STGT Gaiden - Week 3 discussion thread (Twin Tiger Shark)

[KennyMan666]

Right, so small change for this week's voting - voting now ends 24 hours after score submission ends, to give people extra time to make their decisions and send in their votes.

Also, please report any problem you have with any of these games immediately so we can decide if we need to pull/replace.

And now, welcome to Too close for comfort week! What do you mean, that's not what we're calling it?

Okay, it's actually Shmups Farm Dev Week!

(most of the rest of this post was written by nasty_wolverine)

This week we pay respect to the devs that haunt this very forum.

Due to the very nature of this week, some of the games might not be complete in terms of content, but they perfectly playable.

Flying V (creator: Rozyrg)

"We heard you wanted a balls to the walls shooter" and this is what the man comes up with. Flying V, a really hard shooter from a really talented dev. Extremely fast paced, with a nice selection of ships, a classic shooter which will have you screaming and throwing your controller around for a while. A medalling system which has grow medal sizes to rack up points. It checks all the boxes, graphics, gameplay, sound, its all there. AND, it has "FLYING TANKS". Every game needs flying tanks.


Trigonometry Wars 3 Redux: The Revengeoning (creator: Giest118)

This is THE exemplification of the fact that a good shooter is all about the mechanics and less about the graphics. With its simplistic graphics and excellent mechanics, this game borrows alot from the Dodonpachi series but adds enough of its own to stand out. The well known chaining and hypering is present. And it is as tough as the Dodonpachi series, if not more.


Aero Chimera (creator: Sasupoika)

A really hard game. I mean REALLY HARD GAME. Like balls to the walls hard. It has cartoony graphics, with some really flashy good looking effects and a good soundtrack. It features a medalling scoring system with fragment collection for bombs. It has four different ship types to choose from. But above and beyond that, this is a really hard game. Like, it will take a few tries to even clear the first stage hard.


one-two (creator: Noah)

A bright and pretty little bullet hell where you, according to the developer, score by aggressively bombing. I admittedly can't say much about it, but the audiovisual presentation is great and the gameplay is really smooth.


Twin Tiger Shark (creator: mice)

So, you know all those old shmups? Twin Cobra. Kyukyouku Tiger. Fire Shark. Full with their old-school bullshit and unfairness. Now, Twin Tiger Shark takes all the good parts from those shmups of yore and builds it up into a homage to the olden times but with a great deal of polish and quality. Game mode to be played is Hard, two loops (so no looping forever!).

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Voting works as always. The captain of each team PMs the vote to me and nasty_wolverine. Deadline for voting is 24 hours after score submission deadline for the current week - thus, August 24th, 23:59 UTC.

[n0rtygames]

Have a tournament and feature 2 games where the developers are on a team

Final Boss : Eebrozgi
Zenodyne : Kaiser

Both on TDF...

So I guess that's either TW/FV/AC

There is so much other stuff on dev forum you could have chosen - Xeno Fighters R, still playable and with plenty of gameplay for a tournament like this. Twin Tiger Shark?

y u do dis?!

[KennyMan666]

Right, I'll discuss it with nasty.

But just to note, all the games were picked out before registration started, so it's on us for not considering that and not having any reserves in this situation.

Stay tuned for more information once I get ahold of nasty.

[Prinny]

I'll just leave this in the event Final Boss is picked and someone has problems unpacking it later.

Considering its a .rar file, you will need a program to unpackage it (personally, I use Bitser for unpackaging these types of files).

[KennyMan666]

Doubt anyone would have any problems unpacking a rar file, but dev contacted me on IRC and gave me a link to a zip file that's now been added to the first post.

[BPzeBanshee]

Have a tournament and feature 2 games where the developers are on a team

Final Boss : Eebrozgi
Zenodyne : Kaiser

Both on TDF...

You have a point about the various choices of games, but you made this team to begin with and it consists entirely of shmup developers - I half-expected this week to show up, you should've seen this coming too. As co-developer of Zenodyne I have no issue playing the game if it gets voted in, haven't heard from eebrozgi yet but I'm sure he won't mind too much.

For those with Windows 8 machines, nothing will be as bad as XED but things aren't going to be 100% guaranteed solid no matter your pick. The first four games listed here are built with Game Maker before its "modernisation" to Game Maker Studio. Windows 8 made some changes to DirectSound that GM does not like and as a result multiple sounds playing at once causes a crash. In practice this issue is very rare because said developers of these games follow good practice and try not to do this anyway - I was unable to trigger it doing a full 1cc of Zenodyne tonight, and while I sucked at the other games I couldn't trigger it either. Try out these games and let us know if you do encounter any issues, with a screenshot if possible.

For Aero Chimera you'll need to pick the right fullscreen, vsync and graphics card to use for your machine to get it to run optimally. For me this is the one program I've run that needs vsync to run correctly, fullscreen mode and vsync ON on my nVIDIA card ran fine, Intel Integrated with same settings was good too but occasional slowdown with large bullet clusters. This one used to be real shaky for framerate and I suspect has the highest performance requirements in this list regardless - your mileage may vary. Sasupoika notes replays aren't always consistent on his website for the game, I haven't encountered this myself with my brief tests but its something to watch out for. The other games don't have replay functions at all but F9 will produce screenshots of the ingame window.

