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March is The Official Schmuppreciation Month!
Strider-J
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Courtesy of my favorite podcasts, Broadcast Gamer and Team Fremont Live.
Here's the Breakdown.
To celebrate I've cracked open my long dormant Dreamcast and fired up me some Cannon Spike. I'm also on the lookout for a cheap as hell copy of Armada.... I just don't wanna drop 20 bucks on it.
What're YOU... gonna shmuppreciate? ^___^
Here's the Breakdown.
To celebrate I've cracked open my long dormant Dreamcast and fired up me some Cannon Spike. I'm also on the lookout for a cheap as hell copy of Armada.... I just don't wanna drop 20 bucks on it.
What're YOU... gonna shmuppreciate? ^___^
Strider-J on
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Maybe in honor of the month I'll get a VC shmup.
Read my book. (It has a robot in it.)
Alternatively, maybe some Rez or Gunbird 2... I haven't played either in a while.
This is the time for them to announce the third one in the series for the 360, come oooon! It is Schmuppreciation Month!
Another favorite that I've heard about, but can't play cuz I don't have a Wii is like... Soldier Blade or something.
What I here are the greatest:
Gradius V
Ikaruga
Einhander
And all impossible to find... except Gradius.
Psyvariar... can't say I've ever heard of it... I'll check it out on YouTube.
Shikigami has great music, insane difficulty(but not impossible like Ikaruga-style, just bullet hell), and interesting characters.
Just whatever you do, when you find it, don't mind the voice acting. Take it with a grain of salt. It's even better mocked.
(I'm still bitter that my favorite character, Fumiko, has the worst actress in the history of time doing her voice.)
CS2 should be real easy to find. $9.99 used. It was a budget release, but I don't think it's rare.
I still haven't played Gradius V. The series kind of terrifies me. Gradius I is still insane to this day.
V would probably have me breaking something.
Great GBA game that got me through a lot of time on the bus on my way back and forth to work.
It was definitely unique though.
SNES: U.N. Squadron
NES: Xevious
..yeah, I hate myself.
Area 6 boss on Psvariar 2: Ultimate Final.
If you don't want to play the game after seeing that, then get out. :P
One of the greatest final boss themes ever, too.
Read my book. (It has a robot in it.)
Hmm... Psyvariar looks like Raystorm/crisis/etc. kind of.
It does have a similar look to the mecha, ships, whatever, yes. Plays very differently, though. Like Shikigami only much, much better; Saurian gives a pretty good explanation of the system in the comments to that video of his.
Read my book. (It has a robot in it.)
Import-only, I'm guessing? I've never heard of it before now.
It reminds me that I should track down a copy of Raysomething eventually.
Looks like a fun system, if nasty. I love ones that let you use the enemy's shots against them. (One character in Shikigami has the ability, but she's hard to use.)
SOLD! O___O
This something I can just snag at the game store or am I gonna have to pay a fortune on Ebay? Thanks!
The first game made it, I think - certainly to PAL land. I picked up an UK copy for silly money. The second, sadly not - there are three versions in Japan, original DC (The Will To Fabricate), XBox (Extended Edition) and PS2 (Ultimate Final). DC is utterly barebones but looks the nicest, PS2 has some questionable visual tweaks but has a few nice extras, XBox apparently isn't really worth bothering with.
And yes, they do go for fairly high prices on eBay, though not all the way high.
EDIT: The first game looks pretty dated now and the buzz system isn't as slick, but it's still a tremendous amount of fun. Definitely worth it if you can find it for next to nothing and want to see whether you'll like the gameplay mechanics.
Read my book. (It has a robot in it.)
Read my book. (It has a robot in it.)
That's because the Touhou series is made by one crazy guy in his basement. I.N.'s predecessor, Touhou 7: Perfect Cherry Blossom, is just plain shooting with none of the character switching system, and is just a pinch better than Imperishable Night.
There are some decent comics out there too.
I was a big fan of Zephyr and Uridium as well.
Also, any appreciation for Raptor around here? God, I played that game so much on my old 486 as a kid.
I think that Gradius V was the last one I bought (excluding VC titles). The furthest I've gotten is level 3, and that was only once. That second level boss takes so much out of me, but it's a pretty damn cool fight too.
My Backloggery
I don't even understand what's going on in this video. The player seems to be touching a lot of the boss's attacks, without ever dying.
