Incline Shoot'em up goodness (review and discuss)

[Falksi]

Falksi is a true bro especially for having an Excalibur quote in his sig. Excellent movie, one of my top 5 of all time

Well spotted dude, and much appreciated. Only the truly prestigious appreciate great movies and great SHMUPS

 

[LESS T_T]

City Connection's Deathsmiles 1+2 is coming to Steam.



I wonder what will happen to Degica's release of the first game on Steam.

 

[Lutte]

City connection ports always have worse input lag than running emulators, and while Degica's ports can sometimes have a few bugs (had crashes on Dodon), they don't play that bad. A very, very, very hard pass here. If you really need deathsmiles, get the degica port now, or run the xbox 360 version (whether on real hardware or xenia).
Please starve this shitty company, it is time japanese developpers stopped giving them their games.

 

[Palikka]

Please God give all porting duty to M2. (and tell them to port to pc)

 

[LESS T_T]

City Connection's another S-Tribute release Layer Section:

 

[Morenatsu.]

Input lag comes at a premium.

 

[Nutmeg]

Burner blast bonanza. Insane show of skill starting from the 1.5 minute mark.

 

[LESS T_T]

Heh, Team Ladybug, the team behind Touhou Luna Nights and Lodoss War metroidvania, just announced and released a shump game.

 

[Nutmeg]

Seems like a Thunder Cross clone.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Since PCSX2 has now cleared its frame timing/latency issues, I've been playing a lot of Gradius V (developed by Treasure, released by Konami). It's probably my favourite horizontal shmup of all time, even including the classics.

Everything about it is incredible. The tight levels with tons of navigational hazards to clear/memorize, the enemies, and a series first - amazing bosses. The pumping soundtrack by Hitoshi Sakimoto (reminds me a lot of his Soukyugurentai soundtrack honestly). The numerous Salamander/Life Force references (including one of the most kickass boss remixes of all time):



The different types of option powerups are an interesting thought, but in the end they don't matter too much as one (type B) seems far better than all others. As I've probably mentioned elsewhere, the best mechanical addition was the fact that the game doesn't have a checkpoint system by default (you can enable it though) and you get to try and recoup your options after you die. This makes recovery possible but still very hard, which is a definite improvement over the other Gradius games where it was pretty much impossible or incredibly painful to recover from a death, so they were mostly 1 life clear games.

The game still looks brilliant, especially past the midpoint where you leave the tech/ship aesthetic and get to the gooey/alien stuff. It upscales very well, too. No framerate issues at all except for boss explosions, which doesn't affect gameplay in any way.

It's really a shame to me that Treasure gets remembered for Radiant Silvergun/Ikaruga, which despite being fine games, don't hold a candle to Gradius V IMO.

The only downsides for me are the too-easy early levels and stage 2's overlong boss fight (despite being awesome the first few times). It even has additional cool features like stage select mode for practice and a score attack.

I used to have the original disc, preordered it on release but I don't know where the fuck I put it. Played it so much on my fat PS2, along with Contra: Shattered Soldier, which is another very good game, but not nearly on the same level.

Konami sure used to be great.

 

[Spark Mandriller]

I find Gradius V to be somewhat ruined by how strong the options are. It's hard to have good level design when you can do 360 degree laser sweeps and kill everything or lock them in formation to easily push past walls. You've been able to do tricky things with them ever since the first game, but V makes them way stronger, and really easy to use on top of that.
Gaiden is still the best Gradius if you ask me. It's incredibly good at everything. I can't even think of a single thing about it that isn't perfect. Aside from the voice acting, at least, it still has the traditional terrible boss taunts.

 

[Lyric Suite]

It's always fair to say that indie games are inferior. Got a problem with that?

That doesn't mean they aren't worth playing or that one cannot be impressed by the quality relative to the lower levels of talent and resources indie developers have compared to professional studios.

BTW the 360 ports of Cave games are all the more relevant since they actually work surprisingly well on the 360 emulator.

Ye ye i know anything other than the actual PCB Board is decline i'm not into this genre hard enough to be that autistic about it lmao.

 

[Great Deceiver]

The 360 ports of Cave games are really good and the next best thing to the PCB, much better than emulation at the moment. And yes, they work great on Xenia, especially since now you can get rid of the sound delay.

 

[Morenatsu.]

It's always fair to say that indie games are inferior. Got a problem with that?

That doesn't mean they aren't worth playing or that one cannot be impressed by the quality relative to the lower levels of talent and resources indie developers have compared to professional studios.

That's true, it's just annoying to see people rate indie stuff so highly and shove it into their top tens just because participation award. Meanwhile there are a hundred other old games that were just better. The only thing special something like CC has going for it is overindulgence in explosions. On the other hand, it's still way better than those other indie eyesores out there, so.

But anyway everyone knows the best indie/doujin shmups are of course Touhou.

 

[Great Deceiver]

I find Gradius V to be somewhat ruined by how strong the options are. It's hard to have good level design when you can do 360 degree laser sweeps and kill everything or lock them in formation to easily push past walls. You've been able to do tricky things with them ever since the first game, but V makes them way stronger, and really easy to use on top of that.
Gaiden is still the best Gradius if you ask me. It's incredibly good at everything. I can't even think of a single thing about it that isn't perfect. Aside from the voice acting, at least, it still has the traditional terrible boss taunts.

