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Post by Ex on Mar 3, 2018 19:17:50 GMT -5
For Layla, I think you and Bone should give it a shot. I believe the first half of the experience is well worth playing. It's just the overly punitive latter half that ruined the fun for me. Who knows, you two might enjoy the whole thing.
I've also beaten both those Golden Axe games you're talking about. I remember thinking it was weird that the centaur woman suddenly turned human when she mounted a beast. I also recall the last part of the game being a serious quarter sucker. It's hard for me to remember much more than that, as it was probably 2001 last time I beat it. Good stuff though, I love all the old Golden Axe beat 'em ups actually.
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Post by Sarge on Mar 3, 2018 22:29:13 GMT -5
Finished Mugen Senshi Valis for Duo, a remake of the original Valis which came out in 1986. Anyway, it's not a bad game at all. A bit basic, though; it feels a bit like a mid-'80s arcade game in some respects. You get a few magical spells, something I didn't entirely learn until trying to figure out a tough boss and checking what I was doing wrong. Of course, right after that, I figured out the pattern, so... yay? You also upgrade your sword with various icons that give different shots. You can collect up to three of these, almost like a shooter. Yuko moves pretty slow, and a lot of enemies are quite fast. The only speedy move she has in her arsenal is a sliding kick that is blisteringly quick, but also has a good amount of recovery time when coming out of it. It will kill enemies, though, although you bounce off of ones that take multiple hits. The last boss seems like a pain, but careful play in the last stage will get you outfitted pretty well for the final fight. I went with the homing shot, as it helped take out his first form. The second fell by trying to stay close and crouch-slashing. This didn't always work, but I would keep hoping the RNG would trigger his morningstar move instead of the bomb projectile, which can be a bit hard to dodge. The other notable bit (and perhaps it was in the original as well) comes in the form of cutscenes. And boy, are there a lot of them. That death scene for a particular character (who I didn't particularly know I should care about) took a long time, in particular. Voice work litters the game as well, but given that it's in Japanese, I have no idea what they were saying. I got the overall gist of it, though. Regular school girl gets magical powers to defeat evil dude. And might have lost a brainwashed friend along the way. Probably all I needed to know! Since I was playing on the Duo, no save states for me. Most bosses aren't tough, but the stages can leave you in bad shape without much margin for error. On several, if you die on them, chances are you'll be too underpowered to pull off the win upon respawn, so you'll end up taking a game over and go through the stage again. That's part of why it took me the better part of two hours. I'd say overall, the game is worthy of a 6/10. A bit above average, maybe worth a rental back in the day. One likely wouldn't revisit the game that often. (On a complete side note, finally got some CDs that the Duo (relatively) likes. Older Sony discs made in Taiwan circa 2004 were employed on this burn, and other than missing an occasional read (and it would catch it on the next pass), it worked fine from start to finish.)
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Post by Ex on Mar 4, 2018 1:24:17 GMT -5
(On a complete side note, finally got some CDs that the Duo (relatively) likes. Older Sony discs made in Taiwan circa 2004 were employed on this burn, and other than missing an occasional read (and it would catch it on the next pass), it worked fine from start to finish.) I'm glad you finally found some CDs that work with that fickle old beast. - 17. Gall Force: Eternal Story | FDS | 1986 | 6/10Gall Force: Eternal Story is a Japan-only Famicom Disk System shmup, developed and published by HAL Labs in 1986. Gall Force: Eternal Story is a licensed game based on an identically named anime film also released in 1986. (Gall Force itself was a popular anime franchise in '80s Japan.) Despite being tied to the film IP-wise, the game has a completely different plot. In this story, the player starts out as a female pilot named Rabby. Rabby must rescue six of her fellow pilots from the clutches of the Paranoid army. She will do this by flying the attack cruiser Star Leaf. Each of her fellow pilots are locked away in Paranoid space fortresses. Rabby must find each fortress, destroy it, and rescue her friends one by one. Upon rescuing a friend, said friend can now become the pilot of the Star Leaf as well. Doing this changes the Star Leaf's capabilities in various ways. Only by rescuing all the Star Leaf pilots can Rabby and her cohorts put an end to the Paranoids. Gall Force: Eternal Story's gameplay can be described as a basic vertical shmup, but with a few unique aspects (this is a HAL game after all). The first stage acts as a hub. Flying to the end of the hub reveals six different space ramps. Each of these space ramps leads to their own unique stage, with a unique Paranoid fortress Rabby must destroy. In doing so, she will rescue one of the pilots. Afterwards the Star Leaf returns to the hub stage, and the process starts over again. After