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

Man up or woman out?

  • Man up

    Votes: 2 66.7%
  • Woman out

    Votes: 1 33.3%

  • Total voters
    3

Lord Rocket

Erudite
Joined
Feb 6, 2008
Messages
1,089
All training is stat + skill, yes.
 

Lord Rocket

Erudite
Joined
Feb 6, 2008
Messages
1,089
Alright I have started DOSBox so if you haven't made your training choices... too late, my friends. Should have everything written up by Cristmas.
 

Fowyr

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
Mar 29, 2009
Messages
7,671
Fowyr

INT, ACC, SPD

Soldier

Officer's School
Medical x2
Light Arms x2
Chemical Weaponry x3

I hope gods of war will be kind to your party and my service will not be needed. I have too much booze to drink with Ghostdog on the base.
 

Lord Rocket

Erudite
Joined
Feb 6, 2008
Messages
1,089
FIRST OF ALL STOP VOTING ON THE POLL! It's closed FFS, Woman Out won.

Well bros and broettes, I'm going to present the story of our little expedition as a series of short updates. I didn't take particularly detailed notes or do anything especially different to what we've done before so there isn't a hell of a lot to wax lyrical about anyway (happy now, Big O?). This little series will correct a couple of my misconceptions, introduce trading (such as it is), and note some undocumented features of the game but that's about it.

First of all, training. Pretty disappointing results all around this time, actually. Rather than explain my reasoning in detail this time around (those of you who have been paying attention will know what the stats and skills do by now, or will know where to go to find out) I'll just present the results:

TEH0h.png

Cecbu.png

(Another half a point. Cool)

s8TP2.png

iykkB.png

(1 point)

pBgAU.png

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(Joy)

Uz4Ol.png

eb1Hw.png

(1 point)

ydv25.png

IjPln.png

(1 point)

qVcVR.png

O09r8.png

(This is interesting - ESP increases much slower than the other attributes, a fact which isn't mentioned in the manual. Without further evidence I can't say for sure, but I'm going to go ahead and assume that ESP will advance at the other att at >100 rate of 2-4 points per sesh and cap out entirely at 100. The equipment list doesn't have any stats for powers past 100 ESP, after all. Given their rate of advancement, maybe Espers are not quite so OP as I so blithely supposed)

la8KV.png

5vUei.png

(Orgasm is apparently some sort of mad scientist type)

OetV9.png

rlkf8.png

(Destroid deffo needed a to-hit bonus boost. Shame about the half point)

So nothing more than one point, skill wise. I think the team is starting to round out nicely though.

Alright, we've had a couple requests for new weapons for the ship and heavy weaponeers. The latter I don't think is necessary just now; I mean we haven't really had a chance to shoot anything with the Zero-G yet and the 25mm is the middle of the road flamethrower so that's more than adequate at this stage. That said, now we have a gasman in our party, I grab Orgasm a couple of Nerve Gas Cannisters (I found those very useful last time I played).
Buying ship weapons is more of a concern, so we flog off our stinkus Gauss Cannons:

uwRiF.png


We replace them with Hypervelocity Rockets for obvious reasons. I figure it might be a good idea to increase our firing arc as well, so we get a fourth launcher and place it in the hands of Orgasm, who has the best to-hit bonus after Yeesh. Reloads are shared between guns so we get 16 of those (four each, in other words), which should hopefully tide everything over nicely.
After that we armour up; decide to go a little better than 150 this time, given we're going into enemy territory. Not wanting to weigh the ship down too much, I go for 300 points (one and a half tonnes worth) which should be a pretty decent compromise between longevity and weight. Finally we get that hull breach repaired since part of da plan hinges on us being able to talk ships down - more than that very shortly.
All that leaves us with:

nT2q5.png


Note we've gone a little overweight, but since that only drops our movement allowance by one point it hardly matters. With that it's time to leave the base:

WGURQ.png


Alright, before I go any further I'll explain the plan. We're going to head into the pirate's territory since they are a known quantity and we don't want to get ourselves slaughtered because we met something we only assumed we could handle. The main goal is finding high tech worlds so we can run Espionage Missions, which are pretty much the most lucrative kind of raid. We'll be avoiding space battles for the simple reason that repairs are expensive and so is ship ammunition, especially when compared to personal scale repairs and ammo. HOWEVER, and yes I am LARPing like a motherfucker here, if we meet any freighters or similar softcock craft outside of the Triangle, we are going to try and mug them using the comms screen. The reason why this is LARPing is because I am working on the assumption, utterly unreflected in the game itself, that any truckers encountered out of Command's space are, at best, DIRTY SMUGGLERS. Also we are extorting money because we are EX TEE REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEME and as we know truly extreme people like to farm money.

With our strategy formulated we head up and to the left, into subsector (30, 31).

Here's the sector:

bHupR.png


And the first system we investigated:

QmfNO.png


OK first of all I seriously can't remember at all how I managed to waste all that fuel. I can only assume it has to do with me being indecisive about which subsector to raid first - one of the main things I've taken away from this little expedition is that I need to use my fuel (and time, for that matter - characters do age in this game although to tell you the truth I know almost nothing about what the game effects might be. Presumably stat loss and periodic saves against death, modelled on Traveller).
Back on track now. We didn't find very much of interest there. There was an Insectoid world but being low tech there wasn't much to be done (actually low tech worlds can take part in the trading subgame thing but I didn't know that at the time. That's next update anyway):

y4Hxe.png


We ran Scientific Investigations on it and another world - would have done more but at the present moment I wasn't landing on worlds with Unbreathable atmospheres. The game doesn't stop/punish you even if you lack the necessary equipment (on planets, there's increased fatigue loss in combat but that's it), of course, so I'll let you guys decide whether or not I just forgot about this or if it was filthy, sickening LARPing again. I'd make a poll but I can't delete the onld one - before we move on to a different star, where we find a high tech human world:

CmC3a.png


Coolies. Naturally we drop the hitsquad off to collect a few things, but when we go in to 'confiscate' materiel in the name of Star Command:

nnoNj.png


Shit.

onciM.png


If you recall surprise just means one side gets a free round to do whatsoever they please to their opponents. Not so nice when you're on the receiving end, but fortunately there is one thing we can try:

hqGki.png


Good ol' Torsten deciphers this lot's jibber-jabber and we're off. This time around I decide to check out the Bargain/Bribe submenu, when I found that there isn't one. Oops. So, we pay the pirates 300 creds to leave us alone - no confirmation, no negotiation; the game just calculates how much the enemies in question will accept and you pay it out - and they go on their merry way. Oh well.
More importantly, all this reveals that I am a complete bullshit artist. Sorry CB - a quick reference check reveals that 'Pay for Information' only comes up in special encounters and isn't an option in your bog standard run-ins like this one. I'd like to say that I've learned my lesson but given the way I run my mouth off offline, if I haven't by now I never will.

