Incline Shoot'em up goodness (review and discuss)

[ciox]

This info can be very helpul for the 1CC, because the game is hard enough without bullet speed getting out of control. The strategy would be to bomb out hyper mode from time to time in selected tough spots, giving you kind of a double bomb that reduces your rank.

I can beat now first 4 stages with a reasonable amount of bombs to have a relaxed 5th stage.

The problem is I can only do that stage by stage, or maybe 2. I can´t do the 4 stages in one stand because I lack consistency. Only first stage is really easy, and even the boss has one tricky pattern.

2nd stage boss can easily kill you if you are not full focus, and third stage is easy but has 2 kill spots that shouldn't be bombed in my opinion, given what I have seen in stage 4 boss and whole stage 5.

So in my opinion the difficulty increase from Dodonpachi comes from these aspects:
- Weaker ships (even expert ones lack the damage that Dodonpachi ships had)
- Harder bosses, in part due to lack of damage, in part tougher patterns.
- Kill spots in stages 3-4 that shouldn´t be bombed and are hard to bomb on reaction
- Rank/hyper to be managed carefully. Aside from hypers increasing rank and more things in mental stack, If you die while on hyper your bomb stock don´t get expanded.

Some people talk about playing exy to have more firepower despite many less bombs, and that makes stages 1-3 easier to complete, and game feels better. But the firepower increase isn´t so big that you notice crushing high HP bullet spammers in stages 4-5, or really skipping tough patterns in bosses. Shoti ship with extra bombs is better for survival, period.

I thought the main reason to play Exy is because of the movement speed you get and especially the speed while lasering, I don't remember the specifics but that was considered very important by pros wanting to chain stuff and there might be spots in the game where slow movement while lasering can be a pain for survival too.

 

[Matador]

This info can be very helpul for the 1CC, because the game is hard enough without bullet speed getting out of control. The strategy would be to bomb out hyper mode from time to time in selected tough spots, giving you kind of a double bomb that reduces your rank.

I can beat now first 4 stages with a reasonable amount of bombs to have a relaxed 5th stage.

The problem is I can only do that stage by stage, or maybe 2. I can´t do the 4 stages in one stand because I lack consistency. Only first stage is really easy, and even the boss has one tricky pattern.

2nd stage boss can easily kill you if you are not full focus, and third stage is easy but has 2 kill spots that shouldn't be bombed in my opinion, given what I have seen in stage 4 boss and whole stage 5.

So in my opinion the difficulty increase from Dodonpachi comes from these aspects:
- Weaker ships (even expert ones lack the damage that Dodonpachi ships had)
- Harder bosses, in part due to lack of damage, in part tougher patterns.
- Kill spots in stages 3-4 that shouldn´t be bombed and are hard to bomb on reaction
- Rank/hyper to be managed carefully. Aside from hypers increasing rank and more things in mental stack, If you die while on hyper your bomb stock don´t get expanded.

Some people talk about playing exy to have more firepower despite many less bombs, and that makes stages 1-3 easier to complete, and game feels better. But the firepower increase isn´t so big that you notice crushing high HP bullet spammers in stages 4-5, or really skipping tough patterns in bosses. Shoti ship with extra bombs is better for survival, period.

I thought the main reason to play Exy is because of the movement speed you get and especially the speed while lasering, I don't remember the specifics but that was considered very important by pros wanting to chain stuff and there might be spots in the game where slow movement while lasering can be a pain for survival too.

I would argue higher speed while lasering is worse due to less precission in micro dodging, which this game has a lot. For me the value of exy is better laser than shoti to eliminate high HP threats faster before they create kill zones in the screen, and losing less fire power when dying. Because I play for survival.

Super player concerns and preferences are generally not applicable to mere humans trying to beat the game, they can do that easily, they only worry about optimizing scores. I remember Jaimers saying Exy is better. Of course is better if you can no bomb the full game! But who can do that in DOJ?

I value watching their routes though, you can get a lot of good inspiration for situation approaches, and you can discard when they do something fancy or convoluted to just not drop a chain.

