this game on any single run.

I still think this game is bullshit and I know I'll never clear it; partly because it is unreasonable and partly because the chances of getting to Larsa with 4-5 lives intact are close to zero no matter how many times you run it.

I could have probably cleared 2 games in the amount of time I have wasted on this one; and am still maybe 40-60 hours away from clearing it despite the stupid amounts of time it has eaten up. Progress has been painstaking and slow on the whole and most of it seems to be chance and session by session luck rather than a consistent improvement through knowing the stages. This is probably because mistakes are just too easy to make and you have no spare lives to play with at all.

It has been an utterly pointless and fruitless journey that has probably seen me spent some 20-40 joyless hours trying to accomplish something that is well beyond ridiculous and as far as I'm concerned beyond anything that practice alone can achieve.

I read it a while back, and as I've said (other than Larsa taking 4-5 lives) there's no one situation that causes me trouble but I'll still lose all my lives by the St5Boss. Different places every time, every game. I doubt I've lost two lives in the same spot of a very long time now. How do you train that? "work on your consistency"? well you can't work on consistency really, other than sink hundreds more hours into the game, and even then you aren't guaranteed results as I've already demonstrated.

It doesn't matter and I'm pretty much resigned to it now. Not being able to clear it is far less annoying if you just say "screw it" than when you are seriously trying to make progress and sinking hours into it with little improvement to show.

I'm not saying that it's "completely luck based" of course you need to know what you are doing, but that alone will not guarantee you success all of the time.

I'm sorry if you can't accept that, but I'm fed up of defending this to people trying to pick it apart, so aside from this response I'll leave those who are irate to do their thing. If you or anyone else wants to believe that you can control everything about this game, then so be it.

It doesn't make a blind bit of difference anyway.

I've spent hours trying to find a way to beat it in training and there's no way to do it consistently and on few enough lives. The whole thing has gotten well past the point where any more practice is going to make a real difference.

I think it's without doubt the most unfair game I've ever played, and to spend more time on it would be an utter waste.

I've taken it as far as it can be taken. I'm done.

Enjoying it too much to think about this game anymore; although now that I'm not playing Futari I have finally got something to rest my coffee cup on.

I don't know why you'd think I'm upset about my new console or any of the games I've bought? Not too sure how you got that idea.

I'm sorry you think you are being trolled but have you given any thought to why you believe that is so? Maybe what I say strikes a nerve because you know there's some truth to it, regardless of how much you'd like to deny it.

I'm not too sure that this is the thread in which I should be offering therapy however. If you like I'd be willing to discuss the matter further in a new thread set up for that purpose.

The purpose of a game (I am informed) is to act as an entertainment product and presumably provide enjoyment through it's consumption. However, can a game be fun when it is oppressively hard?

Are CAVE's games at odds with this definition when they are (primarily, in the case of arcade games) designed to remove coins from the pockets of players first and foremost? Is creating a game that is virtually impossible to complete without continuing like selling a jigsaw puzzle with 6 bits missing?

Bringing the question full circle; can a game that is virtually impossible to complete be fun, and under what conditions?

If your aim is to score as much as you can in 1 credit, is high difficulty a good thing or does it reduce your final total to nothing more that a "swerve and hope" tactic once the difficulty becomes unreasonable? If your goal is to clear the game in 1 credit, does the coin stealing mentality of the game make the goal nothing more than a pipe-dream?

You can put together all the pieces that you have available to you and say that you've completed it, but you haven't really. The analogy was directed more towards asking whether it is "fair" to issue people a challenge without giving them the tools to overcome it?

Addressing a more general point that is raised, yes I do think shmups are the "right" genre for me as the gameplay itself is fun. My issue has been that that the game becomes increasingly less fun once the difficulty becomes obnoxious even in the face of many hours of practice.

Maybe I should practice and play runs using (say) one or at max two continues rather than trying to get perfect at each stage in turn before moving on to the next one, or does this go against the doctrine that shmup players adhere to?

Where are we ranking akai katana arcade mode in the difficulty scale? Harder than Futari 1.5 or so easy that anything less than 400M on your first ever credit is a failure?

Arcade is more than hard enough to clear.

If I need a reminder about stupid difficulty I'll go back to Futari.

I don't think Akai katana is easy in any sense. Arcade mode might be a bit less dense on bullets than Futari, but the last 2 bosses of katana make up for it as the screen is just awash with nonsense.

I don't see much difference in difficulty in any of Cave's games from a perspective of trying to just clear them. It still comes down to the same thing that has always been my bug-bear; holding onto lives for the duration of the run is just terribly unlikely. Even if you know you can clear levels and don't have sections that give you particular trouble, the lives just drip away with mistakes.

Irrespective of the bullet density, mistakes still happen and practice doesn't eliminate them because if it were that simple you wouldn't accidentally dodge into a bullet in the first place. Practice gets you past points that you couldn't get through because of pattern difficulty previously, but I don't think it stops you making mistakes at the frequency that you originally made them at. That's the reason that clearing most of these games is very unlikely.

I don't find that stops me from making mistakes. As I mentioned earlier, practice helps you to get through phases you couldn't get through previously. What it doesn't stop you from doing is losing lives at random spots which should be routine.

I like Akai Katana as such, but I find it rage inducing like most of their games when you end up with a barrage of shit on the screen, no bombs and no ninja meter and you know you are going to die.

I like Cave's games, I think they are engaging but the eventual difficulty of them is ridiculous. Great for emptying people's pockets, but programmed with this solely in mind.

Unless we are assuming that clearing them is meant to take well over 100 hours and tens of thousand of attempts, I don't know how people clear them.

Well If that's the norm then fair enough. But many people here seem keen to claim they've cleared games after 5 goes, or within a day or two.

I've probably spent 40-50 hours on Futari (or it certainly feels like it) and barring some amazing bit of luck I am nowhere near to clearing it. Fortunately I'm sick of that game and have no desire to ever go back to it.

I'd say at least half the time I usually come off the machine in a bad mood after playing these games.

All their games seem to have a point at which practice make little difference though. Certainly when looking at success rate over a long period rather than if you can clear the stage on a particular attempt.

Practice gets me to this stage but then abruptly ceases to work apparently, which seems a bit of a strange concept. There's a definite point in their games where they go from being challenging to being obnoxiously difficult, presumably with the intention of being so difficult that you are required to plug the machine with money for the next 15 minutes.

I still don't know how you are meant to stop dying at completely random spots, and no-one else seems to have any idea how you can create a focused practice plan for something that has no focal point.

From a probabilistic standpoint it makes sense for the game to be able to grind you down. Even if you have a 5 stage game in which you can genuinely clear each stage individually 90% of the time, your chances of doing all 5 back-to-back is barely 60%.

Nah, I've really had it with akai katana now. It's rage inducingly stupid in so many ways.

The difficulty isn't too ridiculous in general if you can get past some of the cheap shit it pulls like point-blanking you out of ninja mode, or firing super-speed bullets from cannons that are going off-screen and (frankly) shouldn't be firing, but I still however firmly believe that certain sections are designed and tested to be virtually impossible (that is, costing you at least 1 life out of the many coins you have no doubt already lost). The last two bosses are frankly bullshit. Some of the twins attacks actually blanket the screen at ridiculous speeds with the sole intention of being unavoidable. The last boss is similarly ridiculous and designed to do nothing more that cost you money. That isn't difficulty; it's deliberate bad game design intended to make you feed the machine.

