Q: How good/bad is G-Stream 2020 (Oriental Soft)

[hd]

Give me your opinions please!

[Thunder Force]

I've only seen limited footage, but I'm interested in seeing more. Rumors abound of Triangle Service involvement in G-Stream. The small amount I saw seemed like something between Raiden and XII Stag

Maybe someone on the forum has the PCB?

[raiden]

I remember RFK saying something about a Raiden Fighters meets ESP Galuda gameplay, there is supposedly a way to change bullets into medals in the game. Another, completely unrelated fact I remember is that the PCB gets rather hot and should be cooled while playing.

[Damocles]

Isn't Oriental Soft the company that did 1945k III, that cheap Strikers III ripoff? Or was that just "Oriental"?


**Edit: Checked in Mame, it's them.**

[postman]

I have some Gstream pics I will post once my site gets fixed.......looks interesting, but nothing to go nuts over...........hope it gets emulated soon.......

[chtimi-CLA]

i have the pcb. it looks great, but i have to admit i rarely play it, probably because of the horrible sound quality.
it's true it heats very fast, you don't need to cool it if you play one game though.

[bay]

been playing the pcb a bit, definately an older school game. things can happen quick, opportunities to die are quick



played a bit this weekend shmeet, BulletMagnet might have more to say on it. oxtsu will be looking at it soon, hopefully he'll have some constructive critique and reviewing on it.

i hope to get some captures and more information on this game up on the web (and here) so it's not so unknown. we'll see when i get around to that. for now however here is a crappy little movie of demo mode. at the very least you can see and hear some of the game.

http://www.countercultured.net/~bay/shmups/

MVI_4944-700.avi

the encode is xvid @ 700kbps or something along that lines. the audio is whatever came out of the camera, as my mp3 codec wasn't working right with virtualdub.

[Dave_K.]

I can give my quick analysis after having it for a couple months, but only playing it for a couple days (I have to many other great games I'd rather be playing). I'd describe this as Raiden meets Trizeal, definately a Triangle Service feel to it. You medal up like Trizeal, and collect wide/narrow/missle powerups like Raiden. As you destroy ships, your shield charges. You can then release your sheild (much like Chaos Field) as a small disc, which converts all fire intersecting it into streams of medals. This is where all the points are...and is very fun to figure out good milking spots in the game. You can take apart bosses like in Raizing games, although I don't believe there is any rank. Needless to say, its very easy to drop medals. Like in Trizeal, every enemy you kill releases a medal, so avoid the homing missle powerup if possible. You'll do much more targeting firing and then avoiding enemys without firing to hold your medal chain.

As previously mentioned, the two large surface mount processors get very hot. I haven't had it on long enough for it to be a problem, but RFK recommends some kind of fan or cooling for the board (not sure exactly how to do this). Also as mentioned, the sound quality is horrendously under sampled.

Overall I think I'd really like this game if I can give it the attention it deserves.

[BulletMagnet]

Dave and bay covered most of the essentials, I'll just mention one or two other things...at the bottom of the screen is a bar with a certain amount of "slots" in it: depending on how many red (vulcan), blue (laser) or green (homing) items you collect, it determines how strong each of the weapons (all three are fired at once) is. I haven't played Trizeal, so I don't know if it employs a similar system or not...

As Dave said, dropping medals is quite tough to avoid, and as bay said, a lot of deaths depend on whether or not you've played an area before, a feature I can't say I'm personally very fond of (to be fair you do get some smart bombs though). Graphics and sound are unremarkable, and while your hitbox is apparently at least relatively small, your ship sprite is really big and bulky-looking: take 2 of those in 2-player mode and combine it with powered-up guns from both players, and things can get confusing quickly.

I didn't spend a heckuva lot of time with it, but from what I did see of it I consider it fairly mediocre.

[FRO]

Isn't Oriental Soft the company that did 1945k III, that cheap Strikers III ripoff? Or was that just "Oriental"?


**Edit: Checked in Mame, it's them.**

I rather liked that "ripoff" game. I think it's quite playable.

[Ed Oscuro]

Agreed, Strikers is alright.

Also, I'm interested - in the picture of the board, what are the two large CPUs with 3s on them?

[Macaw]

So THIS is the damn game that appeared in one of Icycalms video's where he gave a tour of a japanese arcade. I was always wondering what on earth the game was, and could never make out the logo.

I have to say it looks pretty awesome.

[Dave_K.]

So THIS is the damn game that appeared in one of Icycalms video's where he gave a tour of a japanese arcade. I was always wondering what on earth the game was, and could never make out the logo.

Yes this was the game in his Hey arcade Ibara loctest video, playing on the last machine in the lineup of Raizing games. I asked him the same thing about not recognizing what game it was.

[bay]

Agreed, Strikers is alright.

Also, I'm interested - in the picture of the board, what are the two large CPUs with 3s on them?

Xilinx XC95288 (a CPLD)



the CPU i believe is a hyperstone E1-32XT, some googling reveals that some other company (dgPIX Entertainment) has used it for arcade pcbs as well.