The ship design and weapons in that remind me a LOT of Viper Phase 1. This is good.
ever since Felix made that comment about Japanese gamers having access to a version of directx7 with good J-documentation doujin makes a lot more sense. That doesnt make it better I hate the ps2 color pallette they all work in. The worse than that is the xblig color pallate.
Those are some good good tunes there Viper.
Anyone played this?
[quote=“Dracko, post:66, topic:182, full:true”]
Anyone played this?[/quote]
No, but I’ll second the request for anyone’s impressions! Have had it in my Steam cart (along with Hurricane of the Varstray, which I’d also be interested in hearing about) for a week wondering whether to buy it. I’m sure I’d eventually grab it on a sale, but could be convinced to pay full price if it’s good.
Anyway, my shooting thing in the past couple weeks has been a lots and lots of Konami shooters. And especially the Twinbee series, which I had never quite given the full attention it probably deserves. I’ve had the Saturn Deluxe Pack and the PSP collection for years, but never really got hooked… until now. I think I prefer Detana!! to Yahho!, but they’re both pretty damn great. Didn’t even realize how strongly the “cute” Yagawa games (Muchi Muchi Pork 
and Pink Sweets) owe more of a debt to that era of Twinbee - at least aesthetically - than I was ever really aware.
I’m also awaiting my newly ordered Saturn Sexy Parodius thanks to the Konami binge. Parodius I also kinda gave minimal attention to in the past but I’m all in now and the PSP compilation version isn’t enough for me any more!
Also messed with the original via the DS Konami Classics Arcade Hits compilation. Twinbee itself is… meh, it exists. But had to plug the compilation as a really well done one. M2 did the porting, and it’s typical M2 excellence. Arcade board dip switches, awesome sound tests, accurate emulation.
It’s fuckin’ solid. Soundtrack is Tsukumo-tier.
Ooh thanks for the heads up. Going to buy that right now…
Also, Raiden V is out now (Xbox One Japan). Mine’s on the way.
please post impressions when you get Raiden V, firenze
apparently its coming to North America + Europe too
Crossing my fingers it shows up on Saturday! Might be Monday though.
That’s cool that it’s getting NA/EU release! Though since it’s region free and the exchange rate isn’t too bad at the moment (for US/EU people buying Japanese stuff, at least) it’s a pretty painless import.
Oh, and this happened on Twitter:
My next album is titled "Turbo Grafx 16" as of now…
— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 27, 2016
just on some super nerd vibes… one of my favorite gaming systems when I was a kid…
— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 27, 2016
Blazing Lazers was probably my favorite game on that console …
— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 27, 2016
My boy Mali that I spoke about on the song Drive Slow actually had a Neo Geo in real life bro…
— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 27, 2016
That’s… some pretty damn good taste.
So, I got Raiden V on Saturday and have put a few hours into it. Overall, I’m enjoying it quite a bit. Took me a few plays to warm up to it, but the more I play it the more I appreciate some of the design choices that went into it. Saved up my comments to get some experience with it (and refresh my memory of Raiden IV tonight), but here’s my long impressions.
Cheer system
It definitely has some developed for console features, most evident in the “Cheer system” that uses some of the MS cloud functionality. Basically, any time a player hits certain in-game goals (get a certain number of points, find a hidden fairy, no miss kill a boss, etc.), all other players who are playing at the same time will see a pop-up message. If you hit the “cheer” button, you will cheer that player on… getting cheered or cheering others will give you some meter for a “Cheer attack”, so it provides some incentive to help others out. It’s also just kinda fun to do something good then see the little cheers pop up as others applaud your performance. At the end of your game you get a list of the 5 players you cheered the most, and the 5 who cheered you the most.
The Cheer Attacks are fairly powerful “helper bombs”, which aren’t really gamebreaking but are nice to dish out some extra damage. Honestly, the feature could probably be somewhat ignored and could certainly be developed around (I think you get some slow build of the Cheer Attack bar anyway, but tweaking the charge rate would be an adequate substitute). However, it’s kinda cute and fun, at least now when the game is new. When it’s empty in a year+, might actually require a patch to rework things a bit though - or else the feature just dies.
Cheer does affect your physical rhythm of button pressing. Aside from a couple screen display toggle buttons, you have 4 main gameplay buttons: (1) shoot, (2) bomb, (3) cheer, (4) trigger cheer attack. I first played on a stick and wasn’t very comfortable with frequent pressing of the cheer button. Ended up picking up my Xbox One elite pad and mapping the cheer/cheer attack buttons to the custom-config underside paddles and liked that. However, I wanted stick again so ended up reconfiguring my 2x4 button setup like so:
[bomb] [none] [display toggle L] [display toggle R]
[shot] [cheer] [cheer attack] [none]
That allows me to hold shoot, and still easily hit cheer (definitely the next most used button) frequently while still having bomb close enough for instant access.