Battle.net: Fireflash#1425
Steam Friend code: 45386507
Didn't read the comments? :P
Keep buzzing shots and you fill the gauge - fill it all the way up and you're invincible for a few seconds. Thing is, you can still buzz enemy fire while you're invincible, pushing the gauge up yet again and chaining the period of invincibility, if you like - the challenge is to divine the best path through and in most cases directly into enemy fire in order to keep the gauge filling over and over and staying invincible for as long as possible. The sheer adrenaline rush of charging straight into the bosses' bullet hell attacks and hanging on to invulnerability for that vital one more second is a feeling few if any other videogames have ever given me.
Read my book. (It has a robot in it.)
Also, I didn't see a life meter for the boss. That would drive me crazy. I like to know that I'm at least close to finishing the thing.
Another great DC shooter is Zero Gunner 2, every boss starts off as a vehicle or something and then turns into a robot! Being able to rotate your chopper to shoot in other directions is a cool feature also.
The invincibility gauge is the halo around him.
And health bar, I, um. Don't know. I'm not good enough to unlock the "proper" bosses - I never got to Gluon in the time I owned the DC version.
Read my book. (It has a robot in it.)
some good news for PS2 owners is that Raiden III is coming out next month, $30 new!
I also just read that Raiden IV is coming to the Xbox360! No idea if it'll be a retail release or XBLA title.
Anyway, shmups are great. My favorite is Gradius V, but Castle Shikigami 2 is a close second.
My other favorite shmups include:
Legendary Wings (Arcade/NES/Capcom Classics), a classic shmup in which you can shoot as well as bomb the ground (Xevious style), but you can also get sucked under ground for a 2d horizontal platformer/shooting style level:
Speaking of Capcom shmups, another great and really interesting game is Forgotten Worlds:
It's like a cross between Contra III and Gradius gameplay. It's sidescrolling, flying shmup action, except you can aim/shoot in any direction. Plays great on the Capcom Classics collection, since you can fly with the left analog stick and aim with the right. I believe this game was released on the Genesis.
Another classic Shmup series by Capcom is the 1943 series. It's an upgrade from 1942, which was rather basic. The series was released in arcades and had NES ports. Some people prefer the NES ports, which had some gameplay alterations, but the arcades truly are classics:
One of my favorite NES shmups, Gradius (I only have the NES vsn). This is one of the few games I can beat using 1 life (not just 1 cc, one life):
Life Force, and awesome, but tough fucking classic NES shmup. It's another gradius game, basically. Tough as nails, and amazing considering how much stuff they were able to do with this game on the NES. A lot of Life Force stuff went into Gradius V:
One of the best Gradius games, though, is actually Gradius Galaxies for the GBA. It's extremely refined and polished Gradius gameplay, and portable at that:
Speaking of portable shmups, some other good ones include the Shinen games:
Iridion 3D was total crap, but once Shinen made the games more traditional, they became great fun, with Iridion II:
Good shmup, if not exactly as amazing as Gradius Galaxies. Then there's the 'sequel,' Nanostray:
Very underrated game if you ask me. Great style, and the gameplay mechanics were interesting and addicting. You started out with super attacks, and you refilled you meter by destroying chains of enemies (doing so also increased your score). You had all kinds of these alternate attacks for various situations. However, the game is short, and not too difficult except on the harder settings. But the replay value comes in at how well you can complete the Mission Mode objectives, which are really addicting if you can get into them. They really test your shmup skills, at that.
Another great shmup that I'm just now starting to get into is another PS2 classic, RType Final:
I hadn't really been into the Rtype series, as I much preferred what felt like the less-memorization-based Gradius. Rtype is still great though, but I feel as though it focuses more on memorization than Gradius.
There are a lot more shmups I could go into, but I've hit on a few that I really enjoy. I'm just now getting into RType, so I'm going to probably give Rtype on the VC a shot after finishing RType Final.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
Ha, I don,t often read youtube comments, they are usually filled with retardation of the greatest magnitude. That does seem like extremely crazy gameplay.
Battle.net: Fireflash#1425
Steam Friend code: 45386507
I want for nothing else in this world.
Except for good Saturn video cables ;-)
HOW DOES THAT MAKE SENSE
THINK: DOES SHOOT HAVE A C IN IT?
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
Schure, why not.