STGT '09 Raizing Week 5-6, Battle Garegga - Overall thoughts

[Aquas]

Not a bad tourney! Props to the organizers and participants. It was fun, overall. I think I liked last years game choices a bit better myself. I feel a little silly because I didn't play Garegga, like, at all, for the tourney. Really didn't feel up to it for some reason, but I think it's safe to say it's an enjoyable shooter that many can learn to enjoy... and I will someday. Anyway, I had to live up to my team name, somehow! Last place for this last week, hoo-ah.

STGT09, Battle Garegga? Overall thoughts?

[shadowbringer]

with these extends, even though hoarding extends isn't good for decreasing rank, I asked myself "you won't screw up this credit, will you?"

(it wasn't the run of my best score of the week, btw)

the exact point where I died, in my week's submission. Some credits later I would defeat Nose Lavagghin mk.2 and die to Mad Ball mk.2, due to forgetting that its spinning pattern no longer had the safespot at the upper-left corner after the first sweep. Surviving long enough to drop a bomb could've (or not) given me an extend and make me attain a better score. (though I still couldn't learn the proper horizontal distance and the timing that Black Heart demands you during its sweeping vulcan attack)


It's been a pleasure to get to know such interesting games (the one I liked the least was Strikers 1945 II), and play them with you all. It's an honor to have tested myself against such valuable opponents, and to have seen them in action. Thank you all for taking part of this event, it was very fun!

I would like to thank the efforts of my teammates (from both teams), and to say that I'm sorry for not being able to push my scores a little further, and especially for not doing well in Varth (the game where I feel I've missed the greatest opportunity to earn more positions with less effort, because I messed up in stage 17, even though there were items on the screen. To myself: "get the items, not the lasers").

[captpain]

This week has been responsible for getting me really interested in a Garegga clear. The game is chock full of interesting stuff; great art direction, unusual gameplay, fantastic music... Just all-around one of the best shmups ever. Excellent choice for Raizing week.

Dragon Week... Well, I think I've complained enough there. Apart from that, this was a hell of a lot of fun and I'd love to do it again next year!

[spadgy]

I still can't decide on Garagga. I'm glad it was in the tourny, and I'm sure it's a very good game, but I'm not sure if I loath it or love it. Once I began exploring suiciding, rank control and such, my score just plummeted, bar the one leap up. Perhaps for somebody with my more 'humble' standard two weeks isn't enough. I'm sure this is a game that takes far more than a fortnight's dedication for anybody...

[emphatic]

This week has been responsible for getting me really interested in a Garegga clear. The game is chock full of interesting stuff; great art direction, unusual gameplay, fantastic music... Just all-around one of the best shmups ever. Excellent choice for Raizing week.

QFT. I never played Garegga more than 10 credits tops before these weeks. What a lovely game. Now I have to stash some cash and get a PCB though.

[charlie chong]

I've always had a soft spot for gregga but haven't really played it that much over the last 3 years or so because i've been mainly playing other games to work up my basic shooting skills to a sufficient level to finish it. my previous best was 6 million and i beat that by another 2 million and finally made it off the 6th level so i'm very happy with that!!(more than once i might add,i got to glow squid once with a score lower than the one i submitted)
i found 2 weeks of concentrated play definitely helped and i learnt a hell of a lot of new tricks. now i'm not even scared of blackheart
for someone new to the game then 2 weeks is deffo not enough.. too much can go wrong in a garegga run
i'm gonna take a break then crack on at killing glow squid. i don't care if my score is lower than my best i just want to see that completion screen!

[spadgy]

too much can go wrong in a garegga run

I think that's what made me feel I hated it each time I finished a credit - but then after a few moments I was gagging to play again....

[Herr Schatten]

I still can't decide on Garagga. I'm glad it was in the tourny, and I'm sure it's a very good game, but I'm not sure if I loath it or love it. Once I began exploring suiciding, rank control and such, my score just plummeted, bar the one leap up. Perhaps for somebody with my more 'humble' standard two weeks isn't enough. I'm sure this is a game that takes far more than a fortnight's dedication for anybody...

This sums up my own experiences nicely. Pre-STGT, Garegga always felt intimidating because of that phonebook-sized ST, so I never really started playing it. Playing it for two weeks made me appreciate it more. I can understand why people like it, but I know now for certain that it's a game that just doesn't appeal to me. Even two weeks are too little time to incorporate all that obscure scoring into your playing routine. (Bombing birds gives as much points as chaining 200 medals? Wtf?) Therefore, Garegga was a particularly terrible choice for STGT, although it's clearly a fine game. It's not without its faults, though. There's simply no excuse for nigh-invisible needle bullets.