Anyway we pay A1-A5 300 creds and they get out of our hair. We decide to leave the planet now and find something else to do when:

UC6lS.png

M4qdC.png

3SQyn.png


Damn. As stated we're avoiding space battles, so we break left in order to get away from these two. This turns out to be a silly mistake. Since we are running away, naturally we can waste no tics on such frivolous nonsense as turning around. And since scoutships are quite quick, we can't quite outdistance fuckface from the bottom left:

hDzyq.png


Two shots, two hits, no chance to return fire since our weapons are situated aft and starboard. Rat's cocks. Not only are we reduced to 261 armour, guess what happens to our hull? Yeah that's right, holed again.

ChJJn.jpg


Well that was 4k creds down the drain. Luckily over the next couple rounds we manage to outdistance these slobs and get out of there with everything largely intact. Exception: our dignity. And the hull. Duh.
Anyway, something occurs to me and we return to the planet. The something in question was that we never tried to run a follow-up espionage mission after the last one, now opposition had been disposed of.
Well, we didn't find shit, and after the game told us that (not in those words exactly) we make some new friends:

S3XI4.png


Insult, injury, etc.

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Seven of them? Is that all?
OK first round. Plan for the day is to get under cover and whittle down the big group using our area effect weapons, while dividing our individual targetting fire (including Yeesh and his laser gun) between the two loners.

diOkb.png


We successfully hack into their comms band, but do nothing about it. After that we make our way to the defensive area just to the north and open fire.
Now; I've seen a lot of pathetic shit in my time. Hell, I've been a pathetic little shit in my time. But really, and I can say this without a trace of irony or hyperbole, this next round was the most pathetic shit I have ever seen in my whole fucking life. Not a single hit. NOT A SINGLE HPS WORTH OF DAMAGE DONE, my friends. Worst round ever.
On the other hand, the pirates: smash Maggot's MAC; destroy Destroid's ammo supply (when the game tells you your ammo has been destroyed, it removes any remaining shots from that character's current weapon, forcing them to reload next round. This is inconvenient but not nearly as bad as a smashed weapon - plus it reduces weight!) and reduce four of our intrepid expeditionaries by at least 10 HP each.

RPZVt.png


Here we are being shot at in the next round. You can see we broke cover - I figured, as long as we're taking it up the arse, we might as well be able to hit back just a little. Besides, I wanted to bring Maggot's hand to hand expertise into play. However - the AI in this game is certainly primitive, but it isn't braindead either. Enemies with ranged weapons will keep their distance from your party if you try to charge in. Unfortunately, our party wasn't fast enough to close the gap, as you can see.
As you can also see, Orgasm, all by himself, managed to take down two of the pirates. Our single-target fire was, again, woefully ineffective and Destroid was too busy reloading to help. The pirates were less ruthlessly efficent this round too, claiming only Torsten's armour (pretty much anything you have equipped is fair game here) and a little HP - nothing like last round's bloodbath.
We end the battle without further bloodshed next round at the comms phase (plead, truce). I was giving some serious thought to running for it anyway.

Back in space, we set Oscar to repair our damaged equipment. He does reasonably well, fixing Maggot's Ingram but failing to patch up our hull. A quick Inspect reveals that Torsten has 3 armour points now as well, although it's not clear if he restored those three points from 0 or if the armour only lost three points in the pirate's attack. The game itself was kind of ambiguous about it - when Torsten was shot, it said 'Armour Destroyed,' although when Oscar broke out the spanners the game said he only managed to fix one item. Naturally I didn't think to check how fucked the armour was before I sicced Oscar onto it, but I think I'll give him the benefit of the doubt this time. Good job.

With that I decide that our time in (30, 31) is about up. So we go back to Luna.

Aside from healing and refuelling and all that book-keeping type crap, we sell on the goods we recovered in the name of science:

Jdyhm.png


Which brings our bank balance up to 36893. Now, I know what you're thinking: 'didn't we have 40000 credits? Where's the rest of it?'
Um. Good question. It could be that the pirates we bribed took 300 creds each instead of 300 creds in total, or perhaps I forgot to put a 0 after 300 when I made my notes (honestly though, I'm 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% sure I didn't). Still, even in that case there's still some cash unaccounted for. Also possible is that I took the 40000 shot before I paid to get the hull fixed, but I don't think that's the case either.
For now, we'll assume the crew took Orgasm's advice and went down the boozer before they left the station. Very odd.
After that we get the base technicians to fix Torsten's armour for us. It turns out that repairs to personal gear cost 400 creds a pop, which given that the armour everyone wears is worth 444 of the things, is pretty expensive. We should have sold the armour for (444x0.80, round down) 355 creds and bought a new set, but that's life.

And with that we're done with starport Luna. Despite disappointing performance that time, I figure we owe it to ourselves to make back our losses and so we're off again - southwards this time. Join me next time (possibly later today. I've done all my Chrissie shopping and no-one's making me do anything until tomorrow) to find out about trading, and... well, that's the only new thing really.
 

Orgasm

Barely Literate
Joined
May 4, 2010
Messages
1,360
Man, all those chemical experiments make your cloth all torn...

9ubOO.jpg
 

Lord Rocket

Erudite
Joined
Feb 6, 2008
Messages
1,089
I've written most of the next update and I can safely say it is boring. I'll try and get it up this evening anyway, but I'm supposed to be spending the day with my little nephew.
Here's a better song to tide you over: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8WeyRHgags

GarfunkeL it's not the listening to KPop that makes me a massive homosexual, it's the fact I like to close the curtains and dance around while listening to it actually never mind.
But yeah, T-ara are legitimately and consistently pretty good. I quite like pop music (when I'm not listening to, eg., Drudkh and other overwrought nonsense like that) but it's rare that I like most of an artist's songs.
 