Even if I could get to either one of them (which of course I can't) it's an utterly pointless endeavor. You'd be breaking your balls in order to get to a section that is clearly unreasonable.

I am literally staggered that no-one else (apparently) sees it this way.

I know people have tried to be constructive here, but most times I come away from the game this is my impression of it. A challenge is fine, but this and all their other games go from being challenging to impossible with absolutely no middle ground, and the gap between the two is immense.

Sessions like this put me in a seriously bad mood, and they are way too frequent.

I've got Deathsmiles and whilst I like the game it has one major flaw. No decent practice mode to allow you to skip to the last bosses, and seeing as the two stages previous are pretty long (and the rest of the game is comparatively easy) it makes learning the difficult last bosses very tiresome.

To address random other points. I don't agree that shin mode is any harder. In fact I believe the last credit I played on it (having only played arcade) was a no miss all the way to level 4 (which is unusual). Granted there's more shit on the screen, but the wider viewing angle gives you more time and room to deal with it, and you can wipe the majority of it out making it a non-issue.

The futari video is all well and good, but if you want to pick apart everything I say then why are you bombing sections that you claim are easily avoidable?

I find people's ranking of difficulty on these games bizarre. I've been told (or given the impression) Galuda 2 and DOJ are more difficult and that things like DFK 1.5 are easy.

My experience is that Galuda is no worse than anything else I've played, possibly even easier due to the slo-mo and the lower bullet speed. The increased bullet density is not an issue.
Played DFK. Level 1 is about equivalent to DOJ stage 3 so whoever said that was easy is having a laugh.
Katana's stages are not too bad. The end of stage 5 is donkey balls, and the last two bosses are completely out of place. It's similar to deathsmiles' wonky difficulty.
Futari has a more consistent difficulty throughout the game and it's progression is at least more linear. Anomalies such as the stage 4 bosses being much easier than stage 3 are annoying, and Larsa is complete bobbins.

More Akai Katana for me.

It's hellishly addictive with the same bad after-taste that a smack addict gets after shooting up.

I haven't played it since I last had a meltdown here a while back. Gave it a whirl again after seeing this thread last night and it's like being back at square one all over again. Good fun to play, until you get serious with it and then it's just a massive headache all over again. Same as all of Cave's games.

I don't know why people seem to always say this game is easy. Using the middle-type (power?) it's probably the hardest cave game I've played. Much harder than DOJ.

Not sure which game to play tonight. I could give this another go but every time I play it I just feel a sense of boredom that comes from being washed off the screen by impossible waves of bullets. I've had DFK for about 6 months and I estimate I've played no more than an hour of it, such is the "meh" it induces within me.

That leaves me with pork/sweets, AKS, Futari, DS, ESP2, and DOJ. I wonder if I can tolerate any of those for long enough to get back into them.

I've bought myself Ketsui, DS2 and Shiki3 for xmas so I'm looking forward to a stress free Christmas and a resumption to posting on these forums shortly afterwards.

I think asking someone to invest 40 hours into something in order to be able to pass judgment on whether or not it is good is asking a little much. Surely a "good" game should hook you and make you want to play more? As it is this game feels tedious. It feels like another example of how to remove as many coins from a player's pocket as quickly as possible by ranking the difficulty up from pretty hard to ridiculous very quickly.

The only shmup that I have invested your suggested amount of time in is Futari, and the results of that are well documented in the Futari thread.

I see, so I really need to put in the hours with these games in order to decide that I really don't like them. Maybe I should pre-emptively apply Minoxidil before starting in order to negate the copious amounts of hair loss through it being pulled out in frustration?

Futari and AKS managed to piss me off no end, so I'll look forward to spending an equally long and frustrating time with the next one I choose. I'm in a mind to give Espgaluda 2 a proper go because that has yet to annoy me. Futari I've written off, and the latter quarter of AKS is impossible.

Because I find that they have a very calming and positive influence on my mood.

In seriousness, I suppose it's because (in theory) I enjoy shooters. My problem has been that they seem to take on an impossible level of difficulty shortly after the third stage, and I don't get any enjoyment from dying repeatedly on a section that is clearly designed to rob you of money rather than simply be a section which is difficult to navigate.

"impossible" is just a word I use rather loosely. Don't take it too seriously. It is interchangeable with ridiculous, unreasonably difficult, probabilistically unlikely, and many other phrases for the purposes of this discussion.

I find bullet hell far more appealing (at least in theory).

I "like" most of the shooters I've got but in many cases this will come with a quantifying statement along the lines of "but its too hard towards the end"

I've spent the most time on futari and it's good, but the chances of clearing the last two stages without many lost lives on a consistent basis (consistent enough for some of these runs to be 1cc) is very unlikely. Seeing as I've spent so long on this and am not anywhere near to clearing it (in terms of getting consistently to the end) I consider it to be too difficult.

AKS is the game I've probably spent the next longest with. I like this one as well. Stage 1, 2, 3 are all do-able, 4 is a bit hard and will lose you lives and 5 is complete donkey balls along with the two last bosses which are some of the most ridiculous things I've seen.

Espgaluda 2 is good, played it a bit. Have credit fed it so I've seen it all. Can't really say how hard it would be to clear properly haivng not worked past the third stage properly.

Deathsmiles is ok, ruined by the lack of a boss select in training mode. Were it not for this I'd make a serious attempt to clear this one.

pork/sweets, DOJ and DFK have had less of my time. Pork seems ok but pretty hard.

I've practiced plenty.

Practice allows you to get past the pieces that at first seem difficult, what it doesn't do is allow you to get past the pieces which follow those because they are (intentionally?) designed to empty your pockets rather than give you are realistic challenge to overcome.

Well I'm still waiting for this magical method of practice that others apparently use and is clear to everybody other than me to materialise. Apparently grinding the stages in practice mode until you want to puke isn't an effective way to practice.

Apparently the way I practice is wrong if there is such a thing, although I do make progress, it's just that the progress stops at the point at which the difficulty become ridiculous.

I'm not too sure about your assertion that "so many members" have managed to clear these games. Talking about games in general is a little unspecific but let's ignore that for now. I suspect that "some" members have managed to clear ''some'' of these games. I suspect that "some" of these members have cleared the game once and have never managed it since.

A straw poll of people in any thread is not a very accurate way of gauging peoples' success rate, as it is often the case that those who shout the loudest are the ones who are heard and the voices of those who haven't cleared them are a lot less prominent.

Well whilst that proves that 20 people (at least) have cleared the game it still tells you very little about the proportion of people who are clearing the game, and seeing as there are surely a great deal more members on this forum than 20, I don't see this as justification for saying that "so many" people have cleared it. Taking into account either the number of people who will have attempted to beat this game (which is a comparatively large number) or even the number of people on this forum, a number in the region of twenty is very few clears and in both absolute terms or even as a proportion of members, doesn't represent "so many".

I'm not claiming that Futari cannot be cleared, but I see it more as a low-probability rather than something which an be achieved with any consistency. Once you are in a position to possibly be able to clear the game, and are willing to run the game thousands of times in order to get the iteration that leaves you on the last boss/stage without having lost loads of lives, then you will possibly get the clear.

