Let's talk about shoot-em-ups.

glennmagusharvey

finish this song

"let's talk about shmups, baby..."

Charlatan

You make me want to bomb

1CC or bust, baby

So break out that old ROM

glennmagusharvey

I just discovered Hellfire for Genesis.  This looks like a pretty cool shmup.

It's made by Toaplan?  Isn't that the same people as behind Zero Wing?

The music sounds pretty good.

Edit: Any particular track sounds decent, though the soundtrack as a whole sounds rather mono-mood-ic (what's the right word for that?), because everything is in the same style and the same key and roughly the same tempo.

Saigyouji

Toaplan were a pretty major company on the shmup scene (and the arcade scene in general). When they closed down, Cave, Eighting/Raizing, Takumi, and Gazelle were formed.

Raydere

I have a hard time talking about Zero Wing to a lot of people. There's more to it than the MD port's opening cutscene.

Anyways, here's some Fire Shark, one of their games.

Earthlight_Ray

I play Touhou, a lot. Also most of what I do on tumblr is Touhou.

Earthlight_Ray

Hey, I *like* playing as Marisa. I don't like Reimu's slower speed and wider spread (takes longer to damage unless you're literally like 1 pixel away from the enemy) or homing shots (generally weaker as a tradeoff for the enemy-seeking property). I generally like sweeping around to attack enemies aggressively in games, so I prefer the linear/fast combo over the wide/slow combo.

Me too. *highfive*

AttObl

I'm a Marisa supporter, and I like her beam attacks.

Also, I'm in a shmupping mood today... Any games that I should play for today?

Glowsquid

bio-ship paladin

AttObl

http://alltynex.com/

Shameless advertising for The Tale of Alltynex Series, one of the best Doujin Shmup series now being localized by Nyu Media.

Raydere

So while we wait for The Tale of ALLTYNEX to hit international sites, who's played XOP and XOP Black? http://rydia.net/udder/prog/xopbundle/

Fun pair of danmaku games with a variety of arrange modes, although the visuals in some stages can be pretty creepy. It's 4.50 USD for the whole series and there is also a free 1-stage downloadable trial of the games.

Schitzo

So, apparently CAVE has been restructured, and all that entails?

Raydere

So I got Space Invaders: Infinity Gene

I'm pretty sure this is a comedy shmup

Raydere

SON OF A BITCH

(RefleX area 7 spoilers by the way)

glennmagusharvey

Ooh, RefleX.  I've seen a gameplay vid and it looks really interesting.

I picked up Strike Suit Zero recently.  It looked interesting and @AttObl praised it in chat.  But i'm worried my computer wont run it...

AttObl

The second half of RefleX is rather hard to say the least... Area 5's boss is pretty tough, but the last two areas will kill you.

glennmagusharvey

Ooh, check out the current Indie Gala bundle.  It's exceeding my expectations.

Raydere

So Shiden is a thing. Looks like Cho Ren Sha 68K.

glennmagusharvey

Those of you here who like well-designed shmups might like Firepower 2000, a.k.a. Super Swiv.  It's #2 in the list here (near the end):

Schitzo

Hrm... That reviewer gets on my nerves

Raydere

Hellsinker ~WTF is this Shit~

glennmagusharvey

I recently got eXther Vapor: Vampire Gun REX Package.

Raydere

So after wrangling some more with Hellsinker, I've managed to progress far enough to unlock the Lead stages. Minogame (which I keep misreading as "Mindgame" due to the font) works wonders for crowd control and damaging bosses (especially Glorious fucking Symbol).

Also, nice maze stage.

glennmagusharvey

Haha, I used to read "Voltron" as "Voctron" due to the font.

Anyway, I just picked up Diadra Empty from the current Indie Royale bundle.

Raydere

enjoy level upping horizontal arena action

Spekaing of which, I happened to stop by Rockin' Android's booth at Anime Expo for the primary purpose of tearing through Cloudphobia. Actually got to stage 5 after a lack of practice.

Raydere

Crimzon Clover: World Ignition announced. It's a port of the Japan-only arcade version (which in turn is a port of the original PC version.)

• Most (all?) tweaks from arcade version, including the new Boost mode.


• Training mode.


• Septilingual support (including English and Japanese)


• Leaderboards and achievements.


• Steam release. (Which has made some people, particularly those who favor physical releases, extremely unhappy. And they wonder why 99% of Touhou players pirate the games...)

Schitzo

How did you like Darius Burst, Ray? I found a machine an hour away and quite like playing multiplayer on it. Wish i could convince my friends not to credit feed, though.

Raydere

I only got to play for one stage before my friend nagged me telling me we had to leave. Seems good, hopefully I'll get to play it again in the near future.

Schitzo

Yeah, it was really impressive. I've never really touched the series before, but I quite liked the game and am wondering about other games in the series.

Raydere

Darius Gaiden is good, but the way dynamic difficulty is implemented can go die. To quote:

It's simple: if you power up your main shot, you will trigger the default level for the stage.The default difficulty levels for the stages are: 

STAGE 1: 3/15 
STAGE 2: 7/15 
STAGE 3: 10/15 
STAGE 4: 12/15 
STAGE 5: 13/15 
STAGE 6: 14/15 
STAGE 7: 15/15 

As you can see, the difficulty's increase is stern at the beginning and slower at the last stages, but the difference between level 14 and 15 is bigger than level 3 and 7!The trick to keep rank relatively low is avoiding to max out the forward shot: every time you level-up with main shot, you will trigger the above increase of difficulty.For example, if you enter the second stage with the laser (lvl 2) shot, you will have that stage at difficulty 7.The interesting thing is that on almost all routes,you will max out by stage 4, so you have to level up 4 times to trigger stage 4 difficulty (12/15).Why? because the rank increase is triggered in this way: 

Stage 1/lvl 2 shot (laser)--->rank increase to 7/15 
stage 2/lvl 3 shot(small wave)--->rank increase to 10/15 
stage 3/lvl 4 shot (big mixed wave)---> rank increase to 12/15 
stage 4/lvl 5 shot (not maxed out though)--->rank stops at 12/15. 

As long as your power level isn't maxed out, difficulty stays "low" (12/15), which means faster bullets than the beginning, but bosses have way less hit points than at 15/15: this also means shorter boss battles, and way easier final bosses! 

In other words, should you be unfortunate enough to die on the final stage, especially in succession, you're stuck between being horridly underpowered and spiking up the difficulty to maximum.