This is the Ultra Patch for Double Spoiler, this time played with Hatate and once again serves to fill the gap of unTASed attempts of this patch.
Now in the original Double Spoiler, almost every scene becomes easier with Hatate due to her advantage of a fast camera charge. This is no longer the case in Ultra. Due to this patch forcing you down low on the screen way more, Hatate has a much harder time reaching the boss due to her camera being way less mobile. This becomes immediately apparent in Level 4. Despite this boost in difficulty I did get through these scenes faster with Hatate since I already knew what to expect from the patterns as I already played them with Aya, thus the clear with the highest number of photos is now way less than it was with Aya.
I cleared 102 out of 104 playable scenes with Hatate here and the same two scenes I skipped are here again. However this time 12-1 is theoretically beatable. 12-7 meanwhile is about the same in terms of insane difficulty.
Thanks are given to @Dai_karasu for the stage backgrounds.
This is the Ultra Patch for Double Spoiler, this time played with Hatate and once again serves to fill the gap of unTASed attempts of this patch.
Now in the original Double Spoiler, almost every scene becomes easier with Hatate due to her advantage of a fast camera charge. This is no longer the case in Ultra. Due to this patch forcing you down low on the screen way more, Hatate has a much harder time reaching the boss due to her camera being way less mobile. This becomes immediately apparent in Level 4. Despite this boost in difficulty I did get through these scenes faster with Hatate since I already knew what to expect from the patterns as I already played them with Aya, thus the clear with the highest number of photos is now way less than it was with Aya.
I cleared 102 out of 104 playable scenes with Hatate here and the same two scenes I skipped are here again. However this time 12-1 is theoretically beatable. 12-7 meanwhile is about the same in terms of insane difficulty.
Thanks are given to @Dai_karasu for the stage backgrounds.
Was grinding this category a year ago to beat my 71.1m run but I was forced to stop. This score basically reaches the goal I set out for myself 6 years ago so I'm not really that happy with this run, having to take that long to get what I wanted - oh well. The early game was extremely lucky but it fell apart on Kana.
I was struggling getting my 100m goal in last time I grinded this around a year ago and ultimately settled with a 95m goal. Now I wanted 100m for real, which would usually require a very long first Yumemi round.
This run had a very strong early game. The score out of Stage 6 and even Stage 8 (with it's resources) was the best I've gotten during this grind. The first Yumemi round wasn't good here, since it was a bit under 6 minutes when the longest round I've gotten was 19 minutes, but Yumemi was also on her last hit and there's always a risk Yumemi dies prematurely. Since my score was so high into this stage, I could get away with a suboptimal first round.
This is now the 4th character to reach 100m on Hard.
0:00 Stage 1 1:20 Stage 2 3:13 Stage 3 5:08 Stage 4 7:05 Stage 5 9:31 Stage 6 12:01 Stage 7 15:41 Stage 8 25:12 Stage 9GFW Normal C2 Sum of Best (63,930,380)KirbyComment2024-08-14 | Technically my best is 64,030,180 since my Stage 3 Boss section got a higher score but this is from my PB and it skipped a suicide so it's not as appropiate to include here to keep the route easier to learn from. Segments divided by stage portion or boss fight:
0:00 Stage 1 (3,050,750) 2:42 Star Sapphire (3,463,090) 6:23 Stage 2 (6,660,530) 9:42 Luna Child (10,447,670) 13:45 Stage 3 (10,671,070) 17:42 Three Fairies (29,637,270)東方三月精 ~ Great Fairy Wars - Normal C2 62,438,840 (WR)KirbyComment2024-08-14 | Route World Record: 13/08/2024
Since 2015 I had the thought running through my brain of scoring Great Fairy Wars as I really liked how the gameplay looked as I was watching chum's scoring attempts on stream, but I procrastinated for 9 years until I gave it a try. My C2 Normal TAS served as the determining factor whether Normal was as optimized as Lunatic and if it wasn't, I would try to score this category.
I spent nearly 100 hours practicing this route before doing runs over the course of two months, wherein most of that time I was working on the TAS while slowly practicing it's strategies in real time.
This run was pretty solid. There were three deaths on Stage 2, but I could compensate by this by skipping a suicide on Luna's first spell which doesn't lose any score. After that however I somehow managed to get enough motivation to where I only needed to skip one more suicide instead of two! Throughout the run there were quite a number of lucky freezes so even if I tried to improve this score, I wouldn't easily be able to top the freeze luck. Not to mention my Stage 3 had no unintentional deaths in it, which is really hard to match. On top of that my Stage 3 boss fight scored 100k more than my current best did!
Thanks are given to @Dai_karasu for the stage backgrounds.
0:00 Stage 1 2:42 Star Sapphire 6:23 Stage 2 9:42 Luna Child 14:03 Stage 3 18:26 Three Fairies東方三月精 ~ Great Fairy Wars TAS: Normal C2 71,726,220KirbyComment2024-08-01 | Real-time WR: youtube.com/watch?v=4kbCbV5Nur0 Human-theory TAS Rerecord count: 19,310
I was wondering about how optimized Normal Mode scores are compared to Lunatic. As such I made this Normal TAS picking the C2 route as I had already done this route on Lunatic and thus was most familiar with it.
Compared to the Lunatic TAS, I found significantly more innovations that lead to higher score potential, such as two extra 30% freezes on the knifering section in Stage 1, an extra bomb on Star's first spell, improved ring fairy positioning in Stage 3 and a dramatically improved Stage 3 Non 2 route featuring the headsit safespot. Beyond that alot of freezes have been planned and executed better as well.