Lord Rocket

Erudite
Joined
Feb 6, 2008
Messages
1,089
Well guys, today's update is a special one. You lot won't notice the difference - unless you are keeping track of how many typos I make, I guess, in which case you'll probably notice quite a few more than usual - but I'm gonna try and squeeze this one out before I have to go to Christmas lunch and eat all the food and play with my nephew's presents. Will I succeed? Let's find out!

Last update we decided to move up northeastwards, only to find suffering, pain, and the mysterious loss of 4000 creds (seriously, where the fuck did they get to?). This time we're probing southwards, hoping to run into robots or at least nick something good from whoever may live there. First we stop off at starport Solonar, which you'll be excited about since we haven't been there as of yet:

q7Diq.png

(fun fact: after you get in a fight, the white/grey tones become much brighter in general. Compare that shot with the ones at the start of the last update).

Well, that's what it looks like. I reckon it's the coolest looking station of the lot of them, personally. Anyway, we don't stick around - we refuel the BLOBFIST and then move on.

A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY:
I should probably point out that I'm using different terminology to the game when it comes to describing space. The game considers a sector to be one of these:

UiPbn.png


ie. a collection of suns and whatnot. However, I consider this to be a sector:

jeyA3.png


ie. a collection of 'sectors', or subsectors as I have been referring to them.
Now, I know I should just use the game's terminology to avoid confusion (and I have referred to subsectors as sectors in the past in order to avoid repetition), but this game is so influenced by Traveller I just can't help myself. I've mentioned Trav before, but just to remind you guys, it's a P&P RPG, the first great sci-fi one - it came out in 1977 and is still getting new editions (the last one was Mongoose Traveller in... 2007? Sure I could pick it up off my shelf and check but meh. It was in the last few years, anyway). It also enjoys the dubious distinction of having a canon setting which has devotees who put guys like DraQ to shame, despite the fact the original edition was, like D&D, a collection of rules and tropes you were meant to apply to a world (well, galaxy) of your own creation. Computer game wise, it's most famous son is probably Elite, although the second edition (Megatraveller) got a game of its own. One of the worst RT combat systems ever sicked up by man, by the way.
Anyway, hark at me carrying on like I've played it! I hope to rectify that next year (using the classic rules, if I can convince my group to use something so antiquated), but all I really want to say is that I took my sector/subsector distinction from Traveller. If there's one on my HD I'll upload one of the setting supplements (probably The Solomani Rim) to Rapidshit or a similar service, then I'll put it here so you guys can see what I'm talking about first hand. If there's not a link then you're out of luck I guess (sorry dudes, seems I don't have any sector guides. Maybe some other time).

OK I'm finished talking about Traveller now, you can start paying attention again. Hey, coincidentally, those last two shots correspond exactly to the first subsector we visit. Here's what the system scan looks like:

ZVnNQ.png


The first planet we visit is that shitty little moon thing there. It has an unbreathable atmosphere but I get over myself and run a quick scientific investigation anyway. I do the same thing with the third planet, the one that is vaguely Mars-esque in the bottom right. Of more interest is the second planet, which is a high tech human world. Naturally we run an espionage mission:

6XYR5.png


Auspicious! Didn't have to fight for it or anything. Next up we decide to see if there's anything we can do for them (this game truly is XTREME! Bioware's faggy games make you do fetch quests for people before you rip them off), which is to say we press D to bring up the Cargo Pickup/Delivery interface.
I said before about doing fetch quests for people? Yeah. Basically the 'trading' interface amounts to a planet either offering to sell you something (either some raw materials or, occasionally, fuel, which is useful for those long trips) or telling you that they're after something or other. If you have that something or other you can sell it to them for a reasonable sum. So, yeah, get the stick boy. Woof woof.
As a general rule, the questing in this game isn't exactly imaginative. Generally the missions are very much 'what they say on the tin' and then there's this little lot. Still, I can't whinge about this too much since the core of this game is combat and resource management and I think it does all that pretty well really. I also love the atmosphere - this is definitely helped by the massive playfield. So sick of space games (hi Orgasm) that feel small.
To their credit, these quests are entirely optional and there's no hand holding - if you want to complete a trading run you're going to have to fart around until you find the substance planet Tom, Dick or Harry is after all by yourself. In this case, this lot don't have anything for sale, but they do want Plutonium (this seems to be a popular choice and so you do have to wonder what sort of people are in charge of these planets). I make a note of that in case we find some later and move on to a new subsector, down and to the left:

eOard.png


Plenty of places to check out here.
Just a quick note: yeah, sun colour seems to make a difference as to what sort of planets you're likely to find there. Red suns tend to have quite a few more uninhabitable worlds (planets with Surface: Inferno in their status screens, and stuff like that) and very few high tech, inhabited areas. Blue suns seem to have richer pickings while white ones are somewhere in the middle.
NOW, before anyone takes that as gospel (although if anyone does, it's nice you think so highly of me! I'm flattered) that would be a very unsicentific conclusion based solely on findings from this one expedition (well, that and more regurgitated 'truths' from my previous experience with the game). Not only that but I may be suffering from a bad case of confirmation bias too - I do tend to skip over the red suns since I don't expect to find much of value there.
On the other hand, the comparative rarity of each kind of sun (if you look at the sector maps I've posted, you'll probably notice that there tend to be quite a few red suns compared to the other kinds) does bear out my conclusion. Well, sort of, I figure it makes sense that you make richer, more desireable worlds rarer, right? Everyone thinks like me.

Anyway here we are again, visiting subsector (27, 22):

eOard.png


First we check out the blue sun.

KyVk6.png


Nice spot. Seems there's a few planets of inhabitable size/colour there - generally if a world is mostly blue and white and of a moderate size, there's a decent chance something lives there. The first one we visit is the one furthest southwards, though.