Gaiden is my 2nd favourite Gradius, but I find it much easier than V, despite the greater flexibility/power of options in the latter. Both great games!

 

[Lyric Suite]

But anyway everyone knows the best indie/doujin shmups are of course Touhou.

Could never really get into those, all though the fact they were hard to find before some of them ended up in Steam might have something to do with it. In fact, one thing to keep in mind about Crimzon Clover is that for a long time it was really the highest quality shmup on Steam, before some of the commercial ones started to get ported.

In fact before even trying Touhou the only thing i could play was an indie clone of that called eXceed 3rd which was at least available to buy. Nice music i guess but the whole girly shit just put me off. I have no affinity for that crap whatsoever, and apparently that's a big selling point among Touhou fans so much so that shit ended up in some of the latest DoDonPachi games, to my eternal chagrin.

As far as i can tell, it seems the Touhou philosophy is to focus entirely on the bullet spread. By contrast, DoDonPachi always had a lot more enviormental interaction and something akin to actual level design. Likely, it was just easier to focus on bullets as a one man indie dev, especially at the start.

 

[Morenatsu.]

But anyway everyone knows the best indie/doujin shmups are of course Touhou.

Could never really get into those, all though the fact they were hard to find before some of them ended up in Steam might have something to do with it. In fact, one thing to keep in mind about Crimzon Clover is that for a long time it was really the highest quality shmup on Steam, before some of the commercial ones started to get ported.

In fact before even trying Touhou the only thing i could play was an indie clone of that called eXceed 3rd which was at least available to buy. Nice music i guess but the whole girly shit just put me off. I have no affinity for that crap whatsoever, and apparently that's a big selling point among Touhou fans so much so that shit ended up in some of the latest DoDonPachi games, to my eternal chagrin.

As far as i can tell, it seems the Touhou philosophy is to focus entirely on the bullet spread. By contrast, DoDonPachi always had a lot more enviormental interaction and something akin to actual level design. Likely, it was just easier to focus on bullets as a one man indie dev, especially at the start.

Touhou fans live their own world entirely seperate from actual arcade games. Most of them don't even play the games.

With later indie games like Crimzon Clover and such I always just feel like I'm playing an imitation of a genre and nothing more. The gameplay works (when I can see), but that's it. Touhou is as old as the actual arcade games, so it automatically wins everything as far as I'm concerned. Other games may be harder and have less anime girls, but they feel uninspiring. People want to act like indies are the future, but I've always felt like they've had as much decline as anything else.

But anyway everyone knows the best environmental interaction shmups are of course everything by Raizing.

 

[Falksi]

Yo SHMUP-heads. What's the best SHMUP that you've played which has been released in the last 2 to 3 years?

 

[Darth Canoli]

Yo SHMUP-heads. What's the best SHMUP that you've played which has been released in the last 2 to 3 years?

So, it wasn't released 2-3 years ago and it's not a real shmup but more of a shooter, Cabal/nam 75 like.

Still, I doubt you ever played it, for some reason, this game came to mind when reading your message and I dug it up from my kongregate favorite games from back in the days.

The Peacekeeper.

Really good commando/shooter. You need a plug-in to play it since it's a flash browser game.
I wonder if the dev team made some commercial shooters since then, their work was really professional.

Oh well, I just checked, they released Infernax (side-scroller/platformer action RPG), which I recently played and liked.

 

[Lutte]

Yo SHMUP-heads. What's the best SHMUP that you've played which has been released in the last 2 to 3 years?

I don't feel like naming something as "best" as there's quite a variety of reasons as to why one would prefer a shmup over another, but these are the ones I enjoyed the most among the most recent releases :

Danmakai
Dezatopia
Natsuki Chronicles
RagingBlasters
Demonizer

If you're willing to count new ports of old games, G-Darius. G-DARIUS! G-DARIUS!
All in all, not the most fantastic years of shmupping, but not bad either.

 

[Falksi]

Yo SHMUP-heads. What's the best SHMUP that you've played which has been released in the last 2 to 3 years?

I don't feel like naming something as "best" as there's quite a variety of reasons as to why one would prefer a shmup over another, but these are the ones I enjoyed the most among the most recent releases :

Danmakai
Dezatopia
Natsuki Chronicles
RagingBlasters
Demonizer

If you're willing to count new ports of old games, G-Darius. G-DARIUS! G-DARIUS!
All in all, not the most fantastic years of shmupping, but not bad either.

I have heard a ton of good stuff about G-Darius, but appreciate the heads up on the others.

If I remember right RagingBlasters is a "sequel" of sorts to Blazing Lasers?

 

[Lutte]

Dunno, haven't played Blazing Lasers.

 

[Valestein]

Been playing through "Devil Engine" on Steam, which after i don't know how long, has finally come on sale and it's good stuff.



The OST is badass too.

 

[Palikka]

Every Mega Drive Shoot Em Up REVIEWED!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLB4W-8pZos

Another megaproject from Shmup Junkie premiering right now.

 

[Darth Canoli]

Every Mega Drive Shoot Em Up REVIEWED!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLB4W-8pZos

Another megaproject from Shmup Junkie premiering right now.

I did just that back in the days, not on video though but paper reviews with two other friends giving their ratings since we played most if not all MD shoot'em up.