All that said Normal Mode shows to have the potential of more innovations than I thought, given that less bullets take away chances to innovate. There was however one suicide in this route (that being the second suicide on Luna's first spell) that ended up being unnecessary because the reduced damage from the death wasn't necessary to let Luna live. I couldn't figure out where to move this suicide to however, so for a real attempt this would be one extra life you can afford to waste, depending on where it happens.
This game has a hidden mechanic where the game takes pity on you when you're playing the latest unlocked level and you've accumulated 10,000 photos across the scenes of this level. Whenever this happens the next level automatically unlocks, even if you haven't met the regular requirements for unlocking the next level.
This does come with one side effect: When having all levels unlocked and you obtain 10,000 photos across Level EX, the hidden 12th level gets unlocked! This was originally going to be additional content but ZUN decided to abandon this idea to focus on his new project (likely Mountain of Faith). When playing this 12th level you can also end up with a total of 93 scenes cleared and get a higher total score. Replays also do function if you save some runs from this level.
It is worth mentioning that taking 10,000 photos on any scene(s) outside of Level EX in this case doesn't unlock this hidden level, as was demonstrated in this clip: twitch.tv/videos/2150983613 The game also doesn't unlock a 13th level upon getting 10,000 photos in the hidden 12th level.
Around 2010, I started following a Lets Player named @raocow who used to be known for his non-sequitur commentary style and mainly playing Super Mario World romhacks at that time. He would go on to cover Indie Games later on too.
Around September 2012, he started a Lets Play of Copy Kitty, a game that mixes elements from Mega Man, Kirby, Metroid, bullet hell and more into a game and would become one of his most favourite games - after which it also became one of my most favourite games when I started playing it. I became a member of the game’s dedicated IRC channel and later on also became a beta tester for the game and would also go on to do speedruns and scoreruns of the game. Speedruns of this game you can find on my channel and scoreruns (along with ILs) through this page, albeit just text and no videos or replays: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Q4Ki8O-zEdIfwKbZ5RkDWtE9LMhmdjEn0EYG2mIOE4I/edit?usp=sharing
Around early 2013, I learned that the developers of Copy Kitty also made a game called Another World’s Chaos - a Touhou fanshmup set in the universe of Copy Kitty, for which the current version (v0.5) was released on December 16, 2010 - on an old Danmakufu build from 2008. The game was however never finished.
I tried this game in late March 2013 and loved it, even though I had no idea what I was doing. This was essentially my first “gameplay” exposure to shmups and later on made me consider the official Touhou series. I wasn’t yet ready for it, but after seeing a Lets Play of Imperishable Night by @RoahmMythril and another random video of the Phantasm Stage in PCB, the rest was history - and started playing Touhou for real in July 2013 - getting my very first EoSD 1cc on July 6, 2013.
There is an old video from April 1st 2013 where I play this game but it was never published. I also Game Over on the first stage...: youtu.be/ZdXagKO48MY
And for those who want to give Copy Kitty a try (that's set in the universe of this game), you can find the website of the developers of this series here: entanma.com
This is the Ultra Patch for Double Spoiler. This patch doubles the bullet layers or number of directions rings of bullets are being fired to. Interestingly this patch also doubled the cap to the Risk Bonus, making the cap now 4,000 instead of 2,000. I've made this video to fill the gap of unTASed attempts of this patch.
This patch compared to Shoot the Bullet I think has slightly more balanced difficulty, however the hardest scenes in my experience were harder than the hardest scenes in Shoot the Bullet. Though I also put in more effort not skipping scenes in this game as much. Ultimately this ended up being a 106/108 Clear. The non-clears are 12-1 (this one cannot be cleared as it walls you no matter what you do) and 12-7 (due to the dodging being too difficult for me).
Thanks are given to @Dai_karasu for the stage backgrounds.
When you interrupt any of three available demo replays when Aya is attempting to take a photo, the game stays in it's artificial slowdown state, causing your game to go into a softlocked state if you then try to play a scene or a replay. If on the other hand you let the next demo replay play, the game will crash through one of three ways as seen in this video.
0:00 Menu Exploration + Softlock 1:18 3-6 Demo Play Crash 2:10 2-1 Demo Play Crash 2:56 7-1 Demo Play Crash 3:53 Z-press Crash Example #1 4:16 Z-press Crash Example #2東方風神録 ~ Mountain of Faith Demo (v0.01a) - Lunatic No BombKirbyComment2024-02-10 | This is an LNB of the earliest version of MoF. A version of the game that's much harder than the full game. Not only are many patterns harder, this demo (unlike SA's demo) does suffer from high input delay if you play the game on a more modern system.
The main difficult parts of this run were much more numerous because of the above. The really bad parts are Nitori's midboss spell and second spell, but there's also Minoriko's second spell, Hina's second and third spell and the big fairies in Stage 3 that cause frequent deaths. I would've loved to get an LNN but the input delay doesn't make it very fun and I decided this run is good enough, even if it embarrassingly had to die to Nitori's final nonspell.
The differences I could spot in 0.01a are the following:
★★ Visual design ★★ ★ Every single bullet pattern from enemies and bosses use brighter colors or different bullet types. ★ Hina's spell background is a beige-like color in 0.01a whereas in the full game it's green. ★ The transition between title screen and gameplay is more fade-in-like. ★ ReimuC's focused shot looks a bit different and maybe does a bit more damage from afar too.
★★ Patterns ★★ ★ Minoriko's first spell and Hina's first spell, second spell, third spell are harder ★ The patterns from the big fairies in Stage 3 are much denser and/or faster and the small fairies at 6:04 also fire denser packs of bullets.
