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Comments
Can you explain what stage and level mean in all this? I'm a bit confused.
I'm certain Stage means Course or whatever, and Level means the power of your cannons.
I was wondering if "stage" meant difficulty setting, in something that's specific to the power of the weapon. Unless somehow that's correlated with game sequence in such a way that powering up one's weapon lets one skip around it...then again I don't know how powerups work in Darius.
Each stage has a difficulty rating out of 15 that the game sets to if you pick up a powerup on that stage. Avoid picking up powerups and the difficulty stays the same from what it was in the stage before.
Where do the defaults come from? and is the difficulty only decided after you pick up a powerup on that stage itself?
Have I ever mentioned how much I like Bestrafung?
In-game operator settings. The difficulty change activates when you pick up a powerup for the first time in the stage.
So in Stage 7 even if you don't pick up a powerup you still are at 15/15 difficulty?
If you don't pick up a powerup, the difficulty remains as it was before.
Oh, so if I pick up the first powerup of Stage 1, but none thereafter, then even the last stage will be at level 3 difficulty?
The pre Darius Gaiden/G-Darius gets a bum rap thanks to HG101's charactestically terrible writeup on the series, but I think they're worth a play. I haven't played G-Darius enough to say anything worthwhile about it.
Darius: Great aesthetics (for its time) let down by broken powerup balance and ctrl+c, ctrl+ved stages. Still an OK play.
Darius II: A decent improvement over the original in term of play mechanics and stage variety. Main problems is "One death and you're fucked"-syndrome (since you lose all powerups) coupled with the fact the player ship feels a bit too big in relation to everything else, or maybe that's just me. (Incidentally, the PC Engine CD portmake Super Darius II is quite different and very much worth playing).
Darius Twin: The archetypical mediocre SNES shmup. Dull level design, pitiful difficulty, grating soundtrack and the ctrl+c, ctrl+ved stage design stands out even more as the branching paths are far less sizable.
Darius Force; I remember it being nicely trippy and experimental in a lot of respect. I haven't played it enough to form a proper opinion, really.
Darius Gaiden: One of my favourite horizontal shmups.
HG101 has some wildly inconsistent articles. I don't agree with half of the stuff written for the Strider article, and the guy writing it editorializes way too much.
Had a go at Ketsui last night. It's been a while, so I kept having to restart due to Stage 1 Mistakes™. Still a fun game that rewards risk without completely ruining you for one mistake; one of the few CAVE games I take seriously.
Crimzon Clover WORLD IGNITION set for Steam on June 6.
Astebreed released in EN on Steam as of yesterday...with 8K support.
So I picked up two new shooters on the ecksbawks 360.
The first is Twin Tiger Shark, a love letter to Toaplan shooters of the late 80's, featuring familiar elements such as fast, aimed bullets, the jungle warfare setting, and checkpoints. It's name-your-price on PC, and $1 on XBIG. Definitely a stay-on-your-toes game, especially on Hard and Insane. It has no continues and not even stage select, which I find to be an issue as it means I can't easily practice later stages.
The second is Under Defeat, which I picked up the HD rerelease of on Games on Demand for $20. It's somewhere between "classical" shooter and danmaku shooter, with angle-of-fire tilting and a little drone that can shoot enemies for you with a x2 multiplier for each enemy it kills. There's two modes: The arcade mode, and the "New Order" arrange mode with two new ships, the camera and game window tweaked to accomodate a non-rotated 16:9 screen, and an arranged soundtrack. The default copter feels a little underpowered, but I guess that's why the tilting mechanic exists.
*boner intensifies*
Now if only I had a fully-working PC I could play both.
Raiden DX, featuring a 15-minute stage