Display
Display is interesting in that there’s no TATE mode, but it’s clearly designed around using the left and right “panels” to display other stuff. Roughly 30% left/right panels, 40% main gameplay screen in the center. It feels cluttered as fuck for a short adjustment period, but I was totally fine with it after playing for an hour. I’m also kinda fine with not having to go hook the Xbox One to one of my TATE-able monitors, it’s on my living room TV that stays horizontal so I’m willing to accept this as part of Raiden V’s intentionally console-focused design.
The right side has a running text commentary and some animations from your mission control. It’s a little like the constant Saidaioujou chatter, but in text form (it’s also basically impossible to read while playing, but could add a little something to English localized version). The left side is more interesting, and has three possible panel displays that you can swap between with an assigned button press:
(a) shows your Xbox One cheer/online tracking info. Cheer messages pop up here, as well as a kinda cool line graph indicator showing your progress through the level (different colored zones for each level segment too) and overlaying a graph comparing your score to others and to your own scores. This is probably the default that you’ll want to keep on, because otherwise you lose access to the Cheer stuff.
(b) shows some sort of level “guide” with tips for the area of the stage you’re in, with still screenshots and a good bit of Japanese text. Again, could be a nice reason to play a localized version.
(c) shows pure score/stat tracking, it’s just a ton of stats and numbers.
Stuff I like about the game:
- Shield and weapons systems.
- You get one “life” but can take multiple shield hits, which basically serves as the same thing as multiple lives. However, bombs don’t reset when you take a hit, so there’s less worry about wasting a bomb when you’re at high shield level than in some games, and since you have fewer bombs per credit it’s definitely not a super emphasized aspect of the game.
Weapons: you select from 3 ships with varying speed/stats/etc, then you ALSO select choice A or B for each of the three weapons: Choice A is basically the traditional Raiden red/vulcan, blue/laser, and purple/plasma. Choice B is an alternate version. B vulcan can swing from side to side a bit in the direction you point. B laser is a charge cannon that charges up the longer you don’t fire at all, maxing out after several seconds as a massively powerful and wide laser beam - feels fun and a nice risk/reward thing going on. B plasma splits into multiple beams coming out like spokes from your ship at the center, and tracking enemies (as opposed to the one long curvy toothpaste plasma beam of choice A).
Each weapon can be leveled up to rank 10 by collecting weapon power-ups, and rank is completely retained at death, including after continuing. If you want to get all 3 to rank 10 it’s gonna take you until like stage 7 or 8 (of 8), power ups are relatively rare. The choice to use shield instead of “lives” seems to work well in that you don’t lose you chosen weapon upon losing a ship like in Raiden III-IV, and have it spit out weapon power-ups where it’s easy to grab the “wrong” one on respawn.
Another note that probably fits best here, your ship can suck in power ups and dropped medals when not firing, after a brief pause. That can be used strategically, and especially with the B type charge laser. It’s fun and feels good mechanically, and I missed it when I went back to give Raiden IV a spin - even though IV also sucks in power ups, but V has a lot more medals to collect so it feels much more meaningful.
- Music
It’s really, really good (and first print JP copies come with a full OST CD). Yoshimi Kudo (Basiscape), of Caladrius and Daifukkatsu/Black Label fame, composed it. Lots of variety, great quality. Some of it reminds me of Shinji Hosoe’s work (especially from Under Defeat). There are a even a couple pretty well done vocal tracks (stages 6 and 8)
A couple of my favorites-of-the-moment (which are changing daily, and I have had the CD in my car stereo all week… first physical CD I’ve even listened to in months - didn’t bother to rip the thing yet, just popped it in the car):
Stage 4 has a kind of soaring start that breaks into a straight up Final Fantasy Tactics-sounding theme (at about 1:27 of the below video).
Stage 5 is a real slow burn, starts out overwhelmingly slow and oppressive and builds so patiently and gradually over the course of its nearly 7 minute running length to a crescendo featuring Slayer-esque metal guitar.
3) Mission mode
There’s a challenge/mission mode where you can tackle bosses with certain ships/weapons/number of bombs/etc. as specified in the mission. Sometimes one boss, sometimes multiple bosses. There are several dozen missions over like… 4 or 5 (can’t recall offhand) sets of increasing difficulty. It’s pretty fun, and a nice addition. Not as extensive as say, Dariusburst chronicle mode, but it’s the same sort of feel and adds a different feel than pure arcade mode style shooting.