★★ Mechanics/technical stuff ★★ ★ The description of Easy Mode in the difficulty select screen in 0.01a suggests that at this point in time the game was planned to only have 5 stages on this difficulty, like LLS and EoSD. ★ Loading times when starting a new run appears to be significantly longer than in the full game. ★ Dying does not create an invisible wave that deals damage to enemies and bosses. ★ Grazing is completely absent from the game - which is to say there's no sound effect and graze graphic in this version either ★ Marisa's movement speed is alot faster. From my testing it took around 3.8 seconds for her to move from the top to the bottom of the screen in 1.00a, while in 0.01a it took around 2.5 seconds. ★ When boss spells are cleared, they do not drop the yellow-outlined Point Items ★ Before the Stage 1 midboss appears, some blue fairies from 1.00a (at 0:55) turned into red ones dropping Power Items, meaning you can have 3 power for this midboss instead of 2 ★ The score extend thresholds are different (10m - 25m - 50m - 100m) ★ After defeating a stage boss' final spell in 0.01a, they drop items whereas in 0.02a and 1.00a they don't. ★ Spell Card Bonuses in 0.01a are calculated like this: Faith x 10 In 1.00a it's: Faith x (10 + Stage Number x 3) ★ The difficulty you're playing does not display at the top of the HUD and is instead displayed on the pause screen like PCB to PoFV did. ★ When you die at Full Power, you lose 3.50 power instead of 3.20 power in the full game. Since both versions drop 3.20 power after a death, you won't immediately have full power (4.70) after a death in 0.01a. ★ There is no audio cue for when a boss pattern is low on health
★★ Glitches ★★ ★ Between stages the background music does not fade out but instead stops abruptly, but only when you're doing a credit. In the replay the music fades out correctly. ★ The MarisaB 3.xx power unfocus bug doesn't work here, neither does it work in 0.02a. ★ When you get a score PB with a run that used one or more continues, it will not get reflected in the Hiscore. ★ The FPS counter is broken when viewing some replays. It can randomly switch from values between 0 and 255. ★ Nitori's final spell will not record spell captures properly most of the time. It does not always count captures towards the first number but it can also take away your captures (I've seen my history be 1/11 and later 0/17 - now it's 1/24) ★ If Nitori's second spell starts while she's still in her spinning animation, the animation persists throughout the spell. ★ When Nitori enters the screen before starting her midboss spell, you have a brief window of time to take away HP from the healthbar. During this time she also takes more damage.
If you're looking to play this version of the game yourself, someone recently archived several of the oldest demo versions of Touhou on the Internet Archive: archive.org/details/@jwilins
0:00 Title screen 0:24 Stage 1 1:48 Stage 1 Boss: Minoriko 2:40 Stage 2 4:20 Stage 2 Boss: Hina 5:29 Stage 3 7:43 Stage 3 Boss: NitoriTouhou 16 But You Can Freeze BulletsKirbyComment2024-02-05 | This mod lets you use the GFW freezing mechanic with any character in HSiFS, replacing the release with ice. While this mod doesn't perfectly replicate GFW's freezing mechanic (as bullets sometimes don't get frozen and the ice never damages anything), this is a more fun way to play the game in my opinion. It also makes scoring busted.
0:00 Stage 1 1:48 Stage 1 Boss: Eternity 3:36 Stage 2 5:45 Stage 2 Boss: Nemuno 8:11 Stage 3 10:55 Stage 3 Boss: Aunn 13:54 Stage 4 16:50 Stage 4 Boss: Naruko 20:05 Stage 5 22:53 Stage 5 Boss: Mai & Satono 26:47 Stage 6 28:08 Stage 6 Boss: Okina東方地霊殿 ~ Subterranean Animism Demo (v0.01a) - Lunatic No Miss No BombKirbyComment2024-01-31 | This is an LNN of the earliest version of SA. A version of the game that's noticably harder than the full game or even version 0.02a. As this demo (among other demos) doesn't have Stage Practice, the only real way of learning these stages is by creditfeeding. This was necessary for some beefed up versions of boss patterns. Mainly Parsee's midboss spell where the spawning bullets track you more effectively, Yuugi's first nonspell where the bullets have tighter gaps between them and Yuugi's first spell that was the hardest spell in the Demo before becoming the easiest spell in the full game.
The differences I could spot in 0.01a are the following:
★ Some patterns were made harder, mainly Parsee's midboss spell, Yuugi's first non and first spell. ★ Bullet clouds have a much shorter duration, making some safespots harder or impossible. ★ The blue yin-yang enemies in Stage 3 have a rotating orb effect that's placed closer to their center than in the full release. ★ Maybe just me, but the right side of healthbars sometimes don't appear to have an outline ★ There is a bug that allows any character to leave the screen from any of the four corners and moving diagonally towards them. So long as you hold the horizontal direction hugging the wall, you'll stay offscreen. If you don't go too far offscreen, your shots remain active. ★ Another bug I noticed is that score in replays that get played back get desynced with the real score. This run finished with 122,344,960 (+9m Clear Bonus) but in the replay this video shows, it finished with 122,344,390, so at some point in the replay, a score desync took place. Here is also a reference screenshot of the actual clear as I got it before saving the replay: cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/386171179758649344/1202020306030690334/image.png?ex=66ffc5e5&is=66fe7465&hm=0f62c5d4ba74d528b7777d89c7fd63cbc1a66a5acc892cd84ff5d1f028664192&
For a more detailed page about changes between this version and the full game, check out Puckish's page: touhou-memories.com/tagged/trial11
If you're looking to play this version of the game yourself, someone recently archived several of the oldest demo versions of Touhou on the Internet Archive. I intend to tackle the other demos as well, though probably not aim for LNN on all of them: archive.org/details/@jwilins
0:00 Title screen 0:20 Stage 1 1:54 Stage 1 Boss: Yamame 3:15 Stage 2 4:46 Stage 2 Boss: Parsee 5:58 Stage 3 7:35 Stage 3 Boss: Yuugi東方文花帖 ~ Shoot the Bullet UltraKirbyComment2024-01-30 | This is the Ultra Patch for Shoot the Bullet. This patch generally doubles the bullet layers or number of directions rings of bullets are being fired to. I noticed there isn't really any full footage out there that isn't TASed, so here is my version of it in it's full glory!