rescuing all six pilots, the player can bypass the six space ramps, and proceed to a final space ramp at hub stage's end. This final space ramp takes the player to a regurgitated boss rush, in which Rabby and her fellow pilots must re-destroy all six of the previous Paranoid space fortresses in linear succession. Afterwards the game is beaten! Another unique aspect is that once Rabby stars rescuing other pilots, the player can press select to swap to them at any time. Once swapped to another pilot, the player can press the B button to morph the Star Leaf into a different shape. Each shape corresponds to each pilot, and gives the Star Leaf different capabilities. Rabby has a simple straight shot. Pony allows the Star Leaf's drop mechs to have better AI (player two can control them). Patty uses sideways shots instead of vertical. Lufy has a vertical spreadshot. Eluza replaces forward vertical fire with rear vertical fire (useless really). Rumy has a 360 random firing cannon (fairly useless). Catty's mode simply increases the Star Leaf's defense. I mentioned drop mechs. There's supposed to be a way to drop support mechs from the Star Leaf. For the life of me I could never get this to happen. The drop mech count was on the screen, but no combination of buttons I employed caused any of them to launch. Not even using the FDS mic! So good luck with that. Aesthetically Gall Force: Eternal Story is merely competent for its time. The graphics certainly don't show a lot of creativity, nor try to push the FDS' capabilities. The most graphically impressive aspect is the way the Star Leaf transforms based on which pilot is controlling it. The music fares far worse though. There's basically one single track that loops the entire time you play this game. Said track is banal, and quickly becomes annoying. (However, the end game credits' track is pretty good.) Sound effects are nothing special, although the explosion sound effect is decent. There's no cutscenes graphics to speak of, which is sad considering the potential of the source material. Controls are very simple, and work well enough. Unfortunately there is no auto-fire, and that sucks! I recommend using a controller that supports auto-fire, or else you will have a sore thumb if not tendonitis after this. So why a six out of ten? Because I have some issues with Gall Force: Eternal story. First off, the byzantine nature of the hub stage is not explained to the player at all. That caused me to waste a lot of time, wondering why in the world the stage kept repeating. I had to consort a FAQ to figure that out. Granted this is an '80s game, so RTFM isn't THAT unusual. But I didn't have said manual. Next complaint is the difficulty. Gall Force: Eternal Story is often brutally hard until you get a certain pilot. The reason? Enemy fire is always concentrated on the player, rather than having predictable patterns. And far too many enemies quickly appear on screen and immediately kamikaze the player. Basically you must ALWAYS be maneuvering the Star Leaf to avoid obstacles, which will make your thumb hurt after a while. I like shmups that let you get into a groove, but this shmup is too erratic, spiteful, and pure aught random for that. However, once you get the pilot Lufy, this game gets WAY easier. Her spreadshot is devastating, and definitely helps even the odds. If you run out of lives, there's no continues. However the Star Leaf has a life bar of sorts. It can take about three shots before it dies. Unfortunately for each hit the Star Leaf receives, it loses part of its actual structure (like a wing blows off). This can limit which mech forms the Star Leaf can change into. That means you'll spend a lot of time using Rabby, despite having other pilots you could use otherwise. Another complaint is all the boss fortresses are basically the same. Yes they all look a bit different, but their movement and attack patterns are practically identical. Boring. Yet another complaint would be that power-ups despite being numerous, are rarely useful. In the grand scheme of things, I can admire Gall Force: Eternal Story for three reasons. One, it stars all female protagonists at a time when that was rare. Two, allowing the Star Leaf to morph shapes based on its unique pilot is cool. Three, the hub world idea for a shmup is a good concept, and worked out well (once I grokked it). Other than that stuff, the rest of this experience is purely middling. The presentation is lackluster, and the music stinks. There were certainly better presented, funner, and more rationally balanced shmups available at the time of this game's release. That said, if someone is a fan of Gall Force, they might get a kick out of this old oddity. I personally got a kick out seeing Satoru Iwata's name in the credits twice; Executive Producer and Technical Adviser. The fact that we can still enjoy fruits of Iwata-san's past labors is his Eternal Story. Edit: I forgot to mention, there's an English fan translation for this game: www.romhacking.net/translations/1356/Not that you really need it though.
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Post by Xeogred on Mar 4, 2018 17:01:24 GMT -5
Sadly needed 3 hours for the Infinite Rocket Launcher and another trophy... damn! I blame one of the snakes poisoning me and I was freaking out about the no ink attempt too. With the Samurai Edge unlocked and a lower difficulty I can probably hit that 3hrs.
