LORD ROCKET'S THREAD OF KPOP, JARPUGS, AND DANMAKU SHMUPS

This actually looks like a rather tactics-heavy game. Nice.

Lord Rocket said:

but not so much with Bee or Yeesh. Both of you, give yourselves a slap on the wrist and don't do it again.

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Lord Rocket said:

the Gauss Cannons Bee and Yeesh are using being completely useless

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Good thing Maggot's just a silly marine, sitting around in the back, while the other team-members are looking bad.

I guess he'll have time to shine again, once we start some boarding action. Shine in his majestically useless fashion with ranged weaponry..

Don't worry captain I'll buff out those scratches!

Hey, I hear that if you bump a thread hard enough an update will appear!

Reading this update I start to picture Torsten as the type of guy who would give his rockets names like Fat Lulu and Big Bang Betty. It is always good when your weapon of choice has some personality before it blows your enemies to pieces.

Don't waste all the good names on those sissy little rockets though.

OK people, let's get this over and done with so I can play the game some more. We left the last update having legged it from our first ever space battle - not the noblest way to christen the BLOBFIST but better than wasting scant resources on two little nothings. At least that's how I intend to justify myself.
First order of business is to head back to Starport Luna in order to get the BLOBFIST's tanks filled . I can't remember if I've mentioned this before but traversing each subsector costs 5 units of fuel.



Since we've got 18 fuel units after the fight finished, we can therefore move through three subsectors (well, the game will probably be nice and let us move through four). Running out of fuel in deep space isn't such a disaster, though, since you'll automatically call in a Star Command supply ship to fill you up. This costs money and time, however, both of which are/can be important commodities.
Still, we're keen to avoid that since I'm one stingy motherfucker. Here we are having filled our tanks at the space station pumps:



One nice feature is that you don't have to enter the space station to be refuelled, which would save us swapping disks - not that I don't have a hard drive, but my second computer was an Amiga 500 so I'm still acutely conscious of the whole 'insert disk 2' thing. My first computer was a BBC Micro Model B, by the way. That had a disk drive too but people programming for that particular machine were conscientious enough to ensure their software fit onto one damn disk. Bloody 16 bit nextgen popamole (where disks are the moles, natch) bullshit.
We take advantage of the in space refuelling but then decide to enter the station anyway, since I feel the need to adjust something. I'll link to these next couple images since they are quite large and I don't want people having to deal with broken page layouts:

text mode
problem solvered

Alright, now that's done it should hopefully cut down on the whole 'text too fast to read' issue. It was a bit of a pain not knowing who those guys were until they started shooting at us (in all seriousness, if I could transfer our save game over I'd play the Amiga version instead and bugger my whinging about not wanting to install another emulator).
And yes I know that my desktop has flowers and shit on it, which is a bit on the fruity side, but in my defence:

Yeah that's right

I'm writing this on my laptop which uses a tiling window manager as you can see. For those who don't know, tiling WMs are so manly (100% keyboard controlled, my friends) I could have a wallpaper of two guys bumming and I'd still be the most heterosexual man on this forum.
And yes I am listening to Kpop again, what of it?

OK I'm now finished finding ludicrous excuses to show off my desktops, and I apologise for wasting your time. To recap, we're back on the spacestation, and I've restarted DOSBox so the game runs at a more reasonable pace. While I'm here, I decide to visit the Drydock, which is where you get repairs done to your ship.
What I didn't mention in the last update is that we, just like that one pirate, also suffered a breached hull. I didn't take a screenshot, which is becoming a bit of a refrain in this LP, but in this case it doesn't matter since we'll be coming back later on. And I did get some shots that time, honest.
The Drydock has quite a nice interface, surprisingly, since it offers you the chance to give your crew a crack at repairing any broken equipment before you have to pay for it (well, assuming you've got someone equipped with a repair kit, that is. Repair skill might also help). We point Oscar at the hull breach and... well, he doesn't do anything, despite his promise in his last post on this very page. You can understand my disappointment. Well, given that such a simple thing is beyond Oscar's abilities (don't worry though dude, I'll calm down. We're still bros) it's going to cost us 4k to get it fixed. Given that we're not intending to give our targets a chance to surrender anyway, we won't worry about the holes just now.
I also decide not to get any new armour. Spaceship armour is ablative - once it's gone, you need to buy more, so even if Oscar and his repair kit decided to go 110% this time around, we'd still be stuck at 87 points. My reasoning is that, after that last debacle with the scouts, we'll be avoiding slugging it out with anyone until we're a little better armed. Well, we're going after those freighters, of course, but freighters are all but defenceless so it's unlikely to be an issue there.