The difficulty increase of the patterns varies quite a bit. Most patterns get much harder, a lesser amount of them become negligably harder and one lone scene (3-2) stays identical because lasers are not affected by the patch. It was a fun challenge to go through. I wasn't able to clear four scenes because they were unreasonable or too time-consuming to figure out. I will definitely tackle Double Spoiler with this patch sometime too.
Thanks are given to @Dai_karasu for the stage backgrounds and @ASE-PRL for assisting a bit in the more fancy editing done here.
A few hours ago I discovered a new glitch in Shoot the Bullet! Whenever you take a photo of the boss, there is about half a second where the game stays frozen, but the timer keeps advancing. If you time a photo within the final 0.5 seconds of the timer, it captures the boss and is the last photo of a certain phase, the game will not recognize that the boss should run away from the timer hitting 0.00s and the phase transition takes priority.
If instead you time the photo right after the timer hits 0.00s, the boss still dashes up offscreen but this action gets interrupted halfway and the next phase continues while the boss is in an unintended location (that being above the screen), as can be seen in the 7-1 example.
Because of how the glitch works, this works in multi-phase scenes only. The scenes shown aren't all of the multi-phase scenes, but these are enough examples to get the point across. And if it wasn't clear, these replays were TASed out of convenience.
Edit: In Double Spoiler this glitch does not work. There is however a glitch where there's a 4 frame window or 10 zoom frame window where you can take a photo of the boss, the boss still runs away, but the scene is considered cleared in the results screen. Whether the scene menu actually considers it a clear is unclear. This was something I had already discovered in mid 2020 when TASing 6-4 but now did finally make a clip of: streamable.com/cetiqx
In celebration of Shoot the Bullet's 18th birthday, this video was made as a collection of the highest scoring runs in every scene of this game. I want this video to be an easy way to view scoring runs in this game without having to download replays and even inspire some of you to try out any of these interesting scenes.
Special thanks to @iaasibt5156 for providing replays that were previously unaccounted for! I know there are still some scores missing, such as a 465k score in 6-6 as mentioned in this clip: clips.twitch.tv/DreamyTransparentKimchiFutureMan
I noticed there was an improvement possible in the first phase. By placing Aya's second and third blue ring in a certain way, you can include up to 8 of her bullets into the photo, increasing the score by 2,160 points per photo. I also wasn't that happy with the second phase in my 7.659m TAS, as I didn't really try to manipulate RNG much at all during it. This time I put much more effort into it by trying to get Aya to shoot bullets of certain speeds into the area where I want to take the photo while also trying to control how much she moves vertically. This phase is where I ultimately gained the most score (39,940 points).
This video showcases the highest scoring run in every scene in Double Spoiler with Hatate. I hope this to be a way to view scoring runs in this game without downloading replays and even inspire some of you to try out any of these interesting scenes.
As a sidenote, the legitimacy of CLR's scores have been called into question. These are still shown as there is no conclusive proof and these scores (among all others) still serve as a reference point to learn about the strategies used to get these scores.
A Shoot the Bullet video will be in the works soon. I hope to have it done by the end of the year...
Not quite the 85m goal but it's close enough for me to be satisfied with it! I got a massive Stage 7 and 8. Then for Stage 9 I decided to just suicide on the first round because I wasn't feeling like having another run die to Yumemi being dumb. On the last round Yumemi got chain hit so it could've lasted a bit longer for a few more millions but so it be...
80m achieved! The big highlight was Stage 7. I got a very strong winning round on it. However the luck kind of fell apart in the final stage. I will try to reach out for something higher. 90m is technically achievable but I'll be happy if I get close to 85m.東方文花帖 ~ Double Spoiler: Aya World RecordsKirbyComment2023-11-18 | Hatate WRs: youtube.com/watch?v=kqiZ_CvZC38
This video showcases the highest scoring run in every scene in Double Spoiler with Aya. This includes scenes SP-5 to SP-9 that are accessible with Aya with a glitch. I hope this to be a way to view scoring runs in this game without downloading replays and even inspire some of you to try out any of these interesting scenes.
As a sidenote, the legitimacy of CLR's scores have been called into question. These are still shown as there is no conclusive proof and these scores (among all others) still serve as a reference point to learn about the strategies used to get these scores.
This score will be improved, as this was pretty much a non-improvement from my 2018 score and Yumemi robbed me from letting me play the final round.東方三月精 ~ Great Fairy Wars TAS: Lunatic C2 126,270,290KirbyComment2023-08-31 | Human-theory TAS Rerecord count: 18,042
This is a scoring TAS of a more obscure route. I scored this route as a means to help out Dagoth pushing more potential out of his C2 grinds. This TAS tries to play like a human (kinda turned out poorly) and it did manage to implement some new optimizations. The strategies in this TAS were however somewhat compromised and there were some extra freezes I could've done. I don't think these improvements would be enough to amass enough motivation for an extra life though.