As for issues extracting archives, if you're not using 7-Zip in this day and age your real problem exists between the keyboard and your chair.

[Squire Grooktook]

Let me preemptively say that anyone who doesn't vote for Aero Chimera is a communist. Yes, even the developers of the other games here.

[KennyMan666]

Right, me and nasty have decided to swap out the two games where the developers are participants. Anyone who has voted for any of those games of course has their voted canceled, and anyone who has voted for any of the others is allowed to change their votes. First post updating as soon as I've written the blurbs.

[nasty_wolverine]

I almost didnt see this thread

Sorry, have been down with the flu. So, havent been really been able to keep track of stuff as much as i want to.
Either way, i really didnt think the devs would have minded to play their own game competitively.

Regardless, we do have other games that the mentioned games can be replaced with.
Once kennyman confirms the list will be updated. edit: kennyman has confirmed

As i have said before, this tournament is about showcasing the best freeware doujins in the categories we had. The games were chosen because we, the organizers, thought that they best represent that group. The five games chosen this week was because we thought they best represented the variety present in shmups farm dev, also since we had a limit of 5, we couldnt put other games we thought were good as well. It will be easy to swap the two games out, coz there is a wealth of others to choose from.


edit: regardless of everything, all games listed here, old list and new deserve to be played. so even if they arent chosen to be played in the tourney, you owe yourself on the to play them later.

[KennyMan666]

Alright, Final Boss and Zenodyne are no longer in the mix, having been replaced by one-two and Twin Tiger Shark. Now resume voting.

That said, you should still try out Final Boss and Zenodyne.

[mastermx]

oh man, i was really hoping for final boss to be the next week's winner. I love that game.

[BPzeBanshee]

One-two is prone to crashing for reasons unknown last I checked and Aero Chimera sends players troppo. The obvious pick for us to achieve world peacin out in da crib:

[Squire Grooktook]

Aero Chimera is challenging and needs rank control but its aces in every way. Innovative fast dodging patterns that encourage unfocused movement, great mix of scoring elements, incredibly fast pace, and every ship plays completely differently. I restate that anyone who doesn't vote for it is a communist and possibly a terrorist as well.

[BulletMagnet]

To avoid being caught off-balance like last week, here's what happened when I tested the games out on my Windows 8.1 laptop -

Flying V required Joy2Key but otherwise ran fine...though is it me or is there a whole lotta bullet wobbling going on in this one?

No problems with Trigonometry Wars.

Aero Chimera runs without trouble but also requires Joy2Key...and for some reason I can't get the "focus" button to "stick" - if I'm sitting still and press it my plane's shots will condense, but as soon as I start moving again I lose focus. No idea what that's all about...

One-two was fine when I tried it, but in the past it's run slowly for seemingly no reason, even in a window. Here's hoping it stays on point for now.

Twin Tiger Shark is the only one I couldn't get running, and I don't think it's my OS - when I start it up a box pops up with the message "java is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file." I need to reconfigure something, but I'm not sure what it might be...

Otherwise, got two votes from my team members so far, waiting on the other two.

[nasty_wolverine]

on win7 and confirming

Flying V required Joy2Key but otherwise ran fine...though is it me or is there a whole lotta bullet wobbling going on in this one?

same here. and yes, wobbliness is probably you (unless this is some kinda problem only with win8.1). the bullets are large and pulsate, so that might be why as well.

Aero Chimera runs without trouble but also requires Joy2Key...and for some reason I can't get the "focus" button to "stick" - if I'm sitting still and press it my plane's shots will condense, but as soon as I start moving again I lose focus. No idea what that's all about...

same here. the focus not sticking is a common problem for me in any game which natively doesnt support joystick and uses shift for focus. the other game that does that for me is dotonpachi maximum. this is using joy2key.

Twin Tiger Shark is the only one I couldn't get running, and I don't think it's my OS - when I start it up a box pops up with the message "java is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file." I need to reconfigure something, but I'm not sure what it might be...

umm, do you have java installed? otherwise no clue with this one. try reinstalling java and checking?

[Iori Branford]

Can we vote for a specific label or revision? (e.g. Trig Wars 3 Cagar Label, soooooo much more balanced and readable.)

[BPzeBanshee]

Invisible buttons and putting glow on everything like it's some Michael Bay film is not "more readable" to everyone. The variant does play well, don't get me wrong, but I think if we're going for the games the originals should be the focus.

umm, do you have java installed? otherwise no clue with this one. try reinstalling java and checking?

The java error is not having Java installed for the computer or not having the environment variables pointing to it - if you're running Chrome the automatic download page points to a Chrome-specific one I believe that won't alter the environment variables. Go here: http://java.com/en/download/manual.jsp Hit either of the Windows (64-bit should be better for performance if you have a 64-bit CPU) binaries and it should set you up right.

[nasty_wolverine]

Invisible buttons and putting glow on everything like it's some Michael Bay film is not "more readable" to everyone.