 

[Morenatsu.]

shot is worst for survival because i hate it so i play worse

 

[Matador]

shot is worst for survival because i hate it so i play worse

It´s definitely less enjoyable to play than exy. But I want to clear the game. And I mantain that even exy is underpowered for what the game throws at you.

Have you beat the game? I want somebody to convince me to not play shot, but I don´t see myself beating stage 5 with the few bombs exy gives you.

 

[Morenatsu.]

I beat the game with continues. :^)

 

[Valestein]

Interesting game inspired by Starfox (SNES) and Space Harrier.

 

[Nutmeg]

Looks pretty cool except the 2D art, but I feel like the faux purple 80s aesthetic has diverged too far from the real 80s aesthetic. We need an 80s realist movement.

 

[Nutmeg]

Speaking of retro realism, these two new games for old machines are on my radar:



The GBC didn't really have any good shmups AFAIK.



The Famicom on the other hand had plenty, and this effort seems a bit more amateur. Still nice to see.

Also been keenly awaitng trap0xf's Fire Lancer for a while now.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Nutmeg have you played GG Aleste 3?

It was released in 2020 and developed by M2 for the Game Gear. It's great.

 

[Valestein]

In other news the "Ignition" expansion dlc for Devil Engine was released last month finally on PC.

 

[Nutmeg]

Nutmeg have you played GG Aleste 3?

It was released in 2020 and developed by M2 for the Game Gear. It's great.

Not yet. I really like the niche of shmups on underpowered, smol hardware. Great to see a professional effort, from M2 no less.

From the video, it looks like M2 managed to capture the essence of an 8-bit Zanac or Aleste game. I like to describe these games (i.e. Compile shmups) as comfort food in shmup form. The recipe is as follows. Take screen covering weapons, mix with gratuitous resources and add a generous heap of destructible bullets. Bake for thirty to forty minutes to get a spectacular romp through each stage accented with the occasional difficulty spike to periodically refresh the palate. The real challenge is always in the final stretch, but by the time you've reached it the second or third time, you'll have accumulated enough resources during the run to kamikaze your way to the 1CC. All compile shmups have great aesthetics, being part of what I call the early 2nd generation Japanese pop culture sci-fi and fantasy art movement.

Another way to describe Compile shmups might be to say they are to video games what 80s OVAs are to anime.

Out of the Compile originals, I have 1CC'd Gunnac, MUSHA, Spriggan, and Sylphia.

Gunhed and especially its sequel Super Aleste are considered gameplay favorites by fans, but they didn't quite click with me from my experience with them. The other three I've played are Zanac, Robo Aleste and Power Strike 2, which are all fantastic. Along with the MSX Aleste 2, these are the furthest up my 1CC backlog.

My favorite though is Hudson's (i.e. not Compile's) Soldier Blade (which is the Soldier series' take on MUSHA) for the way it elegantly combines power ups, bombs and hit points into one single resource, and builds challenge around good option-as-shield positioning (a rare entry in the underrated paladin shmup sub-genre).

 

[Falksi]

Hope you chaps have ZPF on your radar. Looks well funky and Megacat have knocked out some good little indie games in their time (Tanzer is ace)...

 

[Matador]

Also in PS4

 

[Great Deceiver]

Also in PS4

I was playing it on the Switch yesterday and it's fucking great. DOJ is my favourite DDP by far. I didn't like the arranged OST that M2 features in this version, though they do have a new stereo mix for the original soundtrack, which is amazing.

In line with other ShotTriggers releases, there's a Super Easy version which is very good for normies. I wish these releases had English menus, though.

 

[Matador]

Also in PS4

I was playing it on the Switch yesterday and it's fucking great. DOJ is my favourite DDP by far. I didn't like the arranged OST that M2 features in this version, though they do have a new stereo mix for the original soundtrack, which is amazing.

In line with other ShotTriggers releases, there's a Super Easy version which is very good for normies. I wish these releases had English menus, though.

It´s ridiculous they don´t make the menus in english, there is no so much text to translate. I´m thinking about buying it on PS4 annyway. The HUD looks great and can be useful to know all the bees locations and manage the rank. Do you know any internet guide with the translation of menus?

About the super easy version I think is good decision to include it for a game so tricky like this.