0:00 Stage 1 2:46 Star Sapphire 6:07 Stage 2 9:13 Luna Child 13:28 Stage 3 17:22 Three FairiesTouhou 19 (v1.00a) Scoring (Seizure Warning⚠️)KirbyComment2023-08-18 | 20,834 hit Skull emoji
0:00 Round 1 3:27 Round 1 Chain 9:28 Round 2 12:55 Round 2 Chain東方獣王園 〜 Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost (v1.00a) - Lunatic No Focus 1cc (Nazrin)KirbyComment2023-08-15 | With live commentary, because there are no replays.
Nazrin is one of the hardest characters to 1cc with. There are however some strategies that can make 1cc more reasonable.
Charging to at least a Level 3 recharges your shield. This does need some luck but it always keeps you from having to use bombs, which I think are usually not at all useful. Nazrin's bomb prioritizes moving towards spirits and destructable EX attacks over the boss.
For the final boss, Nazrin's Level 2 becomes important. This summons a yellow wave that instantly kills activated spirits. This effect extends to Yachie's big otter spirits too and these spirits even count towards summoning automatic Level 3 and 4 summons. The Level 2 also gives you a pretty large amount of invincibility frames which are useful to pass through the walls of Yachie's normal and penultimate spell.
Now Nazrin's Level 3 is also important. This summons a wave of pendulums. These have a chance to make the AI get hit. It losing all hearts is also a win condition. The pendulums break AI in the same way how PoDD AI gets broken (large objects they dodge poorly). When mixing summons from the big Level 2 cancels with manual Level 3s, you can get multiple waves of pendulums being fired simultaneously, which makes it unlikely the AI will dodge all of it, even with the protection from her Level 1 and 2.
The consequence of this strategy against the final boss however is that many things get reflected from both sides, thus making the playfield more intense. This was more fun and satisfying though and really got me used to this boss.
With this goal achieved, I'm probably done playing this game seriously. I may still decide to go for an Orin clear if it's not too frustrating, as at first glance she seemed even worse than Nazrin to play and not in a good way. Her Level 2 even has a glitch where it kills you if you're too high on the screen.
0:00 Stage 1 - Orin 2:59 Stage 2 - Ran 5:24 Stage 3 - Seiran 7:49 Stage 4 - Mamizou 11:03 Stage 5 - Enoko 14:02 Stage 6 - Yachie東方獣王園 〜 Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost (v1.00a) - Lunatic No Hit No Bomb 1cc (Reimu)KirbyComment2023-08-14 | With live commentary, because there are no replays.
Reimu changed little in this game compared to the demo. Her Level 2 still does immense pointblank damage. The only thing I know changed is that her Level 2 can no longer constantly cancel Marisa's lasers, which isn't a nice change considering her lasers are hard to see through Level 2 summon.
I did clear Reimu on Normal on my very first credit, struggled for 5 hours to get my first Lunatic 1cc and after 5 more hours went back to Reimu. I then got an LNN on the first attempt.
I'm not going further and add No Focus on this one like I did for the demo, nor am I going to do No Charge. I will try to at least get a 1cc with Nazrin (and to that extent also No Focus because of her extremely sluggish focus speed), but beyond that I will probably only mess around in VS and Netplay somewhat, as there really isn't much else left for this game to offer, as it has no score.
0:00 Stage 1 - Aunn 1:24 Stage 2 - Nazrin 3:14 Stage 3 - Marisa 5:08 Stage 4 - Suika 6:55 Stage 5 - Hisami 8:59 Stage 6 - Zanmu東方獣王園 〜 Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost (v1.00a) - Lunatic No Hit 1cc (Chiyari)KirbyComment2023-08-14 | With live commentary, because there are no replays.
So there is at least one character that melts AI and I did suspect it to be this character. Chiyari (not to be confused with Chiyuri) summons spirits that chase you when you get close to them and the CPU does not have the foresight to know where to move to misdirect them. It seems they will even just sit still if they are inside of their character's hitbox.
To give a brief opinion of this game from a first impression. It is fun, but there are alot of characters that are weak on-field and the few that aren't are vastly superior in the DPS department. There are some other unfair imbalances and bugs that make things irritating. The addition of a shield mechanic I think is interesting. It does make using Level 4s to recharge them a risk-reward choice, as you will be a sitting duck for a while. The game as expected didn't add replays or score, making the incentive to replay much less, when a game like this should stay relevant for a longer time than the regular 2hus in my opinion. The game can basically only live off of PvP, but whether this is reasonable remains to be seen. Alot of characters may just get banned for just giving the other side no chance.
This is one of few scenes where real time runs can't get close to the boss. Here I try to get very close to the boss with max Risk Bonus and getting Back Shots. The waiting is done so that the boss moves towards the large swirly ring that expands the most. There's always one swirly ring that does so and I can include some of it's leftovers in the photo.
Later on in the TAS I did find out that taking defensives does change the bullet pattern. Otherwise not doing so makes the RNG for every wave pre-determined, so that way I was able to get good photos more reliably. Doing this could've probably gotten me around 629k if I fixed the first two photos and went for high optimization.
It is worth noting that the large bullets can't be micro'd through even in a TAS, except for the very last two bullets fired. I also demonstrate how using zoom frames can distort patterns. This same oddity exists in StB as well.
