newStage Archive Excavation: Freeware Doujin Central!

[daliscar]

After getting excited about Gespenst's thread on Star Shooter Maximum and unearthing D-Force.2 I thought I'd take a proper look at the premier Japanese STG bulletin board newStage for some more quality freeware doujinshi.
Happily the archives go back to May 2008 so I decided to sift through them all. Of course most of the stuff on there is already well known and it seems that most of the obscure stuff has already been covered in these forums too (and most of the rest is just shit) but there were a few that I can't find mentioned before that seem really promising:

1) BomberBomber Gaiden and BomberBomber Gaiden 2:
Really cool Parodius versions of Darius Gaiden from 2008


Homepage http://www2010.chin3.net/

2) Naginata Destruction:
Hectic lock-on laser single stage score attack


Homepage http://function.ifdef.jp/game01/index.html

3) Hector39 and Storm Gear:
These are both very basic vanilla STG with shot, bomb, focus and little else.

Hector39 from the makers of Rosen Diadem. Play as Hatsune Miku with Nico Nico characters for enemies.Really solid shooter. Input konami code using keyboard for 99 bombs.F2 to change Miku's voice.

Homepage http://www.15citron.com/ichigo/hector39/

Storm Gear from the makers of forthcoming Storm Assault and also available in Flash. Frequent updates (current version v1.17). No high score save as yet. Soundtrack from the makers of Star Shooter Maximum.

Homepage http://www7a.biglobe.ne.jp/~bp-827z/asd ... torm_gear/

4) Volca:
Simulation (not emulation!) of an MSX game from 2010. Retro to the max!


Homepage http://www.alles.or.jp/~gyonin/game.htm

and saving the best till last

5) Tilto's Games - Astral Arms, Dimension Diver and Evil's Enlightenment:
Abstract shmups with nice sound effects and good scoring systems. Astral Arms and Dimension Diver are a lot of fun but Evil's Enlightenment is a fucking masterpiece!!

Astral Arms has a rank based scoring system with lots and lots of weapon choices and a "nowait" (no slowdown) option


Dimension Diver has chain-based stage clearing system with choice of ship speeds and a 30 stage trial option


Evil's Enlightenment has fantastic scoring system. Sacrifice a life to enter Counterattack phase, increase score multiplier by collecting items with bomb and counterattack, as multiplier drains to zero it fills item score gauge increasing base value of items. Other Side mode with faster ship and different shots, Victimise mode with permanent counterattack (like hyper mode). Yes a fucking masterpiece!!


Tilto's Vector page: http://www.vector.co.jp/vpack/browse/pe ... 45804.html

6) Shiroino:
Discontinued abstract shmup from the end of 2010. It looks fantastic- single stage score attack only but there's a choice of stages

Homepage http://nanpuru.soudesune.net/shiroino/shiroino.html

Honestly it's like Indiana Jones in here

[RNGmaster]

Hmm, Evil's Enlightenment would be a really great game if there wasn't so much input lag and the hitbox wasn't so microscopic. As it is the scoring is really fun and tense though.

[daliscar]

Hmm, Evil's Enlightenment would be a really great game if there wasn't so much input lag and the hitbox wasn't so microscopic. As it is the scoring is really fun and tense though.

Hmm. Expiriencing lag on the menus but not in the game itself. AA, DD and EE could all really do with some intense background music though and do feel unfinished without it.
What happened to Tilto? This stuff could rival ABA Games.

Playing through the others I can see some reasons why they got forgotten: Shiroino and Naginata Destruction only allow one stage of play which is frustrating, Volco's boring and missing out score saving on Storm Gear is a basic mistake. And why try to improve on Darius Gaiden?
Hector39 is complete and well presented but very simplistic. That's the one I'm playing most

[Gespenst]

If I may share more stuff:
-Marsh: A lovely DoDonPachi-styled shmup (running it in fullscreen will make it go real fast, I don't know why)

http://www.vector.co.jp/soft/dl/winnt/g ... 78255.html

-EX -extra-: From the same guy who made the above shmup. This time it's a Ketsui clone.

http://www.vector.co.jp/soft/dl/winnt/g ... 81666.html

-Reincarnation: Endless shmup. Quite neat graphics, etc.

Gameplay vid:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... dDI8a2DMrk
http://www.h3.dion.ne.jp/~jyujika/reincarnation_0_3.zip

-Arginaros: Another neat-looking shump. Use charge bomb to nullify bullets and kill multiple enemies for items. Somewhat reminds me of Xevious though.

http://www.freem.ne.jp/game/win/g01965.html

-Haritama: Nice, retro looking shmup. Reminds me of earlier Toaplan shmups.

http://www.vector.co.jp/soft/win95/game/se229512.html

-Ultimate Stage: This might be the spiritual successor to SRX's Storm Caliber series. Plays quite the same, but with 3D-render sprites, lack of power-ups and whatnots and unlimited graze-laser energy.

http://www.vector.co.jp/soft/win95/game/se275195.html

[TrevHead (TVR)]

BMed this thread for later

Ive played Marsh and -Reincarnation a while back. I can't remember much about Marsh but I remember having fun with the other one, It's got that Nomltest & Kento Cho feel to it as its just a single stage shmup that gradually get tougher as you progress IIRC there are two revisions of it which are different to each other.