I´m making a break in shmups, but I only left to learn stage 5 (which is brutal) before trying to put all the stages together for a 1CC. I hope to do it sometime next year.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Also in PS4

I was playing it on the Switch yesterday and it's fucking great. DOJ is my favourite DDP by far. I didn't like the arranged OST that M2 features in this version, though they do have a new stereo mix for the original soundtrack, which is amazing.

In line with other ShotTriggers releases, there's a Super Easy version which is very good for normies. I wish these releases had English menus, though.

Also in PS4

I was playing it on the Switch yesterday and it's fucking great. DOJ is my favourite DDP by far. I didn't like the arranged OST that M2 features in this version, though they do have a new stereo mix for the original soundtrack, which is amazing.

In line with other ShotTriggers releases, there's a Super Easy version which is very good for normies. I wish these releases had English menus, though.

It´s ridiculous they don´t make the menus in english, there is no so much text to translate. I´m thinking about buying it on PS4 annyway. The HUD looks great and can be useful to know all the bees locations and manage the rank. Do you know any internet guide with the translation of menus?

About the super easy version I think is good decision to include it for a game so tricky like this.

I´m making a break in shmups, but I only left to learn stage 5 (which is brutal) before trying to put all the stages together for a 1CC. I hope to do it sometime next year.

Usually the shmups.system11.org boards have had translations for the menus in past ShotTriggers. I haven't checked it in quite awhile, though, so I wouldn't know if there's something up for DOJ specifically.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Nice review of the ShotTriggers DOJ release (on a Nintendo fansite of all places):

https://www.nintendolife.com/reviews/switch-eshop/dodonpachi-daioujou-blissful-death-reincarnation

Reviewer gets docked points for mentioning fucking Dark Souls, though.

 

[Nutmeg]

Been playing Power Strike 2 and Einhander today.

I guess I'm still "over" the messy messy stage design in compile games, though I did have some nice mindless fun for a few hours and I did try to incorporate body ramming into my play to the detriment of survival (compile games throw a lot of items at you, and picking them up gives you iframes giving you a window to deal massive point blank damage, but get greedy and eat the death).

Now as for Einhander? It's *chef's kiss* -- near-perfect sequel to the amazing but flawed Xexex. It's a check-point shmup, but not nearly as cruel as the early classics of the subgenre (think R-Type, Gradius or Toaplan games), since getting to full power is a brief affair. Actually, there's no powering up per se, rather you can collect some number of subweapons, which you can also use as shields. Depending on your ship, you can collect one to three, and use one or two simultaneously. So basically, you just have to collect at most three items and you're at full power, and most checkpoints conveniently throw that many (or even more) at you at the outset, though they may not be the ideal weapons for the situation, or triggering the alternate paths (aiming for which gives you incentive not to die in the first place).

The format is very enjoyable for casual play, as having checkpoints, you do actually have to know how to get past each section or boss or whatever, but having trivial recovery makes it so you're not just burning credits repeatedly attempting a heroic recovery well beyond the difficulty of anything else you'll experience the rest of the game powered up. Being a console game, there's also a hard limit to how many credits you get, so seeing the credits is a minor achievement by itself.

 

[Great Deceiver]

I wasn't too enthused with Einhänder at the time, so I didn't really put in the effort. I keep meaning to go back to it, though. It always seemed to me that the game prioritized spectacle, with its bombastic soundtrack and dramatic camera angles to the detriment of gameplay, which seemed pretty simplistic to me.

My favourite original shmups on the PS1 are R-Type Delta and Gradius Gaiden. Still play them regularly. They're both checkpoint based as well, of course, and Gradius in particular is almost unrecoverable on death (though not as bad as earlier entries in the series).

 

[Nutmeg]

Falksi I see from your posts elsewhere you're playing Twin Cobra. I assume the Mega Drive version? That's the extreme close quarters combat version of the game. Very hard. I only ever got up to stage 3 with a single credit. Along with Same! Same! Same! (Fire Shark) it has a notiriously long power up curve in addition to checkpoints and full power down on death, so it's actually very challenging and IMO very entertaining limping your way a little further while exhausting your credits. Really feels like you're fighting the fucking thing.