I like to play games in STGT which don't give veteran players a headstart. The same people will most certainly still fill the top spots, but losing to their superior skill feels fairer to a poorer player like me than losing to their knowledge of scoring tricks. By this standard, RFJ and Garegga were bad choices for STGT games, the other three were really good choices, particularly Strikers 1945 II.

I was a little let down by our team, to be honest. I felt obliged to play all weeks, although I didn't plan to, just because no one else seemed to do it. Most weeks it was just me, The Coop, and ED doing the playing. Only Shocky explained his disappearance. I'm sure the others had good real-life reasons not to post scores, but it would have been nice to know them.

[z0rly]

Battle Garegga is just a very good game, invisible needle bullets and all. It's a game that's mean as fuck but feels really cool to play and improve my score. It's really grown on me playing it semi-seriously for these two weeks.

This was my first STGT. I had a lot of fun, Thunder Dragon 2 excluded (played Raiden IV and DDP that week instead). I'm looking forward to STGT 2010!

[clp]

Battle garegga was and is my favourite shmup of all time so ive played it a fair bit before hand and am not gonna say a bad word against it i love this game . It was the only week i enjoyed as said earlier dragon week was a total farce and strikers 2 was to obvious a choice so yeah overall not great tbh but the last game made it bareable.

[Ed Oscuro]

Herr Schatten raises a number of excellent points, so I won't repeat them. The only one I will disagree with is that this was a bad choice for STGT - my comments at the beginning of the week to the contrary It's a fine way to actually make somebody like myself focus on a game and learn it a bit. I have more respect for Garegga now, but as my final score shows I decided that Duke Nukem: Time to Kill and Thundercade were more fun for the time being (also trying to take photographs of an SR-71B and XP-55). In the first week I found myself actually forming opinions on which ships were the best - before I hadn't put in enough time to work on it. I'll keep working on it now and then, but I did notice that the game makes me more mad than, say, Raiden Fighters Jet. I'm not willing to say it's a worse game than RFJ though.

I can't seem to do the nose slide (on the first boss), and I have tried.

I'm just amazed that the top spot went to a Chitta player - I can only imagine how the homing shots (unless that's a non-homing variant) were kept under control.

[Dragoforce]

I never really put much time in Garegga (or Raizing for that matter) but I have a feeling that's going to change now. Sure, there are some frustrating parts, but overall it has made a very good impression on me.

A huge thanks to the organizers, especially Dex for wonderful work with the scorekeeping! Great selection of games from Mikwuyma as well. Looking forward to next year!

[RGC]

A big 'thanks' to the organisers for another successful STGT!

RFJ and Garegga could make my top 20 this year (I'm sure I could drop two non-Cave games to make room)

Well done to our royale stalwart, Ravid. We'd have been fooked without him.

[msm]

Thanks to the organisers, as usual it was really well run

i haven't been in the right mood for playing shooters recently though, still glad i took part each week, getting to play some new games and stuff, but only really enjoyed garegga.

only played garegga for survival in the past, generally avoiding collecting anything, so trying to collect the medals and learning about the flemencos (and other scoring tricks that i couldn't manage) was fun in a way it's quite a laid back game as i was doing better when i kept dieing stupidly, as the rank wasn't as bad, but if i did well (not dieing) i'd forget to suicide and end up in hell

[emphatic]

I hated the needle bullets at first, but now I think they're awesome. You have a great run and start to think highly of your self, and KABLAM, you're dead, and you see that big, nice 10.000 medal go right past your ship as it ressurects. Not so cocky now, right? Awesome.

[bsidwell]

I'm just amazed that the top spot went to a Chitta player - I can only imagine how the homing shots (unless that's a non-homing variant) were kept under control.

The top spot went to literally the best Chitta player in the world. Don't feel bad about it.
(He actually had a better Gain score that he decided not to post.)

[Danbo]

Started the "week" with a best score of 9.something million, finished it with a B million so I'm pretty happy! I think I've more or less exhausted golden bat now... a perfect run, something you normally just don't get in garegga. dunno whether to go through it all again with Gain or just try to master ibara now.

good tournament...

[BulletMagnet]

As far as Garegga's concerned my opinion's the same as it's been for awhile - if they'd bothered to include an "ugly flashing pink bullets" option and explained the rank system to the point where we didn't have to hack the ROM to figure it out, it would be just about perfect. As it is, it's still one of my top 25, though the exceedingly simple/fixable nature of its flaws gnaws at me like few other games do.

Thanks to the organizers, as always - Team Loser will always be back for more!

[DMC]

Thanks, a few comments/suggestions:
* bring back voting plz (because I like diversity, trash talk and strategic as well as stupid voting)
* bring back pauses plz (6 weeks straight is too much imo).
* Now that we have tried extending the weeks (which sucked imo), why not shorten them? Have one "week" where we only get to play the weekend (game announced friday, ends sunday night)?

good tournament tho, thanks! I hope there will be a 2010 stgt, and that I personally can be more active.