It turns out that this is a low tech 'Avain' - the devs of this game have something of a penchant for typos of the transposed letters variety - world. This is first contact with aliens of a type not mentioned in the manual, which is very exciting until you realise that who lives on any given planet makes hardly fuck all difference. Anyway we scientific investigation the place then visit the natives to see if they're after anything in particular:

8dOyI.png


That's what it looks like when they want to sell you something. 87 creds isn't much so we buy their crap and get out of there, without bothering to check whether they want anything. The next planet, coincidentally the one highlighted in the system shot above, is our next stop. We steal a mystery object from them James Bond style - they tried to fight us for it but Maggot saw them coming and they found nothing but ghosts - and they tried to sell us some fuel (20 units/150cr) but we didn't need it so we declined. The last world we bother to check out here is the one that looks exactly like the one we were just on, but it was so boring I didn't even take notes about it. Let's get the hell out of here.

Coincidentally, here's what you can do on each planet type:
  • Uninhabited/No tech: scientific investigation
    Low tech: scientific investigation, cargo pickup/delivery
    High tech: scientific investigation, cargo pickup/delivery, espionage mission
As you can see, the higher the tech level the more potentially lucrative a visit might be.
NB The Visit Unique Location command can only be invoked, as far as I can tell anyway, when you have confirmation that something is actually there through your mad info gathering skills (since the game apparently randomly generates co-ordinates for these locations, it's pointless just guessing anyway).

Our next destination is the white sun in the same subsector.

vhB61.png

5DP1y.png


Our blue and white standard fails us, though it transpires that little white planets have people on them too:

W9xRa.png


They have nothing for us but they do want Nobellium. Duly noted.

Anyway you are probably all bored shitless by now. I'm not sure why you'd want to read a blow by blow account of every shitty little planet we visit but I've written it now so hell if I'm going to start again, especially since my self-imposed Christmas lunch deadline is looming. Fortunately the game decides to pick a fight with us at this point so we can break the monotony:

aiaAk.png

zGsFz.png


As you can see, it's a pirate scoutship all by his lonesome. I choose to imagine that he's one of those jerks who kicked my arse in the fifth update and decide to exact some bloody revenge.
Because he's all by himself I figure it might be a good idea to try and board him, in order to claim the bonus bounty. The shot above is at the end of the first round's movement phase, and as you can see jerkhole there wouldn't let us get too close to him. Unfortunately for him he's in our 'sweet spot' where Torsten, Bee and Orgasm's firing arcs coincide. We slam him for (hits/damage) 3/90, 4/97 and 3/89 damage respectively, which is not too bad at all. I bet cockface is bitterly regretting his decision to reject our very kind offer to take all his money and let him go (plead, tribute).
That said, he doesn't wise up next round either, refusing us again. We get much closer to him this round, but Torsten obliterates him with the first barrage. Here's a shot of Orgasm wasting ammo:

mxu2A.png


It was a bit of a shame really since next round we would have been able to get aboard. Never mind, we'll be able to claim the bounty for destroying him.

At this point I decide to stop taking planet by planet notes, which was a very sensible move on my part since I am now unable to artificially lengthen my updates by writing about every little thing we did. I surprise myself sometimes. Anyway I note that the next 'few' planets are fit only for scientific investigations - from what I remember, these were mostly worlds around red suns. Soon enough, though, we meet a couple of freighters.
Now, just like in personal scale combat, in space you get a chance to avoid combat if you can successfully 'scan' your new pals. Unlike in personal combat, it is not at all clear what skill is used to do this, if any. I don't even care to guess at this point, either - it'd be nice to believe it is determined by the Pilot's Code Breaking skill just so the Pilot needs another skill other than Pilot, but that's just wishful thinking.

Anyway, this time we are not thrown straight into combat but we are asked if we want to engage with the 'friendly' craft. Remember da plan?
If you don't, yes, is we do want to get stuck in this time so we can try and extort money. Oscar opens dialogue with the freighters and we inform them (politely - ask, tribute) that they should hand over their valuables or they'll regret it. They decide they'd rather regret it, a fact which may have a lot to do with the fact we never did bother to fix that hole in our hull. After a little thought I decide a fucking good kicking will change their minds:

QYm9a.png


That's Bee popping the first one in the first firing phase. The other one is off screen, out of range so he can't bother us while we deal with his mate. The next couple rounds involve us jockeying for position - to avoid return fire - and demanding tribute from dimwit there. He decides that he'd rather die, though:

B0OQ6.png


So Bee obliges. I would rather have had the money but if you have to grab some collars in order to make a point, then you grab those fucking collars, you know?

With that we check out a new subsector, and at this point I really need to go get ready for lunch so I guess I failed my challenge - I might have made it if my stupid dad hadn't rung me. Sorry dudes, I guess you'll get to read this later tonight or tomorrow depending on what we're doing after luncheon. So close to the end as well!

BROS I AM BACK! On the 29th. I do apologise for the delay. I would like to pretend that it was related to a fulsome social life over Christmas and the ongoing emigration saga but I can't. I am a ronery individual and the whole moving thing has been going surprisingly smoothly. The real reason for my tardiness is, and I am being dead fucken serious here, is that I spent the past few days on a massive sugar high, because I was given a lot of chocolate for Christams. So naturally I ate roughly one and a bit boxes of the stuff each day since then, until yesterday when I finally ran out. So if I wasn't all twitchy and in no fit state or mood to write anything I was all headache-y and nauseous and in no fit state or mood to write anything. And yes, I know precisely how pathetic that is.
However, I wasn't entirely unproductive! I beat my personal best scores for ESP Ra.De. AND DoDonPachi when I was all wired (2000000-something and 599060 respectively which isn't great in the scheme of things but under normal circumstances I have all the reflexes of a rotten sloth so I am proud of myself nevertheless) and I played three new games, which I will review for you now:

Eden's Aegis: Doujin bullet hell shoot 'em up. Kawaii neko witches as protagonists (I don't know what neko means). I discovered X.X a few months ago when I downloaded Blue Wish Resurrection Plus off some shitty French site while trying to find a decent PC shooter and I just about wet myself. It had an elegant scoring mechanic, a metric fuckton of bullets and a level of challenge that's about right for someone of my abilitiies so naturally I loved it. Later I discovered Eden's Edge which was vaguely similar but had a witch as heroine instead of a spaceship. Aegis is X.X's latest game and I think it may be their best, too. The level of challenge is a fair bit higher than in BWR+ and EE, for one thing (I can't 1cc this in Heaven mode... yet) and I absolutely love the fact that responsibility for clearing the screen of bullets is now placed in the player's hands. Did I mention it's freeware?
Here's the website.