Gave it 2 attempts. Lost all lives by about mid-way through stage 4. Don't like the game at all though. Ship is too twitchy using shot and I can barely see what is going on through all the fucking explosions and medals.

Unless there's something I don't know it's ridiculously difficult. Without a hyper or bomb for most of stage 3 onwards it looks completely impossible because the screen is flooded constantly.

I did. I switched to AKS and encountered exactly the same problem after a few weeks.

Have cave ever made a game that it was reasonably possible to complete?

This game suffers from the issue of excessive screen flooding nonsense. Even when you take into account that you can use the bullet-canceling enemies to clear some of the garbage off screen, you'll still never get through some pieces without either 1)bombing or 2)using hyper, and I'm sure the purists will tell me hyper is for scoring in which case I shouldn't need to use it for survival.

So far we have,

Futari - several sections that offer a low percentage success rate. Lives are eroded leaving you with too few for the final stages.

AKS - comparatively sensible difficulty until last stage + final 2 bosses which fire off wave after wave of undodgeables which have to be bomb-spammed for survival. Obviously you run out of bombs.

DS1 - wonky difficulty. Almost "easy" until last stage and final boss which look like they were taken from a different game.

Galuda 2 - bullets are dense but at least they are slow. Shikidodong mode allows you to slo-mo and at least weave very intricate bits, but I got told off for using it to survive so I guess this is also close to impossible.

Pork - so-so. Some bosses are ridiculous. Found ship too twitchy, making the game harder than it ought to be.

DOJ - Similar to DFK, if not a bit easier.

Without autobomb in DFK it would be beyond ridiculous. Now I don't like auto bomb, and the fact that it's been implemented tells you that even the designers thought the difficulty was pretty stupid and it required some balancing.

I'll go play a bit more DOJ and see what I think.

I like most of the games I've got to some extent. The games themselves in the way they play and what you have to do are good. My issue is with what I consider to be excessive difficulty that appears insurmountable even with significant amounts of practice.

The most fun I have with a shooter is when it is new and there is no expectation of ability. The first few hours are fine because you make progress and die at fairly normal points without feeling an obligation to be able to clear it. As time passes however and the amount of time practiced increases the feeling that you should be progressing increases, and when you invariably don't make progress in line with your expectations that is when the frustration sets in.

I disagree also with the suggestion that I'm a "troll". I am simply expressing a view which appears to be at odds with what most people here think. If everyone here sat around high-fiving each other about how perfect every Cave game was then that wouldn't really be the basis for very interesting discussion. I know some people here seem to take what I say very personally (almost irrationally so), maybe that's why you think I'm a troll, but it's a little unfair to brand me a troll because of the over-emotional responses that my posts seem to elicit when that is not their purpose.

I still think it's a point of contention to say that many people can clear them consistently. You name two people and then claim "many" others can as well. Without being able to quantify these "many" others your statement is not necessarily true. I could just as easily name two people who can clear them and assert that "very few" others are able to clear them, with just as much factual evidence as your statement (i.e. very little).

You are asking me to answer a question based on a statement for which there is little supporting evidence for in the first place. If the assumption is faulty to begin with (or at the very least unproven) then it is not possible to rigorously prove or disprove anything which follows on from it.

I apologise if this reply doesn't meet your criteria but that is the situation as it stands.

I'm not going to say that practice doesn't matter. The only things that really influence how well you do are practice and a bit of luck. Luck won't get you consistency though so lets ignore that for now.

Speaking from a purely hypothetical point of view, you will need to have played the game a hell of a lot in order to get the sort of consistency you are talking about. Maybe what I consider a lot is very little to you, but I estimate my Futari practice is between 40-50 hours. That has got me most of the way through the game to a point where I'd get to the 4th stage and onwards about 80% of the time. I don't see why I should be much different to anyone else, and can therefore only assume that in order to clear these games consistently you would need at least double the hours I have put in; maybe even more.

Even I don't dislike Cave. I have no feelings towards a company, only the games that they produce which as I've said are fine until you see how stupid the difficulty gets and then the game ceases to be any more than a joke which you seem to be on the receiving end of. I've reached this point with all their games I own.

All their games that I've got fall into the category of "I like them, but the difficulty makes them impossible to enjoy in the long run because progress grinds to a halt once the screen flooding undodgables arrive." After no more than an hour or two of DFK I've already reached this point (which is probably a new record) and it's clear that there's no way to progress any further baring a limitless supply of bombs or being able to play at a record breaking level in order to recharge the hyper in no time; but seeing as I'm playing for survival I shouldn't have to be able to break scoring records just to be able to survive in the first place. I think DFK is actually one of their hardest games, certainly in terms of it getting very stupid very quickly.

In order.

Let's keep this Futari specific because it's the one I have the most experience with.

I've learned the stages. I've played them all so many times that I'm sick of them.
I know where enemies are coming from next, I don't go to the top of the screen to try to wipe them out before they appear because it risks me getting cheap-shotted.
I've practiced the bosses more than the stages. I know how to dodge their patterns but I'll still get hit sometimes because (as I've said before) you cannot avoid every pattern every time.
I don't plan to ever bomb, with a couple of exceptions. Third boss final pattern, fourth boss final pattern (If I recall correctly), some of Larsa's patterns. I never go into a stage with the intention of bombing. I only use it when I get boxed.

With bullet hearding I'll go up the screen a bit or at least get to one side and sweep back and forth across the screen as successive waves of enemies come with the intention of at least keeping a bit of space somewhere to go to if things go wrong.

I know that some patterns are aimed, some aren't and some are aimed and combined with another pattern that is usually fired at an offset to you.

I don't see how BL original is easy. Bosses go down quicker but the patterns are harder. It's no easier than 1.5 which is too hard anyway.

I concede that there does seem to be a lot of slowdown, and indeed I haven't played it a lot, but from someone who was able to get near to the end of 1.5 and not finish it (granted I am now very rusty) I still wouldn't be able to complete BL either. That's why I question how much easier it really is.

Can anyone think of any way to make practicing the stages any more fun? It's such a grind-fest just playing them in practice mode especially when you aren't really getting anywhere.

Doing runs break things up a bit but they are almost completely pointless because I can't get anywhere near my highscore and just die on stage 3 now.

Anyone else got any ideas or ways to make it seem less monotonous?

I tried using different characters and that makes it slightly less boring but I don't think it really helps progress much.

I'm willing to practice, it's just that I've played the levels thousands of times already and it's getting a little stale, especially in the light of making very little progress towards beating them consistently.

Must have just run stage 3 about 15 times. Number of completions in 3 lives....... 1

It's simply not possible to avoid that much shit with any consistency. Even if there's no specific sections that give you any trouble you'll still accidentally dodge into something or misjudge a trajectory and lose your lives somehow.

I wonder what the record is for most amount of time played without getting a 1cc? I've got to be pretty close to it, if not having already surpassed it some time ago.

I'm not trolling. I'm trying to get advice on a very difficult game that has managed to cause a great amount of frustration as must be evident. It is also not helped by people saying how apparently easy it is.

Even if there's no specific sections that give you any trouble you'll still accidentally dodge into something or misjudge a trajectory and lose your lives somehow.