FLYING V FTW
just my personal opinion

[Yazphier]

Aero Chimera runs without trouble but also requires Joy2Key...and for some reason I can't get the "focus" button to "stick" - if I'm sitting still and press it my plane's shots will condense, but as soon as I start moving again I lose focus. No idea what that's all about...

same here. the focus not sticking is a common problem for me in any game which natively doesnt support joystick and uses shift for focus. the other game that does that for me is dotonpachi maximum. this is using joy2key.

I want to remember (am not at home) this one was the one with a small text file on "how to setup pad.txt" and another file named pad.txt
.. edit the pad file according to the instructions in the "how to... " made it work for me (in linux, so should work even better in windows)
...remember first number is actually simply "enable joystick"


Regarding the other games, got all of them "working" in wine (or just with java in the case of TTS)
I don't get any sound at all on flying V. (in linux)

and i want to remember it being only flying V and TTS that didn't have native joystick/pad support that is configureable

[Aleksei]

if Cagar label one two was an option I wouldn't even get my teams vote.

[KennyMan666]

Slightly under 14 hours left to vote, and just two teams that haven't gotten their votes in yet.

Keep 'em coming!

Edit: Okay, only waiting for a vote from Tenhou Unreal Mahjong now, and then all teams will have voted. I'll close voting at that point, I guess.

[KennyMan666]

Final vote received aaaaaaaaand it's a tie again!

nasty_wolverine predicted a split between Aero Chimera and Twin Tiger Shark- and he was right on the money. Four votes for Aero Chimera and four votes for Twin Tiger Shark. And one for Flying V!

So time for the standard d100 roll, courtesy of http://random.org - an odd number means Aero Chimera, while an even number means Twin Tiger Shark.

And the number rolled was a solid 100.

Meaning that the game for week three is none other than Twin Tiger Shark.

The XBLIG version has been patched so I'm 99% sure they're identical so it should be fine playing on that if you want too. Score thread is nasty's job - take it away, nasty!

[Squire Grooktook]

My reaction to the outcome of that roll

[KennyMan666]

Okay, what I've been told is that when you beat the second loop now, the game asks you if you want to go on to a third loop. So don't go on to a third loop. I doubt you people would want to play a potentially infinitely looping game for a weeklong tournament anyway.

[BulletMagnet]

Ah jeez...figures it's the one game I can't get running. I tried the links a few posts up and that didn't solve the problem...anyone have any other ideas on how to solve the "Java isn't recognized" issue? Id' rather not sit out two straight weeks if I can help it...

[KennyMan666]

Well, if you have an Xbox 360, it's one dollar on XBLIG... I'm 99% certain the current PC and XBLIG versions are identical. Not that I want you to have to spend money to be able to participate in the tournament, but, one dollar. Game's great, so well worth that price.

[Lord Satori]

Ah jeez...figures it's the one game I can't get running. I tried the links a few posts up and that didn't solve the problem...anyone have any other ideas on how to solve the "Java isn't recognized" issue? Id' rather not sit out two straight weeks if I can help it...

You'd think they'd take that into account... How many derp weeks are you guys going to have? Personally, if a game for a tournament didn't work for somebody I wouldn't go all "tough nuggets, bitch!" and leave it in.

That aside, this game is actually pretty cool.

[nasty_wolverine]

Ah jeez...figures it's the one game I can't get running. I tried the links a few posts up and that didn't solve the problem...anyone have any other ideas on how to solve the "Java isn't recognized" issue? Id' rather not sit out two straight weeks if I can help it...

https://www.java.com/en/

go there, and install java runtime. after installing it should say "Java(TM) 7" from "Oracle" in your "programs and features" in control panel.
You probably have a browser specific java installed. You need the common runtime with the JVM and all.

Score thread will be up later today after i am back from work.

[nasty_wolverine]

You'd think they'd take that into account... How many derp weeks are you guys going to have? Personally, if a game for a tournament didn't work for somebody I wouldn't go all "tough nuggets, bitch!" and leave it in.

Run a tourney yourself and see how hard it is. otherwise, go away.

[BulletMagnet]

Well, if you have an Xbox 360, it's one dollar on XBLIG...

I actually paid a couple of bucks for the thing when it was first ported to the PC, so I don't have a problem with that, though I'd rather not do it twice if I can manage it, heh.

You'd think they'd take that into account...

I can't really blame the organizers for that, though - the type of computer I own and how it's set up isn't their fault. Trying to find a roster of (good/playable/competition-worthy) titles that are guaranteed to work for absolutely everyone is a fool's errand, there will always be exceptions.

go there, and install java runtime. after installing it should say "Java(TM) 7" from "Oracle" in your "programs and features" in control panel.
You probably have a browser specific java installed. You need the common runtime with the JVM and all.

I ran the "jxpiinstall" file downloaded from the link you provided, and now see "Java 7 Update 67" in the "Programs and Features" list, but I'm still getting the same error message as before. Thanks for the attempt to get me up and running, but something about my setup is getting in the way...guess I'll give it another go next week.