Ace Combat X: Arcade flight 'sim' on the PSP. Fucking fantastic game. Shame it's not on the PC since I've been crying out to play something like this with my joystick. Anyway this is quite reminiscent of the action-y flight sims you can't get anymore (as an aside it's interesting how some genres have the opposite problem to RPGs, which is that a prospective player has nothing to cut his teeth on. If you're interested in flight sims but don't want to deal with engine lag or whatever realistic bullshit those games have which I didn't just make up then sorry, you're fucked. Since I'm avoiding actually talking about Star Command now I might as well mention the security guard at my former workplace, who seriously thought that having a $700 joystick and getting out books on XML so you could correct a couple of minor distance related errors in some MS Flight Simulator 2008 definition file - or some such thing - doesn't make one a nerd at all. Not even a little bit. HOWEVER, owning some 1e AD&D books is like having a bloody pocket protector and sellotape round the nose bit on your glasses). Anyway, in this game you blow a lot of shit up using various planes which you can unlock and buy, and the missions change depending on what order you do them in (OMG RPGOTY!), which is neat. Shame the whole thing only lasts about six hours. Still, it has a multiplayer mode - not that I know anyone else with a PSP - and replayable missions so that's not a huge issue.

Aveyond: The Darkthrop Prophecy: What I wanted was a cutesy J-style RPG with a girl protagonist and some of that old King's Quest IV fairy tale charm. What I got was a J-style RPG with a bunch of random bullshit strewn about the place and insufferably stupid characters. Oh and the most retarded fake difficulty ever. Basically what this boils down to is wandering around trying to grind for cash in order to acquire better weapons and armour so you don't get wrecked by the new enemies in the area you're going to next. Well, sometimes you need to find the weapons in the dungeons rather than just buying them.
Grinding for XP, by the way, is useless, as any personal growth you may experience is worthless compared to the boosts you get from equipping a new weapon, as are tactics (unless the tactic in question is 'spam spell scrolls'). And fuck me, the quests could have been SO GOOD. But they weren't. Check this out: you have to do this quest in which you do the following:
  • You get tasked by the king of some stinkhole to find out which noble in his court is consorting with the thieves in the forest.
    After wandering aimlessly for a while, you'll walk into someone's house and read a letter that says 'bring blackmail payment to forest at 9pm tomorrow or we will narc on you to the king. Best regards, the thieves.'
    You return to the king in order to tell on the person who's house it was but no, that's not the end of the quest.
    After more aimless wandering you meet some chick who had her wedding ring stolen. You go to the jeweller's and find it there. Not that you can bash the jewller and take it back before demanding to know who sold the ring to him, of course.
    Grind for cash. Buy the ring. Return to rightful owner. THEN you ask the jeweller who he bought it from. Was it the homeowner in question? Yes, obviously it was. Who could have guessed?
    King doesn't want to know.
    Alright, go to the forest. Find the thief's cave. Party member tells you you can't go in there yet, because obviously we have nothing to confront them with yet. FUCK OFF
    Go to the homeowner's house. Oh hey guys who I've never met before, I'll pay you to take this package (which you'll never think of opening, natuirally) to the thieves in the forest. OK sure.
    King: still not interested.
    Forest. Dungeon crawl (actually the dungeons aren't too bad I suppose, sometimes there are some simple little puzzles and things that demonstrate some thought has been put into them). Meet thieves.
    Hope you ground for cash since you need to pay them off in order to get the necessary information out of them. Can't just smash up the place, oh no.
    The secret is that what's her face sold the king's daughter into slavery so the right of succession would be passed on to her son, the king's nephew. Pretty grimdark, right?
    Your party members decide tracking down the king's daughter might be a good idea.
    I decide just telling the king is better because seriously I'm sick of this shit. But hey guess what?
    Alright fuck you then.
    Gosh do you think that the king's daughter might be the slave girl on smellpit island who prince fucknuts is totally in love with?
    In short (ie skipping the two or three trips across the world map the game thinks you should have to make): yes it is. The woman who bought the slave is arrested, homeowner gets busted for her thieving and treachery and you get a big reward for being nice people. Soon slavery will be banned too so yay.
I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that this quest would have been awesome if you could rat out homeowner much earlier on, but the quality of your reward would be proportionate to the amount of effort you put in. I think that's sort of the whole problem with this game really, the content has some decent ideas but the execution is middling at best and utterly mind numbing most of the time so ultimately the game sucks shit.
OK and back to Star Command now. Checking back before I went on my little tangent (it's my LP and I'll do what I like) I see we were up to the bit where we collar grabbed a couple of fools who wouldn't give us any money. Sucks to be them.
After that of course we go looking for more inhabited planets to ruthlessly exploit, because in the future no-one is affected at all by committing massive, unprovoked acts of violence (well, maybe a few small pangs of regret over the ammunition we wasted). If we weren't before - sure, I could check but meh - we are now in subsector (25, 21):

PaUAn.png


I didn't take many notes about this subsector, probably because the only thing of interest was this dingy little world here:

O5205.png


as per usual, we check out the local stock exchange to see if there's anything they want before running an espionage mission. I like this planet since, unlike the others, they want nice, wholesome Oats and not Plutonium or some other unstable isotope for bombs or pollution or whatever other nonsense all these other worlds are into. The other thing about these guys is that they are willing to fiercely defend their granaries:

aDTN3.png

3ROKW.png


Note the relatively high fatigue factor this time around. I'll admit I didn't.
Alright, combat begins on a slightly average note:

K3Ve4.png


This is us failing to establish a comms link. Must try harder, people!
I thought the pirate's loadout was also cause for concern, given the preponderance of group-targetting weaponry, but I really needn't have worried. Round one goes swimmingly, with one pirate dropped, largely thanks to the efforts of our Devastator units Destroid and Orgasm (Yeesh helped too). Here's a picture of Destroid being given orders in round two:

aXtbH.png


In addition to killing that one buccaneer you can see we also broke B5's rocket launcher, which he replaced with a flamethrower (not much of an improvement really). Round two goes much the same as before - one pirate down and no significnt injury taken on our side. Since we were doing so well and the pirates were being so useless we moved to an offensive area in order to make our fire that much more effective as well.
Round three is sort of a mixed bag. Yeesh ends up with a broken gunsight and we lose some HP but on the other hand Orgasm splatters what's left of group B so it's not all bad.
Next round does not go quite so well. I hinted darkly at the start of this battle report that the fatigue factor becomes important in this particular fight, and indeed it does - right now, as a point of fact. I mentioned in a previous update that when you run out of fatigue points your guys need to chillax for a round in order to regain them. Well hey guess who needs to relax this round? Yeah, that's right, everyone. We lay about while the sole remaining pirate starts making his way to the edge of the map.

aWRb7.png


He nearly made it and all. However, the next round we ruthlessly cut him down just as he was about to escape (actually to be fair if we hadn't, he would have fired on us and possibly wrecked some more of our equipment, or maybe even done someone an injury) thanks to Destroid and his flamethrower.
Now that the fight's over I madly hammer away at the CTRL and F5 keys in order to get a decent shot of the battle report screen (I normally forget to do this) since the text still flashes up awfully fast. Here it is:

4XzvC.png


600 creds! Nice. Well not really given we have equipment and ammo to replacve but it will do I suppose.

nL4sQ.png


Fortunately for us I'm paying enough attention this time to see that we're a little low on fuel and so I figure it's time to head back to Solonar now. So we do.

odGiy.png


Close call but we made it. Just as well I decided it was time to head on back.

D1DEV.png


Alright this is what a reward screen looks like when you're actually being rewarded for something. It's pretty much just like the reward screen I showed you guys before, except with a bigger number than 0. Now, once again I have provided you guys with dodgy information. I said in an earlier update that kill rewards were 10 creds/tonne and capture rewards are 20 creds/tonne but actually, it is 20 creds for a kill and 30 creds for capture. The manual phrases it peculiarly and I got the numbers around the wrong way, so soz about that.

Now if you'll recall we also managed to pinch a couple things from some of the more advanced planets we discovered. They are:

2dRNE.png

cgyQv.png


So not a bad haul really. Although why you'd store data in RAM is beyond me - I found out that this was a stupid practice at the age of ten when I tried to RAM save a game of Elite I'd been playing for a few hours (this was the Amiga version, by the way) - you can imagine how I felt when I tried to go back to the game the next day. You think they'd know better in 25000000000000AD but I suppose Cleve was right about man not being a learning animal.
We sell our items gathered from less advanced worlds for hardly fuck all as well:

SqBeg.png

rvecd.png


Everyone gets fixed up in the medbay after that.
Now, interesting aside: gun sights, or 'sighting hardware' as the game slightly awkwardly refers to them, can't be repaired if damaged. This means that they can turn into quite the money sink if you insist on getting the good ones, and more importantly, that they aren't an entirely reliable replacement for a high weapons skill. I declare this an incline.
Anyway we end up getting Yeesh a new one, and I discover by chance that Bee's is missing as well so I replace that too. I could make a joke about how women always make you guess what it is they want/need out of you but I'm too much of a gentlemen so I won't. Although I'm too much of a passive-aggressive jerk to let it go entirely but hey I didn't say it, right?

Anyway that is the end of this update. I think this trip went quite well - we made back our losses and even made a small profit (just over 1K if I recall correctly), even after replacing all our gear.
Next time: MY TERRIBLE SECRET. Or maybe I'll just talk about Aveyond some more instead. Who knows?
 

Azira

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What, no training sessions for any of us? Killing pirates both on land and in space not good enough?
Pah.
More violence in next update. :salute:
 

Crooked Bee

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:love:

LR said:
The real reason for my tardiness is, and I am being dead fucken serious here, is that I spent the past few days on a massive sugar high, because I was given a lot of chocolate for Christams.

:lol:

Rocket-sama said:
What I wanted was a cutesy J-style RPG with a girl protagonist and some of that old King's Quest IV fairy tale charm

Not exactly what you're looking for, but you may want to check out Threads of Fate. You can choose to play it as Mint, a true pretty princess:



No, really! It's not tactical or anything, but it's one of the bestest "cutesy" games out there. One of my fav light-hearted stuff.

Also, nice JRPGs with girl protagonists -- not necessarily cutesy, though:
My World My Way: "The game puts the player into the role of Princess Elise, a young, spoiled princess on a quest to impress a handsome adventurer into being her boyfriend." :roll: I haven't played it yet, but it's published by Atlus -- developed by someone else, though -- and Atlus usually means quality.
Suikoden III (several protagonists, including a knight-maiden). Valkyrie Profile (grimdark and mature). Phantasy Star (the original one; first person). La Pucelle: Tactics (SRPG). Wild Arms 3. Uhm, Final Fantasy X-2? :roll: It's actually not so bad, gameplay-wise, but it's girlishly retarded -- so retarded it sometimes hurts.
(Black Cat would be able to name many more, of course; I dunno if she follows this thread. -- Oh, and "neko" means cat, btw.)

P.S. You saw this weaboo faggotry coming, didn't you?
 

Black Cat

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Crooked Bee said:
Black Cat would be able to name many more

*poof*

Who summons me, nya?

Let me see...

My world my way (Selfishness is your power!), Princess debut (And then you'll be exiled from Codexia, sorry), A Witch's Tale (I totally love this one), Atelier Annie (This one's almost offensive), and most of the japan only Atelier games actually. Uhm, Magical starsign, maybe? Oh, that's it! Rhapsody, a musical adventure! Both the good girls and the bad girls stop every now and then to, uhm, sing (Your highness...), and there are few games more saccarine than it, honestly. Even I got suggar overdose from it. The sequel, too, is awesome, nya! And it's being fan translated by the guy who did the Persona Vs Hitlertothep game, if you can't into moonrunes.

What else? Uhm... Let me see. Enchanted Folk and the School of Wizardry, maybe? It's kind of a cutesy japanese Academagia thingie. Then there's Fortune Summoners, which is kind of a plataformer and JRPG hybrid and there's rumors those guys who translated Recettear are going to do that one next (And it's awesome). Well, you kind of have Recettear, Chantelise, and Territory too. And Bee-Kun already introduced you to the awesomeness that is Mint-Sensei.