[KMM]

Partway through the competition I was hoping for the final two weeks to be some Raizing/8ing game other than Battle Garegga to screw with everyone who was hoping for it (possibly Dimahoo, as when I was going through and trying Raizing games, it was the one I did the best at - but man, that would've sucked for scoring). When Strikers 1945 II rolled around, I started into it glad to be away from Thunder Dragon 2 but then discovered I sucked at it in a way that continuous practice didn't help. Then the last week rolled around, it was obviously Battle Garegga, and I gladly dove into a game I hadn't seen much of before.

By the end of the final week of STGT09, my favorite game of the tournament was Battle Garegga, followed closely by Raiden Fighters Jet. Strikers 1945 II trailed behind in third but was still far ahead of Varth and Thunder Dragon 2.

I had the same problem as Herr Schatten - though I didn't necessarily feel obligated to play (aside from that I said I'd participate in all weeks and really wanted to anyway, this being my first STGT), I definitely felt like the only player on my team. There were only a couple of other teams this year where I would've still been top three for my team every week with the generally-low scores I got.

Overall, I really enjoyed STGT09, and am definitely looking forward to playing (with a much better team, heh) in next year's tournament.

[DJ Incompetent]

Thanks, a few comments/suggestions:
* bring back pauses plz (6 weeks straight is too much imo).
* Now that we have tried extending the weeks (which sucked imo)

Agreed on both. I don't mind two theme weeks back to back, but there's gotta be a week break in the middle of the tournament. I didn't like the two week thing either. I'd rather deal with the brick wall part for 2 days instead of a straight week.

I like to play games in STGT which don't give veteran players a headstart.

Speaking of this, in the future, if voting is still gonna be gone, keep the game choices a much better secret. I lost a lot of interest when I started finding out players knew the game picks long before the week started. Then when you read a post like "STGT'09 Week 5 - ...do I even need to tell you?" har har, I knew I wasn't ever gonna catch up for a game like that.




Otherwise, thanks organizers for running the scene. It was a pretty good time.

[dex]

Hmm. First off, thanks for kind words to everyone who appreciated my work on the scoreboard stuff .

Since I generally avoided those threads, I'm gonna sum the whole tourney up:
-Weeks:
-> Week 1: Varth. A pretty fun game, however I felt that the wiggling was annoying, and the sniper bullets felt a lot more annoying in this game than in most shmups (stupid hitbox shape). Also, it had a very uneven difficulty curve - the hardest points happened around when I ended all my credits, and after that there were literally 10 stages you could pretty much bullshit your way through, something I didn't quite like. Still, fun.
-> Week 2: Raiden Fighters Jet. Raiden Fighters Fuckin' Jet. The best. The awesomest. Amazing, fantastic, superb. I have not a single word of criticism for this game. Fun, fast paced, insane, fast paced, complex and fast paced. A recipe for success! If I ever make a 'dex Shmup Tourney', there will be at least 3 weeks with Raiden Fighters Jet as the game ;D.
-> Week 3: Thunder Dragon 2. I only played 7 credits, and dear me, even that was too much. Horrible
-> Week 4: Strikers 1945 II. This one is pretty good, but I was really disappointed and hence didn't play much. Why? Because Psikyo week could have been Gunbird 2! Now that would have been awesome. Still, not bad.
-> Week(s) 5(&6): Battle Garegga. Well, what to say about this one... remember my 'dex shmup tourney' idea for 3 weeks? Well, the fourth week would be Battle Garegga. A great game that grows on a person with each credit. And to think I hated it at first... I do have qualms about it (obtuse system, several debilitating flaws), but it's not unlike a Tool album. Tool albums tend to contain 80% crap and 20% stuff so awesome, you don't mind the crap at all. That's the case with BG. It's not in my top, uh, 5 (Raiden Fighters Jet, Mars Matrix, 19xx [yes, I love it, shut up], DoDonPachi and Rayforce, I guess), but it's trailing on that sixth spot. Who knows, maybe it'll grow on me more? Too bad I didn't have time to play it those two weeks .
-Organisation:
-> Scoreboard handling: Well. I guess it went pretty good thanks to my programs. However, I feel like I should have updated more the last two weeks, but again, too little time + procrastination... I'd like to tart my programs up a bit for next year with more statistical crap, but that remains to be implemented (or not).
-> Game choice: I generally like Mike's choices (with the exception of TD2 >:(), but I don't know if voting shouldn't make a return. Lack of voting definitely makes organisation a lot easier and quicker. On the other hand, voting drama was one of the bonus highlights of STGT'08, so I don't know .
-> Week setup: Very good, in my opinion, if a bit brutal. I think the breaks between weeks unnecessarily drag the tourney, so definitely a huge plus here. Maybe a break in the middle wouldn't hurt, but I wouldn't mind if there wasn't one.
-> Time of the year: Well, it was late in the year, and I would like it to finish before October next year.