For a more reasonable experience I recommend the PCE port, which makes the yellow weapon less of a penalty weapon and tones the difficulty down a bit.

 

[Nutmeg]

and dramatic camera angles to the detriment of gameplay

The dramatic angles are usually used in transitions between stages or trivial sections (destroying a weapon carrying ship before the stage 4 boss, the first phase of the stage 1 boss), and IME aren't really a factor in 99% of play.

They're both checkpoint based as well, of course, and Gradius in particular is almost unrecoverable on death (though not as bad as earlier entries in the series).

I assume you're not using the "edit" trick of putting the shield on power up slot 1 lol.

 

[Falksi]

Falksi I see from your posts elsewhere you're playing Twin Cobra. I assume the Mega Drive version? That's the extreme close quarters combat version of the game. Very hard. I only ever got up to stage 3 with a single credit. Along with Same! Same! Same! (Fire Shark) it has a notiriously long power up curve in addition to checkpoints and full power down on death, so it's actually very challenging and IMO very entertaining limping your way a little further while exhausting your credits. Really feels like you're fighting the fucking thing.

For a more reasonable experience I recommend the PCE port, which makes the yellow weapon less of a penalty weapon, keeps the arcade aspect ratio, and tones the difficulty down a bit.

Yes mate, was playing the Megadrive version of it a couple of months back and still recovering lol. Great summary of it, my run (on the default difficulty) was around the same on 1 credit. It took a lot of practice to get even there though! Honestly, after playing through around 600 console games + the odd arcade game from that era now, I'd have Twin Cobra on the Megadrive as a strong contender for the hardest mechanically-sound game of the era. It doesn't help that later stages look very similar to earlier ones, so memorizing what's happening where becomes even harder than normal.

I'll defo check the PCE port of it out, appreciate the heads up.

 

[Nutmeg]

I put some credits into the delightful Air Buster: Trouble Specialty Raid Unit.

Cool arcade Thunder Force-like, a once incredibly popular sub-genre of Horis that fell by the wayside in favor of R-Type and Gradius likes, and I guess the Hori genre just dying in general. You can't tell from watching a video of it, but Stages 4 and 5 are no-gravity stages meaning your ship continues traveling in the last direction you pressed, which I found *extremely* difficult as a result, especially the bomber waves on Stage 5. There are also PCE and MD ports (the MD port under the name Aero Blasters) I've not yet played, but both are said to be a fair bit harder than the arcade original, which is unusual for console ports of the time.

I really like the art both in game (especially stages 1 and 3) and in supporting materials:

 

[Falksi]

I put some credits into the delightful Air Buster: Trouble Specialty Raid Unit.

Cool arcade Thunder Force-like, a once incredibly popular sub-genre of Horis that fell by the wayside in favor of R-Type and Gradius likes, and I guess the Hori genre just dying in general. You can't tell from watching a video of it, but Stages 4 and 5 are no-gravity stages meaning your ship continues traveling in the last direction you pressed, which I found *extremely* difficult as a result, especially the bomber waves on Stage 5. There are also PCE and MD ports (the MD port under the name Aero Blasters) I've not yet played, but both are said to be a fair bit harder than the arcade original, which is unusual for console ports of the time.

I really like the art both in game (especially stages 1 and 3) and in supporting materials:

This really stood out when I first played it as a kid for 2 reasons.

Firstly, it was obviously 2-player which was pretty rare on home consoles for SHMUPs back then (Forgotten Worlds was the only other one which I owned). Secondly, I borrowed it off a mate who has a sister a few years older then me and who was a right slag. She would often try it on with some of the lads and constantly tried to shag one of my best mates lol. Anyway, that sister then went on to become one of the UK's leading Escorts, she even wrote a book on it...

What's bizarre is that her parents were pretty well off. She didn't really need to escort for cash, she was just genuinely cock-hungry lol. But every time I see her I think of Aeroblasters.

Anyway, those none-gravity levels really put a crimp in the experience for me of what is otherwise a good game. It's not even that I mind them in themselves, it's that they go on far too long for me. If they were broken down into smaller sections I think they'd have worked far better.

 

[Sukhāvatī]

New release.