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Post by anayo on Mar 5, 2018 19:05:03 GMT -5
1) Alisia Dragoon 2) Ristar 3) Jewel Master 4) Thunder Force III 5) Elemental Master 6) Lightening ForceWhen I first played this a few years back I didn’t really appreciate it. Guess I wasn’t in the mood. But playing Thunder Force III last month really helped me appreciate how great its sequel is. The graphics in TF3 looked really “tiled”. But in LF the sprites looked less like sprites and more like illustrations, the color direction was more vibrant, there were sweeping background vistas and excellent use of parallax. I appreciated the parallax in particular, because some parts in Jewel Master had bad parallax scrolling where the different layers didn’t quite move at the right rate. It had an effect on my brain kind of like a bad 3D movie. In Lightening Force, though, it really added a ton of depth. I also noticed how in TF3 your ship can’t move beyond the upper and lower borders of your TV screen. In LF, though, there’s vertical scrolling as well, which makes it feel soooo much more expansive. It just adds so much breathing room. I think these two screens show the improvement from TF3 to LF: Lightening Force is tough, but each time I got a little farther than before, so I was always motivated to keep trying. I only got stumped on one section, but after consulting a youtube video I figured out what I was doing wrong (it’s the pipes in the ceiling that spawn mechs into a room with you). Today I began playing Blazing Star for the Neo Geo and I’m already comparing it to Lightening Force. In Blazing Star your character’s weapons just shoot forward, but in LF it’s imperative to choose the right weapon for the right tactical situation. Do you need to shoot something behind you? Above and below you? Maybe a homing shot to shoot everywhere? In so many other shmups, the power ups just boil down to “laser beam”, “bigger laser beam”, “even bigger laser beam except in red”, but in Lightening Force if you die it can actually inflict your ship with a blind spot because of how “directional” the power-ups are. It's a really elegant system. Up to this point I thought MUSHA was my favorite Sega Genesis shmup… This is a really good contender to take away that title. What do you think? If it came down between MUSHA and Lightening Force, which is better?
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Post by dunpeal2064 on Mar 5, 2018 19:11:33 GMT -5
I think Thunder Force IV is way better than MUSHA, but to be fair, I'm not a huge fan of MUSHA outside its soundtrack (Which is killer, of course)
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Post by Xeogred on Mar 5, 2018 19:27:35 GMT -5
Thunder Force IV is the pinnacle of console shmup excellence. My only complaint is the last boss is kind of a throwaway and seems a bit random, compared to the epicness of level 8 and a few others. Check out the Omake tracks in the secret menu or when listening to the OST elsewhere. Some of them are remakes of classic tracks from the previous games. It's strange there's like another full game worth of hidden tracks in the game. The Technosoft composers were having too much fun! www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOl48GZETDswww.youtube.com/watch?v=ykXD_3EjpEgAlso, I beat REmake AGAIN today, I got speedrun strats down now haha. I finished up Chris' Real Survivor mode, which is the hardest difficulty. Default enemy/player health is based on Hard, item boxes aren't linked, and no auto aim. Items were extremely limited. The first half was the hardest though and you had to be very careful with ink ribbon spending. It was really cool to experience the game this way though, since I'm kind of mastering it at this point. I just need to beat Invisible Mode and Knife Only sometime and I can probably get the platinum. I like REmake a lot.
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Post by chibby on Mar 5, 2018 20:46:03 GMT -5
I remember when kids at school were enthralled with those vapid Tiger LCD games Were they terrible? Probably yes, but a video game deprived younger me was allowed to have a few growing up (one was something with a Caveman who fights dinosaurs and the other was a sad person's version of Nights Into Dreams with actual Nights into Dreams characters) at a time when practically nothing else was allowed and my lord did I play the ever loving mess out of them.
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Post by Ex on Mar 5, 2018 21:37:46 GMT -5
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Post by anayo on Mar 5, 2018 21:51:23 GMT -5
I remember when kids at school were enthralled with those vapid Tiger LCD games Were they terrible? Probably yes, but a video game deprived younger me was allowed to have a few growing up (one was something with a Caveman who fights dinosaurs and the other was a sad person's version of Nights Into Dreams with actual Nights into Dreams characters) at a time when practically nothing else was allowed and my lord did I play the ever loving mess out of them. I think those were fun for the same reason a pretend plastic telephone was fun. They didn't really work, but in our imaginations they did.
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