THX daliscar and Gespenst for posting

[Krimzon Kitzune]

This topic should be stickied.

[Captain]

Lessee here.

Genetos-shmup with an evolution theme, one of my faves.

http://www.tatsuya-koyama.com/php/dl_ra ... _v1_00_eng

Patriot dark-another DDP styled game, but this time by shooting enemies normally you get blue items, and using laser to kill enemies wastes energy which those items refil, once you're out of energy, all bullets and your laser turn red and are....faster? (really I don't know what are the effects of the bar being depleted except bullets turning red)

http://www.mediafire.com/?mtnrty1iiyw (I dunno where to find a download, so I uploaded mine)


Flew fighter- you have a normal shot and a spread shot, and bombs, cool music and bad graphics, just the way you like them.

http://www.geocities.jp/omegalev/game/F ... ter102.zip

Red Killer 2nd age-made by a fan or fans of Siter Skain, it's based on Kamui, has smoother but worse graphics, and music that's not even half as good as Kamui's, but still a nice game.

http://www.4shared.com/file/ZOUOzuvc/red_k.html (yes that's the only link I found...from the site that says it's free)

[Observer]

This is the official Patriot Dark download from Temperance Lance:

http://temperancelance.under.jp/patriotdark-dl.html

Nice thread, btw, let's share some doujin love!

Here is IrK, that Einhänder clone with a mixture of Suguri and a digital realm. Brutal as f"·$"· too.

http://www.geocities.jp/akatuki_twilight/soft/soft.html

(scroll down, it's there)

There is also this tower-tube shooter-like thing called KreisReise as well as Acceleration of Patchouli... You can tell the guy is a fun of the Suguri series, heh.

I'm closely following the progress of Scarlet Agony too, some sort of Lovecraftian STG with some touches of Radio Zonde in the enemy style.

http://www.senro.net/stg/stg.htm

[TrevHead (TVR)]

That Scarlet Agony looks very tasty, how far into development is it?

[Gespenst]

Here's something rather bizzare: eXterminate Ray (X-Ray): A Layer Section clone done in vector-graphics. Haven't tried it since it doesn't work in my PC though (presumably something to do with Windows 7 compatibility. meh)

http://www.geocities.jp/clean_ship/xray.htm

Sailen: nice shmup that emphasizes on Psyvariar-like bullet grazing and suicide bullets all over the place.

http://www.vector.co.jp/soft/win95/game ... 65.html?ds

[daliscar]

Haven't tried it since it doesn't work in my PC though (presumably due to something to do with Windows 7 compatibility. meh)

That looks so so so awesome, d/ling now!
Luckily I've got an XP machine as well as a Windows 7 one so hope it works.

I had a similar issue with Ultimate Stage. It runs fine on XP but on 7 I got an ActiveX error even after installing VB6 (which is listed as a requirement).
And you're right that US is the spiritual successor to Storm Caliber series.
Man I love those games (as per my sig), just wish that guy would carry on with the developements on his site but there's been no activity there for well over a year.

All these doujinshi authors, I wonder what happened to them, if they made other games, if they resurfaced under a different name and so on, especially when their websites from the readmes just give you a 404 error.
I guess this is a kind of shmup archaeology!

EDIT: that X-Ray is totally excellent and the 256-color version works fine on XP. I see the executable is "STKrun.exe" and I can't ever get those to run on Windows 7. All those STKrun.exe shooters were made with Shooter Maker 95 so I've posted a question about Windows 7 compatibility in the Development section:
http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=41463
If anyone's got a fix please tell!

[daliscar]

The Title Lies In You:



http://www.geocities.jp/clean_ship/liesin.html

Found this on the site of that guy who made eXterminate Ray. It's a supercool dynamic rank wave survival shooter which does work on Windows 7.
(Edit cfg.txt so that "Resolution=1" in order for fullscreen to work)

[Gespenst]

The Title Lies In You:



http://www.geocities.jp/clean_ship/liesin.html

Found this on the site of that guy who made eXterminate Ray. It's a supercool dynamic rank wave survival shooter which does work on Windows 7.
(Edit cfg.txt so that "Resolution=1" in order for fullscreen to work)

Anyway, I see some of his games are inspired by Psyvariar as well.

And it's quite hilarious that your own death could do quite massive splash damage toward the enemies .

Also, found this rather bizarre gem

Made in Wired - a compilation of shmup mini-games made by Z-Lock and VAX11 (that ASCII shmup) creator (Hello World Project). Think of Wario Ware with shmup-related mini games.
The good thing is; pretty much everything is in English (or Engrish, at least).

[tinotormed]

Lemme play (almost) all of them!!

[Gespenst]

Been digging newStage recently and discovered a couple of neat things:
Mikado (?)
http://vectorspace.seesaa.net/archives/20120914-1.html
(looks like it's still WIP though, but there's downloadable demo in that link)

Revolgear II, ThunderCross-ish shmup
http://necobikkuri.blog.fc2.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgsK7IsI ... r_embedded