Nothing is forcing me to run into them, but there is only a certain amount of motor control that someone can be expected to demonstrate and only a certain amount of things they can watch and react to at once.

This game is definitely impossible. Ab-so-lute-ly impossible.

it's bullshit too.

I like the genre, as in I like the gameplay. What I don't like is the completely ridiculous and highly improbable endeavour of trying to beat a stupidly difficult game in 1 credit when that is obviously almost impossible, because common sense dictates that you are going to hit a few of the three-hundred billion bullets that it fires at you, because you can't be that accurate all the time, every time.
it's bullshit too.

I'm gonna go play some WoW in a minute.

I have spent christ-knows how long on this game and I am nowhere near to completing it. Even though I have got to captain cocksplash on stage 5 a couple of times on a run that's still nowhere near to beating it because,

1) Those runs are very rare
2) Beating it would require 5 lives on it's own.

I've spent hours.... fucking hours and hours and hours practicing stages, bosses, stages, bosses, runs, you name it I've played it about a million times, and I still haven't got any hope of clearing it.

Unless getting one clear out of about a hundred-thousand runs is how people get an "all" on the leaderboards, then I don't see how anyone could have done it yet I am still nowhere near.

How is chucking a screen full of bullets at you and giving you half a micron though which to maneuver your ship in any way reconcilable with the terms "forgiving", "easiest" or "user friendly"?

I thought my monitor had gone wrong at one point because the whole screen had turned purple.

Lets look at this optimistically. You no-miss stages 1-3, you lose 1 life on stage 4 and one life on stage 5, It leaves you 3 lives to beat Larsa. That's just not enough and you'd never manage that in the first place. How are you meant to 1cc this again?

Since someone managed to get my thread in off-topic locked I think there is some call/demand for a thread in which I can continue this discussion. Judging by the amount of content here, there is obviously some discussion to be had, even if not everyone agrees with me.

Consolidating all my fury into one thread seems a good idea. The only threads getting any amount of traffic seem to be the ones I am resurrecting at the moment anyway. Trouble is that it will probably get modded to off-topic, and if that's the case I'd probably get more responses just shouting out of my window at random passers-by.

Having practiced larsa many hundreds of times I don't think I can do her in less than 5. Five lives is rare, less is even rarer. Obviously I wouldn't have five lives, I'd probably have 2; if that.

I can get hit by almost any of her patterns. As is the case with the whole game and why I don't believe it can be cleared with any predictability.

If I recall correctly, her final pattern of her second form needs a bomb, or two. First pattern of her third form needs a bomb or two. (baring in mind I'll almost certainly have no bombs left on the life that I reach her, and only three for the other life). Even the stuff that I don't strictly need to bomb will still cost lives about 30% of the time.

I find black label no easier. The extra bullets and speed make it just as hard as 1.5

Just had two (what I would call) relatively good runs back to back on futari, one ended on the fourth level, the second on the 4th boss. They aren't good in the sense that I'm happy with how far I got, or the score, but the gameplay was good with the exception of the majority of the deaths which were soft deaths where I nudged into a simple bullet. I am convinced that the game conspires to screw you over at every opportunity it gets though.

Most of the times I die my thought is,

"That was stupid, but hardly surprising given the amount of crap coming at me. It's a miracle that I've managed to avoid so much of it."

swiftly followed by,

"This is just ridiculous!"

followed by a death about 15 seconds later

You must need to have so much luck to get a clear within 5 lives. Even when you aren't getting boxed in you just lose lives to nothing bullets, or the game decides to kill you because you apparently hit an enemy that was in a cloud of gems (when it obviously wasn't). Seriously. I have spent ages on this game. so much time that it's not even funny. How much practice do you need to clear this? 200+ hours? or do you just need to have worked on the programming team?

I don't think you are lying in the sense that you are actively trying to deceive, but I know that people generally (once they can do something to a reasonable level) estimate their ability or success rate to be well above what it actually is if a practical study was conducted. People will say "I can clear the game 8 times out of 10" which is only an estimate based on the experiences they choose to remember. The human mind is pretty good as discounting all the times they reset on level 1, or die twice on level 2, or lose all their lives on level 4, and selectively weights their success' much more heavily than their failures.

After many many many hours of practice I would struggle to get to stage 5 more than 30% of the time I think.

What I am having problems with is the sheer fact that you cannot possibly go through the whole game making so few mistakes. You are going to misjudge a path now and then, get boxed in with no bombs sometimes and get hit by something you didn't see occasionally. This is assuming that you can actually deal with the bosses and levels and the patterns themselves without the loss of many lives, because you are going to need to keep those for the mistakes you make.

What I am saying is, the improbability of making so few errors on a run pretty much excludes the chance of ever clearing it on one credit.

I went off and had a look at that replay. Don't really see what he is doing different to me on stage 2, nevermind anyway. I gave it a try. Had 90M by the end of stage 3 but couldn't have got much more.

I didn't lose the first life until at least half way through level 4. Between there and the last third or so of level 5, I lost all 6 lives which is pretty shit.

I'm back to where I was last time I left this game pretty much. Stuck around 180M (although I suppose this time I've got there a little sooner.)

I managed to limp over the 200M mark today by about 200k. Ended stage 4 with about 130M after losing 1 life.

Lost 3 lives on stage 5 itself. The last third of stage 5 which I cannot do at all because I get repeatedly boxed was pathetic. I went into it with about 195M and bombed a lot of it. You've never seen 5M go on a score so slowly. Got to Larsa with 2 lives. Got nowhere near beating her.

I'm going to need at least 4 lives to have any chance and even then it's still only about a 30% chance assuming I get my bombs off and don't accidentally die on patterns I can actually dodge.

Futari black label is definitely not easier than 1.5. It feels more like halfway between 1.5 original and maniac.

So the bosses go down quicker? big deal. With the exception of larsa who is an utter shit (and is possibly worse in BL as well) the bosses aren't difficult. It's the stages that cost you lives and stage 3 BL is about as bad as stage 5 in 1.5

Definitely not going to be switching over to BL any time soon that's for sure.

I play on an LCD, with a response time of about 8ms.

I don't have trouble seeing anything. I can see each of my deaths in glorious crystal clear high-definition.

I have cleared a grand total of zero shmups (certainly none that I can think of at least) It is quite an achievement considering the hours I have spent playing some of them.

Here's a topic sure to spark debate/abuse.

Is it "unreasonable" to practice/memorise a game so that you can clear it?

Does memorising a game give you an unfair advantage over the game, or are shmups designed (or at least necessarily designed) to be cleared by memorisation in combination with reactions?

Is measuring "ability" via "clears" (i.e. the abilty to memorise an efficient path) different to measuring a "raw" ability (i.e the ability to play an unknown game on reactions alone) and a fair test of who is the best player?

Shmups are hard, but at what point do you have an advantage over the game's difficulty by way of your practice... at what point does your experience outweigh the inherent difficulty of the game?

I am trying to improve. Maybe I'm not going about it the right way despite my best efforts.

Just played DFK black label and that is without a doubt the hardest Cave game on the 360. By miles in fact. Novice mode is about comparable to one of their normal games. Playing normally feels like futari ultra.

Ketsui is definitely not as hard; it's not easy, but both it and daioujou are easier than DFK black.