Ah, indeed. Yes. I almost forgot this one. :salute:

You also have a couple of cheap western JRPG imitators with, uhm, Grimoire Chronicles and The Witch and the Warrior, i guess. Though honestly they look kind of sucky and I just downloaded them because I must have all games starred by witches with pointy hats, even if I never install them.

Ah, ah, yes. I almost forgot again. Those aren't really JRPGs, more like abstract exercises on C&C, but they are the most, say, girly and fairy tale like japanese games you will find around. You will no longer be able to be respected at Codexia, however, if you play just a single one of those: Yo Jin Bo, Danzai No Maria, Princess Nightmare, Wand of fortune, Will o' Wisp. If you can't into jap the first one was already translated, Princess Nightmare and Danzai No Maria are being so, and both Wand of Fortune and Will o' Wisp are so obscure I don't think they'll ever be, though lately there have been a sudden popularity raise in otome games in the west, so maybe they'll be, later. There have been a couple of publishers doing market research and stuffies with the idea of starting to bring those to the west.

Otome Games is the name of that type of thing, in case you did wonder. If you look around and can into japanese you will find many, and much more varied, ones: Some mixing the romantic C&C with strategy or dungeon crawling, for example, kind of how Rance mixes the porn with the strategy, just with romance and taste instead of porn. Try, uhm, the Angelique ones, maybe? Everyone begins with them. And there was that one about the oni princess and the four knights that has really good artwork but I can't find the box anywhere so I can't write the name for shit.

Back to RPGish things thingies, you kind of have Phantom Brave and Soul Nomad, if you are only into games where the main character's a girl, though all of Nippon Ichi games do have the fairy tale like atmosphere you mentioned. Ah, and La Pucelle too.

If you are totally not strict with the rules, however, I guess you can throw in Resonance of Fate (trailer thingie), given one of the three main characters is a girl, and the clothes you can use to customize your characters' looks are hyperfabulous.

And then you have Princess Maker and, uhm, Wonder Project J II. The later and one or two from the former have been translated, so just look around for the patches. Ah, yes, and Avalon Code for the DS (trailer thingie), which I haven't played too far as of yet but as far as I know not only has Otome elements but also some pretty cool and unique mechanics with that the world's going to end, so please make a catalogue of all cool things so we rebuild them next time idea.

That's from the top of my head, if later i'm feeling helpful I'll check my dark moody evil attic of witchiness and obscure games to see what else I have laying around.

Now let's scram before the mobs gets there.

*poof*
 

Crooked Bee

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BC said:

:salute:

(Awww, you like Mint too!)
Okay, so myself and Black Cat both named the following games: Threads of Fate, My World My Way, FFX-2, La Pucelle. (And of course I second Soul Nomad.) That should get you started, LR.

And Rockety, you totally brought all this upon yourself, ya know.
 

Lord Rocket

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Well that was an... interesting diversion. I did expect something like this, yes, just not the, er, sheer quantity of it.

Fortunately for you lot I'm too lazy to set up Desmume or else this thread would never see another update. Shame that Wand of Fortune isn't translated either, depressingly enough that is precisely the sort of thing I'd play.
By the way, I wouldn't say I am only into weeaboo trash where the main character is a girl. Right now I am slowly making my way through Grandia again, for example. It's essentially just that if I'm going to play a girly game I may as well go all out and play one where you are a girl, you know?

PS. Black Cat, as long as you're here, quality Doujin shmups (does Doujin get a capital? I don't know)? I already know about X.X, Siter Skain, and Cho Ren Sha.
Don't say Hellsinker, it's too hard for me (and generally speaking I prefer games with more elegant mechanics).

PPS bloody typos
 

Lord Rocket

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Crooked Bee said:
(Black Cat would be able to name many more, of course; I dunno if she follows this thread. -- Oh, and "neko" means cat, btw.)

Given that I've seen people call her things like 'neko-chan' you think I would have worked this out without being told. Genius, thy name is Rocket.
 

Black Cat

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Lord Rocket said:
PS. Black Cat, as long as you're here, quality Doujin shmups (does Doujin get a capital? I don't know)? I already know about X.X, Siter Skain, and Cho Ren Sha.
Don't say Hellsinker, it's too hard for me (and generally speaking I prefer games with more elegant mechanics).

If you like horizontal ones try Trouble Witches. It's colorful, cute, wacky, and every stage has it's own and unique types of challenges instead of being just more waves with more bullets per wave. The final boss, however, is criminal. My first clear of the game I got to her without losing a single life, or just a single one, and buying nothing but extra lives the entire game, and I killed her on my last one.

Arcanum Echo is similar to it, though more amateurish. I couldn't find a single good video of it, given the, like, two there were are of a much older demo build that did not even had most animations. In any case, is pretty good, at least until the fourth stage. I would love to know if it keeps on being cool afterward but there's no way I can do that bloody stage, no matter how hard I try. It has some pretty cool mechanics, though: You have the classical screen clearing spells, which reload by grazing. You also have your basic shot, and then a melee attack. The melee attack has a combo counter, and every time you reach a treshold you recharge your entire life bar and it grows a little. Also, and similarly to Death Smiles, you can turn around to shoot, or strike, both to the left and the right, and the enemies will rush you from both sides. Etc, etc. Is pretty fun and complex, though as I said is somewhat rough around the edges.

Since I already mentioned it, give Death Smiles a shot if you have an Xbox. It's awesome. The art and style are beautiful, the music is amazing, the game has some peculiar mechanics, and it's even in english. You have five diferent characters, the world is totally crazy and very castlevania-esque, or maybe halloweenish.

Now, the vertical ones. Leaving Hellsinker aside, my two favorite vertical shooter series are TWINS and Exceed, so you should try those two.

