鏈縁蛇叢釼〜 Earthen Miraculous Sword - Unreal Mode TLB 1cc (Kuroji)

Jaimers 2026-09-23 | 鏈縁蛇叢釼〜 Earthen Miraculous Sword - Unreal Mode TLB 1cc (Kuroji)

隅人王 ~ Sumikkou - 2-ALL Clear (No-Miss)

Jaimers 2023-06-18 | Sumikkou is doujin shmup from 2008 that was developed by Sumikko-soft.
This game only existed as a physical disc pre-order bonus for the special edition of one of Sumikko-soft's other eroge visual novel games during a highly specific point in time.
It was therefore exceedingly rare, and it was actually on the brink of becoming lost media because you just couldn't get it anywhere and it was never dumped.
It wasn't until recently that we found a JP site that had exactly _one_ disc in stock. We quickly imported it and here we are. Truly one of the greatest preservation efforts of the community. 2000 yen well spent.

As you can probably tell, the game is very much a parody of Tatsujin Ou.
Same presentation, same system, same shots, though the shot balance is quite different in this one. In the original, red was by far the best and green by far the worst, but this is reversed here. I can only assume to troll Tatsujin Ou players.
Blue has some use against the stage 2 boss since it's a tiny target which green isn't very useful against.

Would have tried no-miss no-bomb but I don't think the last boss is actually possible because the hitboxes are too big.

Ending and credits are the same between loops, so I skipped the first one.

There is also some Phelios, Batrider and Xexex in here, the guys that made this were at least pretty into shmups.

I'm glad this game exists and was preserved at least, you don't see many Tatsujin Ou fangames.

00:00 - Intro
00:27 - Stage 1-1
02:55 - Stage 1-2
05:29 - Stage 1-3
08:27 - Stage 2-1
10:49 - Stage 2-2
13:16 - Stage 2-3
16:06 - Ending & Credits

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[NS] Star Gagnant - Arcade Mode - Meijin 1cc (Autofire)

Jaimers 2023-06-14 | A clear of the highest difficulty of one of the most unusual shmup releases of the year.

Developed by Terarin Games and overseen by Takahashi Meijin himself, Star Gagnant is a crowdfunded joined effort to bring you a new shmup where the central gameplay mechanic is... not having autofire?
Probably the only new shmup released that has celebrity endorsement.

The game is a throwback to Star Soldier and the various Hudson Soft caravan shmups of the 80's, where you had to score as many points as possible in 2 to 5 minute modes.
Hudson Soft yearly held major in-person competitions for these games starting from 1985, which is where the caravan format really took off, with like 300 people attending these events.
Autofire wasn't really a thing yet back then and mashing was seen as a highly desirable skill to score higher in these competitions. Takahashi Meijin flourished during this time for being the fastest button masher alive, and his record of firing 16 times per second gained him absolute legend status. He also basically became the sales person for Hudson Soft during this time since, besides the mashing, he was also really good at presenting and marketing the events and games to kids especially. Which eventually garnering a lot of media attention and made him a bit of a celebrity. His extraversion got him appearances on several Japanese variety TV shows and he even starred in a couple of games like Adventure Island. Even to this day he remains a bit of a pop culture icon. He basically made a career out of this that he's still reaping the benefits of to this day.
He recently crowdfunded Star Gagnant together with Terarin because he wanted to create a new experience where he can spread the joy of button mashing to a new audience.

In this game you mash to shoot and you need to mash faster to reach stronger shot levels.
In order to reach max power, you need to mash at 9hz, or 9 times per second, which is uh, a lot. The 2nd highest shot level isn't that much weaker at least, but it does make a difference with speedkilling. There is an autofire button for the weakest shot level, but this does basically no damage and is not very useful.
The stronger shot levels consume a meter that recharges over time and by picking up items. This meter drains like instantly for anything higher than 16hz, I assume to counteract external autofire software.

Still wild to see a game like this being released in 2023.
With the industry and community having left mashing in shmups behind several decades ago, it feels a bit out of touch with modern sensibilities and advancements, where mashing nowadays is mostly seen as an archaic relic of the past that was impractical and also dangerous to your health.
Still though, the mashing in this might be a fun gimmick if you're into that, I might just not be the target audience for this.