That red rank bar maxed very quickly. I don't know what I was doing, Just played it as I felt it needed to be played. I was using strong and auto off, although I can't say I recall auto on being any easier.

Actually had to continue on the first level on my first try which is something new. It was ridicudifficult.

Because the gameplay is good. The difficulty (certainly in the Cave games I've experienced) is verging on the ridiculous.

Whilst I'm sure that most shmups are quite difficult to clear in 1 credit (other than the ones that are designed to be so easy that they are trivial) the offerings from Cave that I have tried are pretty soul-crushing on the whole (with a few exceptions, but even the exceptions have exceptions).

I love shooting things, I love dodging things, what I don't like is what I perceive as money stealing patterns, and seeing as Cave are so highly revered around here for their amazing game design, I think that's a bit of a paradox.

It isn't the scoring that's soul-crushing, it's the survival. I play for score/survival from the offset. I'll never change and it doesn't alter the legitimacy of how I feel about the difficulty of their games.

I actually do appreciate people's advice as hard as that may be for you to imagine, and on the contrary I don't believe Larsa or any of these games are impossible. I have covered this before. My usage of the word "impossible" is very loose and somewhat removed from it's true meaning. What I do believe is that certain parts of certain games are very hard to consistently clear. Indeed you could spend a lifetime learning every intricacy of the patterns and still only clear it in the minority of attempts. Is that OK?... for me it's not. Things should be able to be mastered to the point of almost inevitability.

I have never said or implied that people are lying. I said that people who are somewhat skilled in a field tend to overestimate their ability/rate of success statistically.

Maybe the majority of the people who post on this forum don't find these games as difficult as me, but this is surely a place to express views about them, and that cannot be completely confined to those who find them trivial from the offset with the exclusion of anyone who dares to question or debate how difficult they actually are?

I certainly think that it does make a difference. When I'm not in the mood these games seem beyond ridiculous. Even in the right frame of mind it's a struggle to imagine that they are able to be completed, but it isn't beyond the realms of possibility.

DFK black still baffles me. Unless I am doing something odd, the game is ludicrously hard and I'm on the 2nd level...... I'm not feeling it at all. I have warmed to the soundtrack a little, but still feel that 1.5's is better. I like that the chain meter seems a little more forgiving because the meter in 1.5 is stupid. It fucking cancels my chain even when I'm lasering something.

Naturally a very interactive gun-game is going to do well in arcades compared to a shmup that beats you down and basically tries to remove coins from your pocket at an astounding rate.

Indeed I can't. I can 5-boss Futari, and have only managed to get a stage 5 on AKS... But with AKS all the difficulty of the clear is in the last stage plus the twins and the final boss. The difficulty is "ok" until then, but it goes somewhat schizophrenic once you reach stage 5. It suffers from deathsmiles syndrome..... "comparatively" easy and then ridiculously hard in a very non-linear fashion.

Based on 360 shooters and ignoring difficulties like "ultra" it has to be DFK black.

It's super-stupid-ridiculously difficult.

Let's be honest; the majority of Cave games are border-line impossible anyway. There is certainly no appreciable difference in difficulty between a lot of them. The difference that does exist is like saying that climbing Everest and stopping 5 feet short of the summit is "easier" that climbing to the peak.

I fucking swear that all these games are impossible. You get better through practice up to a point and then you slowly get worse. Happens every time on every game.

Current target of my rage is triggerheart-fucking-excelica!

Consistency decreasing ..... check
Score decreasing..... check
Progress decreasing ... check

Yep, business as usual.

Never had a problem with it's iffy slowdown personally. Whilst I agree that the release from slowdown isn't how you'd expect it to be and is more sudden than one would like, I still find it predictable. You kind of know that it's going to release you early...

Nonetheless it's still fuckin' impossible.

I've recently taken up a new hobby of demolishing brick walls by smashing my head against them. Whilst some have suggested that this is not an optimal method I've found it to be more relaxing than playing Futari or any of CAVE's other piss-you-off simulators. I'm also finding that abrasions to my forehead are down 36%.

Triggerheart is definitely impossible.

It can go in the pile of all the other shooters I've got that are fucking ridiculously stupid.

The list of not-impossible shooters has yet to have any entries on it. All the games I own are impossible. Don't think there are actually any shooters that are possible to complete.

Problem with shooters is they are either much too hard or much too easy. None of them are anywhere inbetween.

Yup, I pretty much stand by that. Without infinite hyper from stage 3 onwards it's bullshit.

I've tried some of those games in that section and can confirm that they are indeed impossible.

Lmao, I only started playing triggerheart again yesterday after a little break and I'm more pissed off now than I've been for weeks.

I can only assume that you literally need to spend many many hundreds of hours on each individual game to get anywhere near to completing them because there is zero carry over from one game to the next.

Deathsmiles has the most schizophrenic difficulty of any game I have though. The 6 original stages are easy even on rank 3, but the final 2 bosses are bullshit, combine that with a stupidly long final stage and no boss-practice option and you have a recipe for throwing your xbox out the window.

The lack of a proper practice mode is what stopped me seriously trying to finish that game.

Because the extra stage and the bosses with their stupid off-the-scale difficulty and fucking suicide bullets ruin the game and make it impossible. The stages are impossible, the bosses are impossible. The final stage with suicide bullets is too hard, the last boss is one of the most stupid things I've ever seen. All the lives and bombs you can carry won't make any difference because you'll get through them pretty quick.

DS is a perfect example of what I said earlier. Games are either too hard or too easy, never anywhere inbetween. DS is both too hard and too easy.

edit: I was just playing it 5 minutes ago, that's why I'm in such a good mood as I'm sure you can tell.

Gave DS a run. Got through to jitterbug, died of course. Continued. killed him. Tyranowanker pops up, needed at least two more continues to kill him; probably 3. Bombs do no damage at all and his patterns are so fucking ludicrous that it makes you want to throw your controller through the TV. Screen-loads of crap coming from every fucking direction possible.... was worse than I remember it and my memory of it was that is was pretty fucking ridiculous.

Yeah,

Get hit,
invincibility
Get hit again as soon as it wears off
invincibility
Hit again...

The screen is filled with so much stuff moving in every direction that it's impossible to avoid it. Once you get hit you are literally dead before you can regain any sort of grasp of what the fucking pattern is doing.

The bombs do virtually no damage. They wipe the screen granted, but that's really just a containing tactic and doesn't help you make any progress.

Ridiculo-pattern approaching,
BOMB,
Ridiculo-pattern approaching again,
Oooh shit!, nope still can't deal with that,
BOMB,
Ridiculo-pattern approaching once more,
BOMB,
Ridiculo-pattern approaching yet again,
Die...

net result, virtually no damage inflicted, bombs depleted, lives to follow soon.

If 40-60 hours practice isn't enough to beat it, then it is virtually impossible.

I don't want to be one of these people who plays these games for 10 hours a day and develops an allergic reaction to daylight.

Typical number of hours to clear Triggerheart?...... 20, 50, 100?

I think 40 hours is quite a bit of time. It's certainly quite a bit of time to waste and still be at least another 40 hours off being able to clear a game. In the case of futari I suspect I'm nearer to 80 hours and frankly nowhere near to clearing it. I've given that up as a lost cause...