Stuff I don’t like about the game:
-
LOOOONNNNG levels.
Too long for my liking, a run of all 8 levels takes roughly an hour. I look at the clock after stage 4 and I’ve been playing one game for 30 minutes… Maybe some people will enjoy this, I think it’s too long and the stages could probably be a little tighter. Stages 1&2 start the game out a little sparse and slow, and there are some lulls in later stages. Not so bad that any individual stage feels excessively padded, but the combination of the length and number of stages just gets to the point where it’s hard to focus intensely for that long. -
Difficulty/tiny & fast bullets
Holy shit some of the bullets are brutally fast, and can be hard to see. Especially in the fast moving rush portions of some stages, where the field of view also zooms way out occasionally. Normal enemies can be killers, this definitely isn’t one of those games where the stages are a brief diversion before getting to the meat of the game with huge boss fights. I actually tend to prefer stages to bosses in my STGs, but some of the stuff here is just borderline unfair. I don’t expect I’ll ever 1CC this thing on Normal or higher. -
Crashing/glitches
I can only hope this was launch glitches with the servers (used for the cheer mode), as I haven’t seen it in the past couple days… but when I played on Saturday I had full game crashes THREE times. Loud awful static noise, freeze up, game application shuts down. One was on the Stage 8 boss on S rank (each stage 3-8 has S/A/B/C rank depending on how well you’ve performed), and I lost all my progress of all the S rank stages I had visited (which normally you can choose to start from, or practice, or unlock missions, etc.). The Cheer system was also just down for stretches too, with a message in the in-game cheer status window of some sort of network connection error. However, I haven’t seen that since the weekend, nor have I crashed recently, so maybe they’ve cleared up the issues. -
No dual mode
I kinda liked that gimmick in Raiden III and IV, the “play two ships with one controller” thing. But V has no 2 player mode, so it’s gone. Mission mode is a nice addition, but I do kinda miss that goofy mode - one of the more entertaining extras in shooting games.
Closing thoughts
Like I said, took me a few plays to warm up to the game. Kinda “Generic Type-X shooter” look at first, and the weapon system design subtleties weren’t immediately apparent, and early crashes didn’t help my initial impression. But I’ve definitely gotten over that and now I can say I like it a good bit. Feeling the urge to play it again even though it’s time to go to bed (and this is like the same thing I’ve felt for like 3 of the last 4 nights), so that can’t be a bad thing.
If this novella wasn’t enough for you and you have any specific questions, feel free to ask!
Some folks have posted about Battle Crust already but just listen to that soundtrack
SPEAKING OF SOUNDTRACKS (oh god I’m posting this right next to Tsukumo-BGM, RIP)
“Mega Drive audio chipset”
Good boy.
Raiden V update: the Cheer system is currently broken and causes system crashes. Too bad, it’s a cute little addition. You can still turn it off in the system menu though (cheer attack gauge still slowly increases over time, so cheer attack special is not eliminated) - turning it off seems to resolve crashing issues, I’ve yet to crash with it off. I’ve been playing the hell out of the game and still really enjoying it.
Steam Deathsmiles coming in a couple days (March 10), should be about $20 with a 10% discount for first week.
Would anyone here recommend Jamestown? I noticed it on the psn store recently. I remember there was a lot of hype surrounding its release in 2011 but does it hold up?
Its okay? I would recommend astrableed before it on psn.
The buzz was for some reason it introduce tigsource to bullet hell. Lots and lots of western pc nerds jumped on it. It also has multiplayer which Ive never experienced. It is babies first bullet hell in the best possible way.
Im more for hot experiences though and astrableed is that. Maybe jamestown is more mechanically sound.
Jamestown is basically a Cave game designed to be beaten by normal human beings. Granted it’s not exactly easy to do so, but I managed to do so on one of the non-insane difficulty levels after maybe 10 or so hours, while an actual Cave game would take me probably 50-some hours to still not manage its fifth stage. For someone truly dedicated to the genre I wonder if it might be a bit thin.
I had fun with it and it has that thing where the game takes small sections of a level, adds a mechanical twist and offers it up in a quick challenge mode. Usually dig those, not sure why more games don’t bother.
good god why do we still not have an awesome looking scanline filter
But we do!
The ones that come bundled with retroarch are state-of-the art. YMMV, of course but they are probably the best looking scanlines you can achieve with a sub-4k monitor.
Pretty good selection of ntsc filters too and even a filter that emulates 3dfx chipsets if you are into that “n64 vaseline” look