DJ Incompetent: the choices WERE kept secret (only Mike knew them, and he told me a day before the week started, and I kept the choices secret too). It's just that Battle Garegga was basically the guess of 95% of people, and so was its placement during the double week. Hence the thread title - that game wasn't a surprise at all . Any 'predictions' by people that happened to be true were just lucky (and, in the case of Garegga, educated) guesses.

[DJ Incompetent]

#shmups has some good guessers.

We need some vaguer theme names then

[Dragoforce]

I think we guessed all the games beforehand at stgfan based on Mikyumas top-ten list (well, DMC did but we are supposed to be a team ). I also concur with my teammate regarding the voting and pauses between weeks, it did get a little brutal towards the end.

[Ed Oscuro]

I think we guessed all the games beforehand at stgfan based on Mikyumas top-ten list

For the first couple weeks the games seemed to concur with somebody's suggestion in the (no-) voting thread where it was suggested to use Rob's, mine's, and somebody else's suggestions. Of course the fourth and fifth-sixth weeks weren't part of that initial group.

[Davey]

Garegga: Good game but I was too burnt out to try hard (from the tournament as a whole, not just Garegga). I didn't play at all in the second week.

Overall: I liked not voting, didn't like not having breaks. Even if there isn't one after every week, having one or two in there somewhere would have been nice.

I don't think I'll play again (although I always say that), but I wouldn't mind doing the data again next year.

[unsane]

By this point in the STGT my interest was waning. Mostly because i knew i had zero chance at being competitive - i hadn't played Garegga much 'til this. I highly enjoyed it in small doses, which isn't conducive to a tournament, and especially to such a beast of a game. Getting the first 2 levels down to a science reminds me of RFJ. I'm satisfied with reaching 3 million with the little effort i put in, i'll certainly be revisiting it a lot in the future, on my own time.

[szycag]

I'm glad I put the time into it that I did. There's basically a post-it note version of the game's workings that you get into your head after a while. BUT I'M STILL A CAVE WHORE

[sunburstbasser]

I love playing Garegga and it was the only game I'd really had time to get familiar with before the tourney. Not that it helped my score much! I don't really have the patience to play shmups for hours at a time generally, so my scores tend to peak pretty early. I did manage to get considerably better at Garegga, with a better-scoring ship (Bornham vs. Black Zeppelin, my usual choice) and getting right up to the stage 3 boss (don't know the name, sorry!).

Personal ranking:

1. Battle Garegga
2. Raiden Fighters Jet
3. Strikers 1945 II
4. Thunder Dragon II
5. Varth

Love Garegga, automatic favorite shmup for me. I'd never played RFJ before and really found myself liking it a bunch. I played on MAME without sound though; I'd drop it a rank if I had to listen to the music. Strikers II is a Psikyo game; you either love them or hate them. I agree Gunbird II would have been better but this wasn't bad at all. TD2 I actually like a lot and I think I did better at that than the rest.

I still don't like Varth.

[Zejiro]

Here's another suggestion: Don't put the most hardcore game at the final week. It's probably more ok to people who are good at the game, because they don't have to learn a complicated system, and so on.. but to me, who is fairly new in this genre, and haven't played Garegga at all before, it was just painful when this game was announced. I'd much rather have played this game the first week, and any of the other games (well, at least if I only had those games to choose from ) the last week.

After four weeks without a break from playing lots of shmups I was kinda sick of the whole competing, and I know I could've gotten a much better score on Garegga if I had just played it a little bit more, but as I said, I was already tired when it started.

Overall it's been pretty fun though. I've been whining a lot, but I didn't know that the STGT was (in)famous for not having the most fun games in it, so the games wasn't as fun as I expected. Here's my game ranking.

1. Strikers 1945 II (Easily the best game we played, easily..)
2. Varth (I like the wiggling, very frustrating game, but it's pretty decent)
3. Raiden Fighters Jet (I hate the first stage, but when you "activate" the yellow medals, the game gets really fun and intense)
4. Thunder Dragon 2 (Ok, seriously. Last week I went through the games in my head, and TD2 was just a black hole. Couldn't remember ANYTHING from the game, except the title screen. Dementia? Or just not a memorable game..? )
5. Battle Garegga (Because I didn't give it a real chance. I'm sure I'd like it a bit more under other circumstances)

Thanks to everyone who participated.