And so we make our way back to subsector 29,29. We arrive at the planet we were making our way towards without incident:




Oop, who's this? Well, reducing the DOSBox cycles did help - I managed to parse the text that flashed up as 'five freighters' although it was still awfully fast, so that's an incline. Not much of one, but still.
Here's our five new friends:



No thanks. As I said earlier we're supposed to be wiping these guys out, not chatting about the weather, and although the game will probably interpret enemies who surrender as 'destroyed' we're all Codexians of integrity here in this thread and so we're going to kill the lot of them. Plus the crew of the BLOBFIST are playing as Renegades this time around - Renegades get all the best dialogue, after all (although we won't get to romance Ashley :`( ).
Right, here's the plan. Remember how I said freighters don't have guns in the last update (seriously, keep that in mind)? We're going to keep as many of them in view as possible so none of them have an opportunity to run for it - randomly encountered freighters will generally just do the bolt if you can't establish communications with them - while concentrating fire on ship C.
Dunno about you lot, but I find the way some older games will invoke the combat system for non-combat encounters quite charming really.

Here's the Scan screen so you get an idea of who we're firing on:



Everyone puts in a pretty good effort this round, although Gauss Cannons are, again, barely worth a damn even against these guys. It's pretty cool how they cost over twice as much as Hypervelocity Rockets.


Yeesh is firing on ship A, given that C is out of his arc.



Next round is pretty much the same thing:



We're still firing - mostly - on our friend freighter C by the way. Torsten's turn next:



POW! You know something? I think the space combat effects are pretty well done. The cloud of debris sticks around until the end of the fight as well, and the animated explosions when something bursts actually do look quite good. I was so impressed that I CTRL-F5ed madly a bit later on so you guys can see exactly what it looks like.
One down, four to go. But hey, check this out:



Hmm - maybe I am not entirely trustworthy, eh? And let me tell you something; the lasers these guys are packing are mean. As you'll soon see, we're reduced to 45 armour just from that one hit. All of a sudden I am regretting the fact we didn't get some extra armour installed.
While we're here, we may as well talk a little about the capabilities of our friends the freighters. They are ponderous as shit, for a start - they move once per phase, in tic 3. Their shields are about the weakest in the game, but I can't currently estimate a point value for them. Their lasers are, as mentioned, brutal. I put them at about 100 damage based on what happens to us in this encounter. Luckily they only fire once per round and they aren't at all accurate with them. They also only fire in the forward arc, although being a genius I didn't realise this until later and so completely failed to exploit this fact.
I said in the last update that maybe it was a mistake to start this LP since it brings to everyone's attention the fact that I am a massive thicko but it seems to me now, having had time to think about it (another refrain: 'having had time to think about it'), that having to confront and reflect upon my mistakes in this way might actually make me a better, more thoughtful, player. Or perhaps I'll just keep doing the same dumb shit instead.



Here's Bee being given orders to fire on freighter E. Yeesh and Torsten are concentrating their fire on freighter D. Yeesh scratches away, doing a paltry 18 damage off of the full five strikes (still better than 3 hits for 7 though eh?). Torsten does a little better:



And a pat on the back for you, Pussycat, get yourself something nice from your local dairy/deli/convenience store/whatever else you might like to call them where you live. Maybe a nice popsicle if you're a southern hemisphere man, or something to warm you up if you aren't. The total damage was 166, by the way. Bee hits her target for a massive 27.