Struggling to get good rounds going. I was only 3.8m ahead going into Stage 9, but I also had 4 lives less, meaning I should've been ahead by far more. This run only PBd because of an 11-minute Yumemi round.東方夢時空 ~ Phantasmagoria of Dimensional Dream - Hard Yumemi 94,572,080KirbyComment2023-06-10 | Shottype Record: 10/06/2023
All the luck was great this run. I did make some sad survival errors in the lategame, making me lose my lives quicker into rounds than I wanted, but the winning rounds on Stage 7 to 9 were all great!
Second attempt of getting back to PoDD Hard for a bit again. This run randomly got a huge winning Stage 7 and 8 round, but unfortunately I wasted a life from Yumemi getting forked and winning prematurely東方獣王園 ~ Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost (Demo) - Lunatic VS Mode - Nazrin (NBNFNH)KirbyComment2023-05-12 | This is me winning against every opponent with a No Bomb No Focus No Hit Clear. This was actually not as impossible as I expected. Nazrin's Level 3 is actually surprisingly good at exploiting the AI. Basically for the same reason they're broken in PoDD - this being that they get walled by large objects they lack the proper foresight for. One thing to mention about VS Mode is that here you do actually need the AI to take enough hits. Killing a certain number of bosses isn't a win condition in this mode. The AI will have to take unintentional hits for you to win, basically.
The match against Marisa was by far the hardest, but I actually somehow got her to take hits from spirits only, which was very lucky. Meanwhile I believe my match against Aunn took just one attempt and the rest also took much much less time than Marisa.
0:00 Aunn 2:03 Nazrin 5:20 Reimu 8:59 Seiran 11:50 Marisa東方獣王園 ~ Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost (Demo) - Lunatic No Focus No Bomb No Hit (Reimu)KirbyComment2023-05-08 | I learned of how broken Reimu's Level 2 is and it essentially turning the game into PoFV Scoring. Giving you alot of gauge back to use it over and over while spawning tons of bullets for you to reflect again. For this run it's a great defensive option although it doesn't remove EX attacks and you're not invulnerable during it and it can also quick kill bosses when pointblanked. Playing this way definitely yields funny moments like these screenshots below demonstrate: cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/386171179758649344/1105246287709884566/SPOILER_image.png cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/386171179758649344/1105246288288690267/SPOILER_image.png
Sadly this madness wasn't really present in this run very much, but I'm not gonna do another run to show it off or anything.東方獣王園 ~ Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost (Demo) - Lunatic No Focus No Bomb (Nazrin)KirbyComment2023-05-08 | It took a little while but I finally managed to get a No Bomb run in addition to No Focus. No Hit doing on top of that would be way too hard for me. Seiran in this game gets insanely hard at high rank and it's not something Nazrin can really deal with. I basically just had to get lucky. At the end of the match I still hadn't taken a hit so I was able to tank through the high rank boss.東方獣王園 ~ Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost (Demo) - Lunatic No Focus 1cc (Nazrin)KirbyComment2023-05-07 | The game is a bit better than I expected, but it does still have a ton of technical problems I've run into. This is also why this footage here is recorded at half of my usual bitrate. I was expecting the game to lag alot like it did in 100BM.
Nazrin could be one of, if not one of the hardest characters to clear as of right now. I tried to 1cc Lunatic with Nazrin without using focused speed, as using this movespeed makes her move almost 4 times slower (equal to Charge Speed in StB and DS) and that's really bad for a game where slow movespeed is discouraged. She's also difficult because most credits will encounter Reimu in Stage 1 or 2, who I think is the hardest opponent in the game. There is no noticable limit to how many Yin-Yang Orbs can be on screen. I've ran into several situations where I got (close to) completely walled by them.
I'll probably write up somewhere what my final thoughts of the game are someplace else once I've collected my thoughts on it. The game is okay so far, but there are alot of things that could prove very detrimental to the replay value. This may turn into another game where you play and mess around for a few days and then never play it again, if certain features currently absent stay absent.東方夢時空 ~ Phantasmagoria of Dimensional Dream - Lunatic Yumemi 117,724,220KirbyComment2023-04-22 | Shottype Record: 22/04/2023
After a month of grinding this (and despite 2 years of not playing Lunatic) I was able to get a huge PB. This category is really nasty given the score variance is huge with Yumemi. Opponents also love to be very uncooperative and die immediately or they'll wreck you. I've been struggling alot with the final three opponents.
Yumemi lasted 4:29 this time which is a long time. Thankfully I was lucky with my survival this time. Even while playing safe that was still a good round. I've had another run a few sessions before this one that had the same score into Stage 9 (103m) where Yumemi died in less than 2 minutes and only got 107m as my final score. A 4m round compared to this being a 14m round should say something about said variance. It can be very frustrating. There's nothing you can do about this. You generally just have to hope your boss Yumemi doesn't do the cross attack alot, since the AI gets hit by that 80-90% of the time.東方夢時空 ~ Phantasmagoria of Dimensional Dream - Lunatic Yumemi 109,349,440KirbyComment2023-03-30 | Personal Best / Shottype Record: 30/03/2023 Former PB / Shottype Record: 22/04/2023
I've come back to a bit more podding on Lunatic. The last time I did was when I got the immensely strong 122m with Reimu. This was the only shot I wasn't really happy with yet, but it's also a very luckbased category.
This run started off very strong in the earlygame, even with a death in Stage 5. Unfortunately the last Chiyuri and Yumemi round scored poorly because the rounds ended far too early. Even if Yumemi just survived maybe 10 seconds longer, I could've gotten 110m. Obviously even more could've been obtained if the unfortunate luck and somewhat poor performance on the other late game rounds weren't there. I will try some more to get 110m.東方封魔録 ~ Highly Responsive to Prayers TAS - Lunatic No Movement (Makai)KirbyComment2023-03-17 | Rerecord count: 6,477
This is a new improved version of the Makai TAS I did earlier. I changed the VSync setting on Neko Project so that the immense bullet flickering is no longer present, so you get to see the actual flicker improvements from the Anniversary Edition.