I've pretty given up on Cave's games. Things like Triggerheart are still impossible but I don't need to add another layer of shit into the mix by playing other games that are even worse. Games like Deathsmiles and AKS show promise, but are ruined at the end by two bosses with undodgeable attacks. The rest of their games that Ive got are just ridiculous all the way through; most of the game being a stitch-up designed to remove coins from the pockets of people in arcades.

Progress in all games is so slow as to be virtually non-existent. It's frankly a feat of inhuman ability that I'm able to avoid all the shit that I do. The games are designed to be overwhelming, but overwhelming to the point of being all but impossible.

In the face of zero progress over a long period, it's just too hard to dedicate whatever time is necessary to beat any of these games; the endeavour becomes tiresome and frustrating and the enjoyment is minimal. The games themselves are fun to play, but trying to advance score or progress isn't because little advancement occurs past a certain point.

*sighs*

I absolutely give up, I really do. There's so much fucking luck involved that it's just impossible.

If the game doesn't screw you by leaving you no fucking room you just end up nudging things and losing lives anyway. Either way you're getting nowhere fast.

Fed-up with it...

There's no way you can say that DFK and AKS are "easy"

DFK (strong or not) is balls hard and floods the screen from stage 3 onwards.
AKS has two of the most ridiculous bosses at the end of it.

I don't particularly think there's any appreciable difference between DOJ, futari, ketsui or anything else. Certainly not first loop. It's not as if you are going to clear one of those easy and then be completely stuck on another.

Thing is, even if you can clear every stage on a particular game sometimes in practice (let's even say you can no miss every stage in practice sometimes) the chances of you doing all stages back to back is very small. It's in the order of 5% probable that you'll manage to complete a run. That's the luck factor.

You can never guarantee that you'll be able to no miss a stage (I doubt you can ever get more than a 30-40% no miss rate for any stage that is anything more than routine), and being able to no miss some stages is essential to compensate for when you lose 3 fucking lives on that stage you consider yourself to be brilliant at. Averaging out the probabilities over a run, you are aiming for that impossibly small chance that you'll string together however many stages it is without blowing all your lives.

Doesn't matter how good you are, the luck factor plays a significant role in whether you'll ever get that clear.

Tomorrows lesson: Looking in 16 different fucking directions at once.

Gonna just respond randomly here, no quotes.

I haven't played Futari for ages. Would take me over a month to get back to where I was and that's all just so you can get your balls slammed in a door repeatedly. I doubt I'll ever go back to that game.

The number of bombs you have is pretty irrelevant to whoever raised this point because you'll probably never fire more than half of them (due to sudden unexpected deaths from bullets that you had either assumed you'd avoid, or shots you didn't see). You can use all your bombs if you like, but you then have to take the stance of being very bomb-happy; and I don't see what that really achieves other than potentially deprive you of a bomb later that you might really need.

I don't particularly see a 1cc as the be-all-and-end-all. I play for score as it happens, but you can only score so much before how far you can get in a game becomes a severely limited factor. I've never once believed that trying to score less would make a clear any easier.

I've actually only ever been provided with selected replays (and highly selective at that) and peoples word that they can so such-and-such on whatever game; that and people's untested predictions of what they can do. Almost everything I complain about comes down to how consistently you can clear certain sections or levels. I can provide you with a replay of me no-missing something, It'll just take me 100 attempts but I'll provide you with the one run where I did it, so that means it's do-able consistently does it?

The bowling and golf analogy doesn't hold because the margins for error are so much greater that little twitchy movements on a game-pad that have to be milliseconds long otherwise you fucking nudge something. The luck element plays a greater role in shmups because they are designed to be impossible to complete.

I think I'm as good as I'm going to get realistically. I could obviously get better, but the return will be massively disproportionate compared to the amount of time it would entail. I do not see why I am apparently so much worse than everyone else who claim to have cleared AKS on their third go, or say "DFK is easy" blah blah .. there's no reason why I should be and there's no previous evidence in anything else I've ever done that would suggest I'd be so woefully below "average".

Ah screw this, I'm just going to sit in the corner and have a little cry....

My goal is to improve my score in THE, this will be done by dying less and getting further into the game as well as finding ways to collect more fragments on the levels I can actually clear with some reliability. I think Triggerheart is the "right" difficulty (or as "right" as any difficulty is going to be). I'm leaving my cave games alone because they piss me off too much and I can't escape the feeling that they are bullshit.

This week has not been a good week in terms of being irritable and easily annoyed; as is evidenced by this thread.

ARRRRGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!

I still think that 3rd level faintear and the 4th boss in THE are at least 50% luck.

I've copied exactly what they do in superplays to kill faintear (and it's grabbing 2 objects and chucking them, so hardly a complex string of moves) and it doesn't work. Not once had she died in two hits so there's something pretty BS going on there.

That 4th boss is almost completely random as well. Pattern's never the same and it's later forms are literally a curtain to begin with.

I'm only copying it because what he does is so simple.

Grabs enemy and moves to the left,
Chucks enemy at boss,
Grabs other enemy,
chucks it at boss,
Boss dies.

Only problem is that it doesn't work. Two thrown enemies doesn't kill the arsehole.

As far as copying superplays that show complex routes, there is close to zero value in trying to copy them. Unless you have worked out the route yourself through hours and hours of repetition and experimentation you'll never manage to copy it successfully.

There's nothing inherently boring about using save-states/stage select (unless you find the stage itself particularly unappealing). It does however become boring when you are grinding the stage over and over and making no measurable or consistent progress; and that's often what I find.

I'm grabbing the one that spawns at 6 o'clock and moving to the left into the next quadrant before the lasers cut off it off. That way I've got another enemy to grab after I chuck this one.

As for angle and speed I can't tell you. It's a miracle if I even manage to throw it without being hit.

I must say I find this amusing. Trying to learn stage 4. Keep losing 3 lives by about midway through, then I manage to no miss it with 100% contribution as well...

Doubt that'll happen again.

Just looked at last boss......

Interest in trying to 1cc this game instantly gone.

Let's just say that Futari is complete bobbins and leave it at that.

One of Cave's best trolls to date.

The whole stage is a load of bollocks really. I know there's absolutely no chance of ever clearing that in 3 lives, let alone doing it after stages 1 to 4.

It a shame because the rest of the game is completely do-able. Deathsmiles syndrome strikes again.

No, and this game isn't like that. The stages get progressively harder.

Stopping on stage 4 might have been a little bit too early difficulty-wise, but stage 5 seems like a mechanism for making people pump more coins into the game in order to finish it rather than a reasonable challenge that can be overcome legitimately.

I'm already hitting the ceiling on stage 4. If your option gets canceled or misses, you are fucked. If you accidentally get forced into picking up another option, you are fucked. If you accidentally fire the option at the wrong point (leaving you none available later) you are fucked. If you don't have 3 lives at the start of the stage, you are fucked, even then you need to bomb like crazy because the game conspires to screw you over with its rank.

I might clear stage 4 in a run one day, but that's about as far as I can see it going because I'll never get to stage 5 with any lives left more than once in a blue moon and I've played stage 4 to death. I know everything about it. Where enemies are, where to fire the options... still doesn't guarantee any sort of success.