Next round we maneuvre about so that freighter E is in both Torsten and Bee's firing arcs. Yeesh takes the opportunity for smoko:

(META EDIT: OK I suddenly worked out why all the pictures are all tiny. Must remember to sync directories properly)



Once again I didn't think to do anything sensible like outranging freighter B. Fortunately we took no hits this round. as freighter E is in no position to return fire (forward arc only, remember) and B is a stupid bastard who couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with a flamethrower if he was touching it. We, on the other hand, absolutely shred ship E. Torsten provides a very respectable 177 points of damage and breaches his hull, while Bee likewise puts holes in him while inflicting a solid 47 points. Actually this is a good opportunity to point out that systems damage doesn't stack - once something's broken, it can't get any... er, brokener. That last hit we took breached our hull again, but it's still going to cost 4000 creds to fix when we get back to the station.
At this point we take a short break as I do the same thing I did last time, which is to say retreat out of range so Torsten gets a chance to reload. It works about as well as it did last time too. Still, this little oversight proves to be to our advantage since when we return, the freighters are more spaced out, giving us a chance to divest E of his structural integrity without distraction:



Next round, after Torsten reloads:










I really think those explosions are quite pretty.
OK a question for you guys: when you're in a small, lightly armoured but highly maneuvreable craft and you're facing off against two larger, slower ships which are equipped with weaponry capable of evaporating what little protection you have remaining with remarkable rapidity, how do you proceed? Think carefully, this will be on the test.

If you answered anything other than 'attack head on' then we are too different to ever be friends. If you answered 'attack head on in such a way that your strongest weapon is useless and your most powerful shield is not being bought into play', however, then perhaps we should get married.



Here's Yeesh doing his best to make up for his pilot's poor judgement:



Unfortunately, despite the fact that freighter A has already taken a couple hits, this simply isn't enough.
The freighter's return fire, however, is devastating. One hit burns away what's left of our armour and holes us (again). Things are now that little bit tenser. I must say that running for it crossed my mind - it might have been interesting to see if the game would let us get away with not killing all of the freighters, or , conversely, if the mission doesn't count if we haven't done the lot of them. However, I'm one of those people who doesn't really like turning back for any reason, and besides, I figure that we can fairly safely trust to luck given the fact this lot fight like cows.
Needless to say, the idea of giving them a short back and sides, so to speak, and avoiding their return fire never occurred to me.

I do, at least, have the presence of mind to get out of freighter B's way while we crack open A's steel shell. We turn around to better train our guns on our new acquaintance and let Yeesh and Torsten do their thing:




Torsten doesn't do quite so well this time around, but Yeesh does OK given what he has to work with. Hopefully we'll do a little better next round.



Well, shit. Still, the fact we broke him up is a positive result, although Yeesh actually did most of the work this round - scoring a 56 pointer. Grab yourself a beer mate, you've earned it.

Our next task is, surprisingly enough, to vapourise that last freighter. So we close in and Yeesh and Torsten open up. Things don't go so well, however. Yeesh manages a paltry 20 damage and Torsten all but wastes the last few rockets in the launcher, inflicting a Gauss Cannon-esque 38. Then this happens:



Two words: Mother. Fucker.
Now I hate to leave you guys on a cliffhanger, but this seems like a pretty good time for me to go to bed, so you'll have to wait and see whether we survive the blast or not.























Ha ha, nah just fucking with you. I'll just finish writing this update tomorrow and you won't even notice the 8-10 hour gap. 'Night guys.

Well that was pretty meta wasn't it? The delay ended up being a bit longer than 8-10 by the way, since my cat seems to be part of a conspiracy designed to deny me any sleep, so I've spent the entire day moping around having all the energy required to do fuck all. I was pretty tired last night too, so I can't promise there won't be any more weird, unfunny jokes from now on either. That was another one just then, actually. Sorry.

