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Post by dunpeal2064 on Jun 4, 2021 18:54:01 GMT -5
I've actually never played a true bullet hell. What's a good one for a beginner? I think Touhou is a great place to start. Even on its easier difficulties, it does a good job of showcasing why bullet hells are fun, and ZUN has a knack for creating very interesting and unique bullet patterns, even without making them difficult. Imperishable Night (Touhou 8) I think is a solid one to start with. Its very polished, being the third game on windows, and even in its higher difficulties its a pretty lenient game, without too many additional mechanics that might make things confusing for someone new to the series. It also has, I think, the largest death-bomb timer, which means you can focus on the fun of dodging and shooting, and if you get hit, you still have time to bomb and avoid the death. It also has some really great patterns, and some really great music. Plus, since these aren't arcade games, they are able to approach the genre in a more relaxed way, offering tons of tools to practice and a good spread in challenge across its 4 difficulties. And, despite these games being fairly old windows releases, the community has continuously patched them to work perfectly on modern systems. Google "Touhou Shrine" if you want to find out the easiest way to play these. If you do dig the games, ZUN still prints copies you can buy from stores in Japan for quite cheap (Mandarake is where I bought mine), but sadly there isn't a digital option for the "older" windows games, though there are a lot more official Touhou games on Steam now then there were back in the day. If you wanted to try an arcade bullet hell, I think Mushihimesama Futari on Normal Mode is a pretty good entry point. Espgaluda and Deathsmiles are also pretty welcoming and less brutal, but they do have some different mechanics to them that might present an added learning curve on top of already getting used to bullet hells. They are both great though, for sure. Of these, Espgaluda is the only one that works well in MAME, and it also has a great ps2 port. The 360 ports of Futari and Deathsmiles are great, but pricey now. Deathsmiles is on Steam, too, for a fair price, as is the original Mushihimesama, which is also a decent entry-level bullet hell on Original difficulty.
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Post by toei on Jun 4, 2021 20:25:35 GMT -5
Yeah, I read some of the Steam reviews for one of those free shooters and literally all of them were talking about Touhou, so I think I'll just start with Imperishable Night.
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Post by Xeogred on Jun 5, 2021 8:02:40 GMT -5
My three top favorites in no real order:
1. Thunder Force IV - everything about this game is my aesthetic. 2. Mushihimesama - the first one to make bullet hell "click" with me more and appreciate. Always fun to load up again for another run and it might be the one I want to try and 1CC someday. 3. Gradius V - this legendary series went out with a bang, this game is no joke. I gave up on it a decade ago but finally got my revenge a year or two back during some Club Retro month on our personal white whales I believe. It felt incredible conquering this beast.
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Post by Sarge on Jun 5, 2021 15:25:58 GMT -5
I'm going to be very interested to see where Gate of Thunder ends up for you, Xeogred.
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Post by Xeogred on Jun 6, 2021 1:45:34 GMT -5
I'm going to be very interested to see where Gate of Thunder ends up for you, Xeogred . I couldn't get two emulators working with it. Then I tried the PSP version and the game is stuck at "Now Loading". The world doesn't want me playing this one!
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Post by toei on Jun 6, 2021 3:13:30 GMT -5
Did you try Ootake? It worked for me. (Also, did you try multiple rips? Maybe you got a bad one.)
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Post by Sarge on Jun 6, 2021 12:43:41 GMT -5
If you continue to have trouble, I'll set you up somehow.
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Post by Xeogred on Jun 6, 2021 13:07:17 GMT -5
I PM'd toei to try and figure some things out. I really do think I probably just need to setup a virtual drive again. Anything better than MagicDisc thesedays? It seemed kind of funky sometimes on Win7 in the past for me.
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Post by Sarge on Jun 6, 2021 13:44:17 GMT -5
I also have DaemonTools, but I don't know how much junk comes bundled with the free version. I use it when MagicDisc decides to be a pain. With Saturn and Duo, this seems quite often - they seem very finicky with images and disc emulators.
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Post by Ex on Jun 6, 2021 16:34:50 GMT -5
I put some time into Bomber Raid last night, which is a Master System exclusive shmup. I thought I'd already beaten this one years before, but apparently not. Unfortunately the game does not support auto-fire, and it really should. I get annoyed having to push fire a couple thousand times through the entirety of a shmup which doesn't support auto-fire natively. Actually, I refuse to do so anymore. So I deterred playing Bomber Raid last night, in lieu of digging out a controller from my controller stash that has auto-fire built in. With auto-fire I know I can take Bomber Raid down legitimately. If I had played this game as a kid back in the '80s, on my real Master System, I would have had auto-fire available to me, because I had the SEGA Sports Pad: That switch I circled allows auto-fire if you enable it. The other switch makes the ball controller work like a d-pad for your thumb, instead of continuous directional movement by rolling the ball with your palm. I'll infer SEGA didn't consider using auto-fire to be cheating, since they built it right into their own controller. Anyway, I plan to take Bomber Raid down soon.
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