I'm gonna buy it. Don't know why really seeing as Futari has annoyed me more than anything in recent memory.

Here's to many hundred more hours of ultimately fruitless practice.

We're still nearly 3 months out from release anyway. I'm sure I'll have either finished what I'm playing by then or have been sufficiently irritated and want to give it up anyway.

I've already hit the limit on this game. Probably going backwards now.

I'd love to know genuinely what people's experience with practice is, because people make out as though they practice a level, learn it, and then no-miss it in the vast majority of runs. Not only does this obviously not happen for me, but I'd be more surprised if it actually did.

You cannot avoid all the crap on the screen all the time.... fact
You are going to nudge something by accident with not insignificant frequency... fact

Practice increases your chance of clearing a level from 0% to above 0%. It guarantees you no success on any given run though; frequently you'll make too many mistakes to clear it. Aside from playing games like this as a full time job (literally 10 hours per day year in year out) you cannot significantly diminish the role that luck plays in how you do on any given run, and the margins for human error cannot be eliminated entirely. Given the precise nature of the dodges required you're already pushing the limit of the what you can repeatedly do in terms of precision of movement. To pretend that you can faultlessly perform these moves with virtually zero errors over and over just isn't credible. We're talking about making 3 minuscule timing errors in the course of performing hundreds if not thousands of precise taps on a control pad.

Of course practice can make some difference, but you eventually and spectacularly hit a wall past which zero progress seems to be made, and apparent improvements are the result of temporary variations in luck more than anything conscious or learned.

From the folklore here it seems that if you clear a game then you clear it pretty easily and quickly, with progress being rapid and with little hindrance occurring past minor sticking points. Consistency is apparently never a problem and is not even a consideration.

From my experience it seems that if you hit a hurdle (at which point you need to seriously start drilling it in practice mode) and you are a long way off the end of the game then you might as well save yourself the time give up, because at the very least you will be blighted with severe trouble with consistency from this point onwards, and all subsequent levels will be very low percentage clears.

Probably should have stuck this in the complaints thread, but it has no context in there.

This started out promisingly and even had a whiff of accuracy to it, but it went downhill quickly. Before I correct you I'll just add that I don't believe in blindly accepting advice without at least seeing if it passes the rationale test. Anybody who blindly accepts advise without question is rather naive.

I never "demanded proof". I intimated (as I have done here and everywhere else) that consistency is hard to achieve and luck contributed greatly to the success of a run. If consistency is hard to achieve it stands to reason that factors beyond our control are the deciding element as to how a run turns out, luck being one such element.

People provided videos of themselves performing certain feats (none of these demonstrated consistency as they were one off events, much like superplays) and I was asked to accept that they could do this on demand all the time without ever faltering. This was never proved. What actually happened then when I continued to press the same point about luck being important is that you started playing me off against other forumers by suggesting that my refusal to denounce the existence of luck was tantamount to calling everyone "liars". Not something that I ever did, but evidently the conclusion that you chose to reach.

A lot of the routes that people use in replays are actually very similar to what I came up with myself. I don't think my routes are particularly flawed so as to make the game unnecessarily difficult, but executing them still relies on not bumping things by accident. These aren't shots that have come out of nowhere that I've not seen, I'm talking about hitting things that you know are there and are actively dealing with, but just hit because of the small tolerances involved in avoiding them.

Under defeat stage 1-4 ...... bullshit.
stage 1-5 ..... mega bullshit.

So here's a question for you. What do you do when you've played the level so much that you see it when you close your eyes but still can't clear it?

Practice isn't going to make any difference now because I know where everything is, and it's not going to stop me hitting bullets that I can see by mistake. Watched the replays, they do exactly the same as me, same path, same everything.

I do find playing these game can be quite depressing (today at least). The impossibility of them combined with making no progress is just demoralising. When they don't make you feel like that the difficulty is simply infuriating.

I guess the problem is just the absence of progressing. You hit a wall and that's it.. that's pretty much as far as you ever get. Practice stops working and produces no measurable results. It spoils the enjoyment of playing because every run is doomed to failure before you even start.

Grinding levels in practice is no fun (certainly once you stop getting results), runs are largely a waste of time because your score is limited by how far you can progress. The game is fun to play until it all starts to fall apart and you're dead again at pretty much the same spot every time.

I don't see what I'm not doing that apparently everyone else is... I really don't get it.

I've spent ages on various games. Futari, THE, under defeat and no clears, frankly not even close to clearing them.

It's just depressing that it always ends up the same way. You just get to a point where you can't progress or do whatever it is consistently enough. At this point you've pretty much made all the progress you're ever going to make and playing the game any more is just an exercise in frustration.

I don't think I'll ever manage to clear any of these. It's not through lack of time or effort but it seems that once you get stuck, nothing you can do makes any difference. It makes all of that time spent getting to that point seem like a complete waste because of the inevitability that you'll always reach this sticking point, and no amount of additional practice can allow you to progress further.

It's pretty rubbish really.

My problem is not really that I can't have fun without the 1cc, but I can only have limited fun without making progress. If I am practicing and I'm not making any meaningful or consistent progress (consistency being the key) and I can't improve my score on any of the runs then it severely limits the fun I can have because every play session is just a failure in everything I attempt.

I don't see how I can get any better. The reason I am not improving is because I am as good as it is possible to be. The variations in success of any run is large. People talk about having a "plan" for levels but I do. For 1-4 of Under defeat I have a point by point fucking plan of what I shoot and with what, but it never produces the same results because you are never in exactly the same spot every run, and you still hit things by accident, and once you've died it's all randomised again.

I think people's success with any of these games that is posted on this board must represent the most infinitesimally small section of the shmups community as a whole, because there is just no way in hell that any significant number of people are getting through these games in 1 credit or setting reasonable scores. Given the simply ridiculous amount of time I've spent on some of these games I don't even believe I fall into the more "normal" representation of shmup players, because there must be a hell of a lot of people out there who'd have given up way before me.

I won't be getting a Futari 1cc. I gave up on that game a while back and it would take ages to get back to where I was. I got 200M and that'll have to be good enough.

The rank on this game really is fucking stupid, made all the more stupid by virtue of the rank adjustment not working properly in practice mode.

Looking at two runs I just did back to back on UD (both ended on 1-4 because it's fucking ridiculous and the rank is a shithole) I don't think I ever have a single run that doesn't make me rage. It's definitely a result of the difficulty though, or what I believe is wholly unreasonable difficulty combined with rank just in case you are doing too well; can't have that now can we (as if these games aren't stupid enough on default).

I almost always turn the machine off feeling pretty pissed off.

Are people seriously telling me they don't experience this on the majority of attempts?

I think I'm going to have to accept that I'm not gonna clear it and stop playing because it's pissing me off no end. Every single time I end up turning the machine off in annoyance.

It's just too fucking difficult and there's no escaping that. I've tried everything and I've already wasted so much time on it and Christ knows how much more it could take to clear it. I could be here 'til fucking Christmas and still not have managed it.

That'll be nice to see because every shmup I've experienced wants to beat you down until you stop playing and end up hating the genre.

I'm pretty much at the stage where I could 1cc under defeat now. You'd still need to get to stage 5 with 2 lives though and that's pretty unlikely on 95% of runs. Stage 4 is still a complete cockmuncher but I know that level upside down and back-to-front so that's not going to change. Stage 5 is definitely easier and would be comfortable with 2 lives.