OK where were we up to? Oh right, we just got fucked up. I'm sure you've been on tenterhooks the past couple paragraphs, but you needn't have worried - we sustained damage to an important but non-vital system - specifically, our dropship. The dropship is what we need to board ships/land on planets, so unfortunately it looks like we're going to be heading straight back to port when we've spaced this goon. IF we space this goon.

Spoiler: we totally space this goon.
First we finally remember to turn around and present our best side to the fucker:



Then we blast him to smithereens:




And then shoot him some more for good measure (this is known as a 'corpse kill' - scroll down to #1 if TL;DR).
It's weird how corpse kills do damage, though. This doesn't really affect anything so far as I can tell, so... well, yeah, I do
ALRIGHT I don't really know where I'm going with that sentence so I'm gonna tell you guys about my potatoes instead. I was boiling some up and I'd had them on the stove for twenty minutes which is about the sort of time you want to go check the water level is still OK, but it seemed I hadn't put enough water in this time so it was entirely boiled off already! Luckily my lappy is right across from the kitchen so I noticed the lack of steam pretty quick, otherwise that could've gotten nasty. Guess I'm having tea half an hour later than usual tonight, and I promise to think of a more graceful way to exit from pointless, meandering drivel next time, like maybe deleting it and starting afresh and oh god I'm doing it again.



Let's get the fuck out of here, this system is bad luck. NB if our next few battles go well then luck has nothing to do with it, OK?



Alright we're back on Luna. This is what the ship bounty screen looks like - it pops up when you arrive back at a port after scoring some kills. I think I've said this before but basically, for vapourising a ship you get a monetary bonus equivalent to 10cr/tonne (I know it says 'ton' by the way but I'm metric myself), and if you capture a ship you get 20cr/tonne. However, because there are non-hostile frieghter encounters in this game as well, you aren't reward you for being an arsehole about it and blowing them up willy-nilly/capturing the ship and making everyone walk the plank. That said, it doesn't really penalise you if you slaughter our friends at Ace Trucking Co. either. Well you waste ammo and fuel I guess. I feel compelled to point out I took screenshots of all five of the screens (one for each ship, see?), even though they were all exactly the same.
All blather aside, even though we were ordered to kill those guys we don't get any extra credit for it. Unless, of course, you count the mission bonus and big fat pay cheques we earned:











Yeesh and Bee get promotions even though Torsten did all the work. Better luck next time, bro.

Well, we now have some 42803 creds to our name which isn't too shabby, all things considered. Let's make a quick trip to the drydock again before this update ends, since I did promise:



There's all the systems we currently have installed. A-G, T and U are common to all ship types, and the rest are optional and bonus features (like extra dropships for those cases when we run into more punk freighters who I've grossly underestimated). Lets go through them:

Engine: can't move. Even if you survive combat its a game over as you're doomed to drift through the cold, dark void forever. Unless they can be repaired in space, of course, so good luck.
Retros: can't turn around. I seem to recall I lost these once - it was annoying.
Life Support: Game over man!
Power: Also stops your ship from moving. According to the manual your weapons systems have backup batteries attached so you can still fight.
Communications: No more comms phase for you.
Computer: Another useless one. Basically stops you from using the Computer function in space, so you can't check your kills, etc. I guess the crew can't look up porn in the intergalacticnet either but it's good to keep your imagination exercised as well, you know.
Tow Link: Can't get captured ship bounty if you can't tow 'em.

So that's that. Anyway, our last act of this update is to have Oscar try and repair our damaged subsystems. He still can't fix the holes in the hull (not 100% on whether the game genuinely let us make another attempt and we failed again or if it keeps proper track of what we've failed to fix already. I'll remember to investigate that), but to his credit he does manage to fix the dropship:



So I take back that snide comment I made earlier. Still, I end up having to pay 4k to fix the hull, which really was a bit of a waste of money given how paltry the effects of a hull breach are. Oh well.