As mentioned in the old video, you only get access to shooting amulets and swiping away the ball or bullets when doing a No Movement run. The old run finished with a 12 Miss 13 Bomb. This new run ends with a 7 Miss 9 Bomb clear.
I did find a way to get the panels in the very top corners during the Jigoku TAS, but the one stage that had a panel positioned in this way (Stage 16), had a bumper in the way, so it still had to be bombed. The larger amount of rerecords were mainly due to spending alot of time manipulating teleporter RNG in Stage 8 to maximize score. In Stage 19 I also spent alot of extra rerecords to make sure that Sariel's lasers didn't kill me, she didn't switch phases quickly and her phase 1 bird pattern wasn't the aimed pattern.
0:00 Stage 1-4 1:51 Stage 5 2:43 Stage 6-9 5:03 Stage 10 5:56 Stage 11-14 8:02 Stage 15 9:06 Stage 16-19 11:17 Stage 20東方封魔録 ~ Highly Responsive to Prayers TAS - Lunatic No Movement (Jigoku)KirbyComment2023-03-14 | Rerecord count: 4,847
I finished my Makai TAS recently, so I decided to tackle the Jigoku route as well. I managed to make some improvements to the first five stages, going from 4 Miss 2 Bomb to 1 Miss 2 Bomb. Another resource improvement is that I managed to make the very top-corner panels just barely hittable without having to bomb, but only with the swipe move. The ball has to be at a very specific height and the ball needs to be hit as early as possible. The only stage where there was an unhittable panel here was Stage 16. This run ends with a resource use of 4 Miss 6 Bomb.
During this run I enabled the Disp vsync option in Neko Project, as having it disabled was causing immense flicker during the Makai run. Thank you to Nmlgc for pointing that out. This run is also running a bugfixed patch of the Anniversary Edition, as the first iteration of this patch caused graphical bugs during the TLB phase of Sariel's fight that weren't in the original game, though these graphical bugs weren't really visible during the Makai run.
With the above fixes, I will now redo my Makai TAS. I can get a No Movement clear with less resources spent and also make the footage look cleaner by applying the aforementioned fixes.
0:00 Stage 1-4 1:51 Stage 5 2:43 Stage 6-9 4:38 Stage 10 5:21 Stage 11-14 7:22 Stage 15 8:36 Stage 16-19 10:45 Stage 20[old] 東方封魔録 ~ Highly Responsive to Prayers TAS - Lunatic No Movement (Makai) - Read description!KirbyComment2023-03-10 | This TAS is outdated. The new improved TAS can be found here: youtube.com/watch?v=59HcxfC6KdI
Rerecord count: 3,559
When doing No Movement, you only get access to shooting amulets and swiping away the ball or bullets. Nobody has done this in real-time yet but I do believe it's possible. This TAS could have probably spent a little less resources, but there are points where I'm forced to die because of too many bullets coming at me from an angle or because the panels in a stage are unreachable without bombing.
I played this TAS back on the first Anniversary Edition, released by ReC98 on 5 March 2023 in celebration of this game being fully reverse-engineered. Unfortunately this patch doesn't fully function on Neko Project which I had to use to make and play back the TAS. There are points where there's alot of bullet flickering, perhaps even more than the original. Perhaps once I figure out how to fix that or a more updated Neko Project comes out, I may re-upload this one. I will probably make a TAS of the Jigoku route soon.
0:00 Stage 1-4 1:19 Stage 5 2:09 Stage 6-9 3:16 Stage 10 4:16 Stage 11-14 7:07 Stage 15 8:16 Stage 16-19 11:06 Stage 20Shoot the Spoiler 3 Replay Party (All Submissions)KirbyComment2023-02-26 | This was a stream showing off all of the submitted replays from Shoot the Spoiler 3, streamed on 25 Febuary 2023. This is a tournament with 10 categories where players vote between one of two scenes. There were five scenes in Shoot the Bullet and five scenes in Double Spoiler (three with Aya and two with Hatate).
There have been nine total players who submitted for at least one of out 10 scenes in Shoot the Bullet and Double Spoiler. Five of them were new to photogame scoring. Thanks to everyone who participated and congrats to Fallen Wisp and Acaride for taking the first place in 1 and 9 of the scenes respectively.
The Shoot the Spoiler 3 tournament has now begun! These are the scenes that have been voted for. This tournament lasts until 19 Febuary 23:59 CET. To recap: StS is a fun and casual scoring competition involving the photogames: Shoot the Bullet and Double Spoiler. When you participate, any level of dedication is welcome! The goal is to simply have fun together and try out some photogame scoring!
You can submit without being in the Discord server linked above - being in the server is not a requirement to participate. There are two scorefiles for StB and DS with all scenes unlocked in case you need one. For scoring strategies beyond the ones shown in these recent StS 3 videos, you can download replays from Maribel's RoyalFlare archives linked above.