TWINS is made up from three games: TWilight INSanity, TWilight refrAIN, and Alternative Sphere. It's pretty cool in that it requires some time to get familiar with it, since it has loads of weird design choices, but once you do you'll love it. First, in TWINS and TWAIN you use two characters, and choose the pair at the begining kind of like in Imperishable Night. Then, TWAIN and AS do not have lives: You have a spirit metter or lifeline, which is your number of bomb like attacks. If you are hit it will autocast a bomb like attack on automatic, but at a much higher price. If you are hit and do not have enough spirit or lifeline to autocast, it's game over. Also, it has a lot of C&C, and i'm not joking: The choices you make on dialogues, how good or bad are you playing, how much are you using either character, the way the game has ranked your playing, etc, will have consequences on the game, starting on diferent patterns and spellcards, to unique special attacks, to diferent versions of an stage, to completely different bosses or stages. Is really cool.

The eXceed series is made up of three games and two special editions, but it is the special editions i'm talking about when about my favorites: eXceed 2nd Vampire Rex, which is the special edition of eXceed 2nd Vampire, and eXceed 3rd Jade Penetrate Black Package, which is the special edition of eXceed 3rd Jade Penetrate. The former is an Ikaruga clone, less difficult but with a lot more charisma and personality. The later is a traditional vertical shmup, and some of the bosses on the higher rank are deliciously autistic.

Also, if you are into Mame give ESP Ra.De and Guwange a try. They are simply awesome. If you like those try the ESP Galuda ones for PS2, which are kind of a spiritual sequel to ESP Ra.De and even include two of it's characters as extra characters with unique rules, diferent to the ones of the main characters.

Then there's Touhou, but I kind of have a love/hate relationship with Touhou right now. Try, uhm, Suterranean Animism and Mountain of Faith, those are the ones I like the most. If I were in my love phase I would say try them all and make them your entire life, but i'm on the hate one.

Oh, I almost forgot! Try Cloudphobia, it's one of the few manly mecha shmups among all my cute 'em ups and my character based shmups, mostly because it's so bloody cool and unique. You see, you have both your life bar and your mother ship life bar, and each enemy you don't kill before it's pattern ends counts as a hit on your mother ship. But, you see, the stages are also timed in such a way that you will not have enough time if you don't use the booster, which obviously raises your speed but both makes your mech harder to control and makes much harder to fight the enemies before they hit your mother ship. And then you have two mechs: A ranged one, which is like a classic shmup ship, and a melee one, the one in the video, which is much more powerful but much more harder to use.

And since we are at it try also Cotton 2 if you have a Saturn emulator at hand. Is very cute and very good. I also have a fan translation of Cotton for the Playstation laying somewhere, if you want. It lacks a bit of polish here and there compared to newer games, but it is pretty fun all the same.

And if you want something really unique, try Engage to Jabberwock. It is, basicaly, a mix of danmaku shmup and puzzle dungeon crawler. It's kind of very weird.

And I'll stop here because each time I finish a paragraph I remember another series I should recomend you, so let's leave it at those are from the top of my head and if you want i can add more later. :P
 

Lord Rocket

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Awesome, thanks for that. I have already played a couple of those - ESP Ra.De. is probably my most played game at the moment, and if you check my last update you'll see that I was very proud of myself for getting 2243240 points while I was on my sugar high (I never said I was good at these things). Guwange I am sort of ambivalent about - it's quite easy (naturally I haven't 1cc'ed it, though) and I'm not a huge fan of the spirit animal thing to be honest.
I've also tried Exceed 2nd Rex. It isn't bad but the ranking system gave me the shits so I stopped playing it (if I started to do well then it would make everything all hard and kill me. Fucking game can't even wait for me to make the inevitable stupid mistake).

TWINS and Cloudphobia sound interesting so I will check them out when I get my big computer back.Lastly, since you know about Touhou, perhaps you would care to explain to me how you can have a 12.8th game in a series?
 

Black Cat

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Lord Rocket said:
and if you check my last update you'll see that I was very proud of myself for getting 2243240 points while I was on my sugar high (I never said I was good at these things)

I'm very sorry, it kind of went over my head. When I start talking shmups I forget about everything but, like, colorful bullets! Pew pew! Etc, etc. I really love those little evil games, so I write mostly emotionally and kind of thought streamish when doing recomendations and stuff.

Lord Rocket said:
Guwange I am sort of ambivalent about - it's quite easy (naturally I haven't 1cc'ed it, though) and I'm not a huge fan of the spirit animal thing to be honest.

Yes, it's much easier than others, in general, and Cave's others, in particular, but it has the honor of being one of the few shmups that actually have a very dense atmosphere and mood, and both music and art are beautiful, and the monsters are really creative (spider neko!).

I love it, but I can accept it's more of a personal taste thingie.

Lord Rocket said:
Lastly, since you know about Touhou, perhaps you would care to explain to me how you can have a 12.8th game in a series?

It works like this. There are three kind of Touhou games: Those made by ZUN, those made by Tasogare Frontier, and those made by other people. The ones made by ZUN are, obviously, canon, and usually have the entire numbers. The ones by Tasogare Frontier are fighting games instead of danmaku and also canon, and they get fractions, which also happens with some games by ZUN, like Shoot the bullet, who are suposed to be like side stories instead of whatever the bleep the others are, given up until 10+11+12 there wasn't any kind of continuity, at all, outside of, like, hey, let's make the boss of the previous game a character on this one, yay. Games made by other people aren't canon, so they don't have a Touhou Id number.

So you have that, for example, Shoot the Bullet is 9.5, because it was released between Phantasmagoria of Flower View and Mountain of Faith while being outside the main continuity, being kind of a canonical side story. This starts getting complicated after Undefined Fantastic Object, which is 12.0 and thus the last game, until now, in the main continuity, but after which came Hisoutensoku (12.3), which is kind of an expansion to Scarlet Weather Rhapsody (10.5), Double Spoiler (12.5), which is kind of a sequel to Shoot the Bullet (9.5), and Fairy Wars (12.8) which is a sequel to one of the canonical Touhou mangas ZUN himself was kind of writing (the one with the three cute little fairies with the weird names).

So, more or less, if the number is an entire it's a ZUN game, and if it's a fraction it's either a Tasofro game or a ZUN, uhm, game that isn't one of ZUN's main games. I don't really know, however, who gives them the numbers, and why they aren't, say, 12.1, 12.2, and 12.3. It's just one of many weird stuffies the Touhou fandom has, I guess.
 

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