And so we end the update. Unlike the last couple of installments I'm not going to suggest a plan for us to follow since I want to hear YOUR ideas. What should we do with the money - 38K can buy some nice stuff, after all? Should we take a mission or go exploring? Get a good discussion going because the next update will probably be a few days - I'm currently in the process of moving overseas and it's forms up my arse up the moment, especially since I've left basically everything to the last minute.

PS I greatly overcooked my replacement potatoes.

Damn cheap China Corp hydrospanners.

You are like waaay to wordy for my taste...

I propose that you throw a party for 38 kkk! Whores and coke for everyone! And bigger guns for the eternal Privates...

Did you replace the lost armor? If not, then that's definitely something we should look into. And then go exploring for loot!

A promotion, yay!

[See my commentary on the next page.]

Orgasm said:

You are like waaay to wordy for my taste...

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Yeah I know... does anyone actually read all that shit? Every update in this LP has been 2000+ words, it's fucking ridiculous.

I do! But I've yet to reply. Been busy with my own LP.
I like your tl;drs, LR, they're interesting to read. Fuck the haters.

EDIT.

Yay, a promotion!
(So this is an XTREME renegade LP now, eh?)

Lord Rocket said:

Should we take a mission or go exploring?

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I'm all in favour of exploration over just combat. But what exactly are we supposed to explore?
Are there any, I dunno, "lore"-related missions? Like that space pirate pub thing you mentioned earlier?



This would look good on the first page of this LP, by the way.

LR said:

Yeah that's right

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Heh, nice.

LR said:

Bee hits her target

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LR said:

so I'm gonna tell you guys about my potatoes instead

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LR said:

I'm currently in the process of moving overseas

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Good luck with that. Is that work- or study-related?

Lord Rocket said:

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CB: like I said before when I first played I only got through a fairly small portion of the missions and there was a fair amount of content I missed out on as well - I never, for example, really got stuck into the insectoids (who I'm assuming turn into the main baddies of the game at some point) or went looking for those robots mentioned in the manual's intro (subtle hint there for everyone in favour of doing our own thing for a while, these and the pirates are the three main factions - whose space do we encroach on?). Since I obviously missed out on a lot of content, finding out how much interesting stuff is out there is going to be half the fun, for me at least.

I can confirm that there are at least some extracirricular things to be done - I found out about that pub doing nothing in particular, for instance.
I assume since the game includes a 'pay for information' command in the bargain/bribe comms menu - not sure if I ever mentioned that - there's going to be a reasonable amount of stuff you can hunt up.

This would look good on the first page of this LP, by the way.

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You're right. Remind me to fancy up the first post a little later on.

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I hope you're just taking exception to my patronising tone and misogynistic undercurrent, as opposed to me getting your gender entirely wrong. I mean, you said you like pretending to be a succubus in your LP but this is Codex after all.

Good luck with that. Is that work- or study-related?

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Thanks. Both really - going to study while I work. It's a quality of life issue too, I'm moving back to where I went to uni and where most of my friends live.

I read your updates, and I like them wordy. Keep up the good work!

I can't believe I missed this thread! Another game added "to play" list.
Please continue.

I like the idea of exploring too. But first, can we buy some better weapons for the BLOBFIST? I mean, damn.

You really pay attention to little detail, Rocket-sama.

Arrgh so confused
Well in any case I'm going to continue to refer to your character as a she.

I can't believe I missed this thread! Another game added "to play" list.
Please continue.

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Welcome aboard, and please feel free to put forward some character guidelines in the event of an existing character dying.

Oh and dealing with the moving company has been less irritating than expected so I'll start prepping the next update tonight. If anyone has any ideas about what to do next then please advance them before then.

Also, everyone in the party is eligible to train.

I want more HP.

Strength and Scout/Recon would probably be helpful.

I'd really like to increase my ESPer, both as attribute and as skill.

Also,

Stop doing that!

A bit of practice in the cockpit and uh I probably need to brush up on my repair after last time.

Does this training phase also include raising attributes? In that case I would like to pump up ACC again and small arms.