If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment or leave a direct message on Discord (KirbyComment#8925)東方封魔録 ~ Story of Eastern Wonderland - Extra ReimuC 35,311,930KirbyComment2023-01-19 | Shottype Record: 19/01/2023
Had to improvize Evil Eye Σ because I somehow died to one of it's cronies and thus had one bomb less. Would've been a good run if not for that, but I may not be getting a run past the point item birds again tomorrow.東方封魔録 ~ Story of Eastern Wonderland - Normal ReimuA 24,389,840 (WR)KirbyComment2023-01-09 | World Record: 09/01/2023
Only the second run to get past the orb spam section of Stage 3. It kills you way too much because they like to stack up and the non-piercing side shots don't kill them fast enough. No deaths this time too. I only really accidentally let Marisa die because I miscounted. I've been doing this embarrassingly often. Still satisfied though.東方封魔録 ~ Story of Eastern Wonderland - Normal ReimuA 23,706,110KirbyComment2023-01-07 | World Record: 07/01/2023 Former World Record: 09/01/2023
ReimuA's piercing shot doesn't occupy a whole lot of the screen, meaning that if enemies stack up too much, you basically just take a death. That's annoyingly common in Stage 2 and 3. I got past those two parts once but then the rest of the run went into the gutter. With savestates my run scores around 25.3m.東方夢時空 ~ Phantasmagoria of Dimensional Dream - Hard Yumemi 79,791,440KirbyComment2022-12-26 | Shottype Record: 25/12/2022 Former Shottype Record: 08/06/2023
The third Shoot the Spoiler tournament is around the corner! StS is a fun and casual scoring competition involving the photogames: Shoot the Bullet and Double Spoiler.
If this peaks your interest, the way it's going to work is that we will be having 10 categories. Each category has two scenes you can vote between before StS starts. The categories will be laid out as follows:
• 4 Shoot the Bullet scenes • 3 Double Spoiler scenes playing as Aya • 2 Double Spoiler scenes playing as Hatate • 1 Fan Favorite scene, picking 3 out of 20 of the scenes played in Shoot the Spoiler 1 and 2.
To help your decision, these two videos provide a quick and organized showcase of the scenes you can pick between.
The Shoot the Spoiler 3 competition will last from January 20th 18:00 CET until Febuary 19th 23:59 CET. You can vote for the scenes in the 10 categories until three days before the competition starts (January 17th 23:59 CET). When you participate, any level of dedication is welcome! You don't have to play all of the scenes. You could play only your most favourite scene, or give all 10 scenes some attention. The goal is to have fun together and try out some photogame scoring!
For the tenth category, you can vote three out of the 20 categories played in the previous two Shoot the Spoiler tournaments. Whichever scene gets the most votes will be played as the tenth category. If the winner is a Double Spoiler category, there will be a second poll in the Shoot the Spoiler server to decide which character we play. The voting choices for this tenth category is linked at the top of the description.
For the tenth category, you can vote three out of the 20 categories played in the previous two Shoot the Spoiler tournaments. Whichever scene gets the most votes will be played as the tenth category. If the winner is a Double Spoiler category, there will be a second poll in the Shoot the Spoiler server to decide which character we play. The replays shown here are the winning scores from the previous two tournaments.
0:00 Choice 1 (StB 1-5) 0:59 Choice 2 (StB 7-6) 2:47 Choice 3 (StB 9-6) 4:33 Choice 4 (StB EX-3) 6:04 Choice 5 (DS 1-4) 6:32 Choice 6 (DS 8-3) 9:01 Choice 7 (DS 8-6) 11:00 Choice 8 (DS 9-6) 13:11 Choice 9 (DS 9-2) 14:28 Choice 10 (DS 12-4) 15:04 Choice 11 (StB 2-5) 16:24 Choice 12 (StB 6-8) 18:04 Choice 13 (StB 9-5) 19:54 Choice 14 (StB 10-8) 21:53 Choice 15 (DS 3-5) 22:52 Choice 16 (DS 5-4) 24:45 Choice 17 (DS 6-4) 25:37 Choice 18 (DS 10-7) 27:39 Choice 19 (DS 4-3) 28:56 Choice 20 (DS 12-8)東方文花帖 ~ Double Spoiler - RNG ManipulationKirbyComment2022-12-15 | From what I understand, if you let a replay play out til the end, it will consistently store a specific RNG value and to that extent, the exact same one. When you then start playing a scene afterwards, the RNG will start out the same. In this example video, the pattern in 4-7 fires it's bullets in exactly the same places.
What I learned from TASing though would suggest to me that this would only be useful for the first photo for at least some RNG-based scenes, as the timing of the photo and the usage of Charge Speed will influence what happens next. So far this only seems useful for the first photo of certain scenes, like 4-7 and 9-7. The pattern changes midrun after taking the first photo.
In practice you'd basically have to make replays where you kill yourself as quick as possible and then test any replay to check whether they give you RNG you want.
CycloneFN seems to have discovered this in ISC originally: clips.twitch.tv/TolerantTemperedTildeSwiftRage-iMlMkhmHlrd22wl3Shoot the Spoiler 2 Replay Party (All Submissions)KirbyComment2022-12-11 | This was a stream of all submitted replays from Shoot the Spoiler 2, streamed on 4 July 2021. This is a tournament with 10 categories where players vote between one of two scenes. There were four scenes in Shoot the Bullet, four scenes in Double Spoiler playing as Aya and two scenes in Double Spoiler playing as Hatate. The goal was simply to have fun together and try out some photogame scoring. I was pretty happy with how it played out and the stream was fun too (bad mic quality aside w).
Shoot the Spoiler 3 is expected to be around the corner, so look forward to that. Two videos will be released that will showcase the scenes you can pick between, once again split up in 10 different categories. If there are any questions or possible suggestions you want to ask about, feel free to leave a comment or a private message. This upcoming tournament will be hosted by me this time around and I will likely not participate during it myself.