Definitely not going to get much better though. Lives still get lost in random spots. Clearing it basically comes down to getting lucky and avoiding the stupid mistakes and doing a decent run in the process.

The luck comes into play because you cannot complete the game on every run, every time. No-one can clear the game 100% of the time; that is to master it and then never fail on a single run ever again. Indeed the reality is that you will fail often but even leaving that aside there are factors at play which combined with skill determine the result of a run. That factor is luck.

You can always argue that every movement is a result of an input you make and therefore can't be luck as such, but luck occurs in many forms. The pattern where you fuck up your inputs and nudge a bullet is just as much luck as the pattern where you also fuck up what you were trying to do but somehow still end up avoiding everything. Luck is a randomised factor over which you have no control. You have no control over whether the bad input will cost you a life. Once you have failed to execute what you intended, it's luck as to whether there is a bullet in the path of your ship at that moment.

I'm going to try posting here, but I don't have a specific question.

I have said that I could potentially clear this game, that is to say that I can actually complete all parts of the game without losing unreasonable amount of lives. In fact I can no-miss a lot of it, but not necessarily all in one run.

Other than trying to get better at points where I'm weaker (stage 4 really) is there anything else I can do apart from keep grinding out hundreds of credits in arcade? It just feels like a case of attrition more than anything which I can't believe is a good thing to be thinking. I can play practice mode all day long but that's not actually going to get me my 1cc; eventually I've got to actually run the game a few times.

I think I'm pretty much done with Under Defeat. I can't improve my score because I can't get a clear. I can't get a clear because the run never comes together, frankly its nowhere near to happening based on where it ends on most runs. I can clear all of the levels in practice and I can't really get any better at them, but 3 lives is just never going to be enough to do all 5 back to back.

It kind of highlights the problem in general. I can clear stages and practice isn't going to make me any better, yet I still can't clear the game. Not really sure what you're meant to do in that situation. It's a different case when you can't clear a game because you can't clear a stage/boss, but when you can actually beat all the levels it seems like the ultimate dead end.

I'm playing it less and less because I'm only repeating what I already know and can't learn how to do it any better.

I think I'll have to because my drive to play it has pretty much gone because I'm not working towards anything now, I'm just banging credits into arcade mode and failing to clear it which isn't achieving anything.

What do I do though; find another game and play it until I get stuck?

Sound like a never ending cycle.

I don't know what to play next seeing as I'm packing up under defeat.

I've got loads of games but they've all got problems.

DFK - too difficult and scoring is extreme memory because it's all about chaining.
DFK black - same
Ketsui - Don't understand scoring. Game is a mess imo
DS - crappy practice mode but the game bores me anyway
DSIIX - unopened
DOJBLEX - too much chaining and memory. Break the chain and you might as well hit restart.
Espgaluda 2 - like the game but the massive difference in a normal "clearing score" and an "abusing the system" score is so big that clearing it seems pointless because you are scoring nothing.
Futari - lol
AKS - decent but scoring seems to suffer from espgaluda 2 syndrome and the last two bosses are too stupid to contemplate
pork/sweets - don't like sweets, pork's alright but don't like the ship movement/hitbox.

I'm certainly starting to think that Cave's games aren't as great as people make out.

I've certainly got a headache.

I don't understand them because of their impenetrable levels of difficulty and obtuse scoring mechanics that require you to attend a 3 year course at Cave university. There's certainly no point in playing them without at least giving some consideration to scoring, but as I say some of them use a scoring mechanism that is so far removed from actually playing the game that it's an impossible task to even think about attempting them.

galuda 2 is good, but the difference between playing for survival and just scoring when you can, and playing outright for score is so ridiculous that it seems as if there's no point even trying. I'm inclined to think that if people are able to get both extends on the first level then the scoring is a bit broken or more abusable than was originally intended.

I still think it's very odd. Extends are usually built in to accomodate moderate scoring, but being able to obtain them both on stage 1 seems completely ridiculous and highlights the massive disparity between playing for score and trying to score whilst clearing it. Unless you are able to memorise some ludicrous suicide bullet slo-mo route for the entire game your clearing score will just be pitiful and equivalent to a good run through stage 1. As if beating the game isn't difficult enough, you'll then find out that the route used to beat it is completely useless for scoring.

But unless you are trying to chain I don't see the point. You don't have to chain the whole game, but you've got to have some sort of plan as to how you are going to chain some of it, otherwise playing it to beat it seems pointless because your score is beatable in no time by someone who can just chain a full stage for example, whilst you are busting your ass trying to clear the game for an inferior score.

Even playing the first level of DFK it's just so confusing. The chain dies so quickly that you've got almost no chance of holding it. Between keeping half an eye on the chain (which just dies when it feels like it) I couldn't tell you what order the enemies appear in and from where, and there's so many..... I dunno, that doesn't seem like something I'm going to enjoy.

I've also never understood why power supposedly scores more. Every time I play with it (like for like runs on the first level lets say, no-miss) my score is about 1/10th of what it is using strong for example

I credit fed to the laser wheels in DFK before. Was fun

lol

[O. Van Bruce]

NTSC-J...

I don't know what to think... you are either the greatest hater of DTP or his utmost loyal fan...

or maybe both, given the kind of relationship this forum has with DTP...

[Icarus]

That should be a random daily quote generator at the top of the forum index page.

[AntiFritz]

Have mercy on my broken scroll wheel

[iconoclast]

I'm tempted to give AKS another go because I always liked the game and it's got a bit of an Espgaluda 2 type scoring system to it with it's bullet canceling which I actually quite like, despite some of it's flaws as I see it. The last two bosses do put me off though. Other than that the game looks do-able, although I can say the same of Under defeat despite not being able to beat it.

If you're talking about arcade mode, the last two bosses aren't that bad. I wrote some strategies for them here, so maybe that can help you simplify them. (I use Type C by the way, so I'm not sure how well that works for the other characters.)

[DrTrouserPlank]

I'm tempted to give AKS another go because I always liked the game and it's got a bit of an Espgaluda 2 type scoring system to it with it's bullet canceling which I actually quite like, despite some of it's flaws as I see it. The last two bosses do put me off though. Other than that the game looks do-able, although I can say the same of Under defeat despite not being able to beat it.

If you're talking about arcade mode, the last two bosses aren't that bad. I wrote some strategies for them here, so maybe that can help you simplify them. (I use Type C by the way, so I'm not sure how well that works for the other characters.)

Thanks. Once/if I get back upto speed I'll try some of them out.

woof woof moo

Kind of scary that someone you've never met can be that obsessed with you.

Nonetheless I stand by most of those comments. I haven't read them all of course, because unlike people who've evidently got endless spare hours in their day to compile them, I don't have endless spare hours to read them.

[TLB]

I think this one's my favorite.

I'd say this is my problem with it.

The better you play the easier it becomes in the sense that the better you play, the more bullets you cancel.

I always find games where you have an option other than dodging difficult to play, because that other option is almost required to navigate the game rather than something that just makes it easier for you. With that in mind the game almost becomes a puzzle where you have to work out how to use that "power" to avoid bullets rather than just dodge them.