The bigger problem with this game I'd say is the insane input lag.
It's about 6 frames from what I've been told, which makes the game not very fun to play.
It's also quite expensive at 40 bucks.

The game itself is a somewhat average Star Soldier clone but the quality is all over the place. Stage 1 and 3 have decent pacing and action, but the final stage especially has like nothing happening in it. The caravan stages definitely seem much better about this at least.

00:00 - Intro
00:42 - Stage 1 - Space Station
03:37 - Stage 2 - Space Colony
07:34 - Stage 3 - Asteroid Belt
12:23 - Stage 4 - Ice Planet
16:38 - Stage 5 - Fire Planet
21:26 - Stage 6 - Rush Into the Space Fortress
25:44 - Stage 7 - Space Fortress Center
33:46 - Ending & Credits

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[AC] Twinkle Star Sprites - Story Mode - Lvl 8 No-Death Clear (The First Versus Shmup!)

Jaimers 2023-06-11 | Twinkle Star Sprites was made by ADK and came out in arcades in 1996.
It was the very first versus shmup of its kind and was something truly unique at the time. Afterwards the format was copied by basically everyone and this has since become the standard format for a vs shmup as we know it.
Despite that, Twinkle Star Sprites has remained the gold standard, no other game since has really managed to match the quality and depth of the original. Which is really impressive when you think about how this was made when there was zero precedent on how a game like this was supposed to even look or play.
Their original vision was something of a combination of a shmup and a versus puzzle game, which I think sums up this game pretty well.

Level 8 is the highest difficulty in the game, and on the arcade board is only accessible via the service menu.
Unlike a lot of arcade games, difficulty makes quite a substantial difference in this. The opponent is far more aggressive and doesn't die nearly as quick, making for much more intense matches.
Some would say it's the definitive way to play the game as the AI tends to die too quickly on Level 4.

Resources:
Insane strategy document with practice tools: docs.google.com/document/d/1k8kBUJfGd1g5rbcCqS_6qCtkzSk2FGAixgWwtmbfAgs/edit#
Formation and Perfects guide: nicovideo.jp/watch/sm42124804
STG Weekly breakdown: youtube.com/watch?v=fLOu02WSyrs

Very simplified tl;dr
- Destroy formations with a single chain reaction to get Perfects. Perfects give more meter, they increase the speed of your attacks and it also speeds up the spawn of the next Fever orb.
- Destroying enemies creates fireballs that get thrown at the opponent. Enemy explosions can then reflect these fireballs back. If three fireballs get reflected back a second time, it triggers a boss attack.
- The fireballs that were already reflected back once flash, so only reflect these back and dodge the normal ones to not get countered with a boss attack.
- After a certain amount of waves, one of the enemies in a formation gets replaced with a Fever orb. Fever orbs will transform every enemy you destroy into a fireball for a short amount of time. This greatly increases your offence and it gets pretty wild when both players get Fever at the same time.

The first four stages are fairly easy, the cpu dies quite fast in these.
Stage 5 is the first big gatekeeper, the cpu here can last a really long time.
Stage 6 and 7 both have ridiculously overpowered opponents that also last a really long time and are the main challenge of the run (these characters are generally banned from tournaments for being so OP lol).

The AI is quite sophisticated in this, it can even perform complex maneuvers like chaining Perfects.
Normal attacks don't faze it, it requires significant pressure to land a hit. So you really need to go all-out trying to combine boss attacks with level 2 attacks while during a fever.
Since the AI's specialty is micrododging through everything with TAS-like precision, it tends to struggle with really big hitboxes where it can't easily move out of the way at the last second. Characters like Really Till who's boss often tries to physically ram the opponent, are really good for this.

Not pictured: me getting owned by the cpu for 26 hours.
Game is mad fun though, so I didn't really mind spending that amount of time.
Runs are short, never boring, very varied, and deaths always feel like you could have done something better, which really adds to that 'one more try' feeling.

The game gives you a rating at the end which is mostly based on speed and how fast you complete the game. On Level 4 these requirements are still pretty tight.
The requirements are not adjusted in any way for Level 8 lol.

This game had a whole bunch of ports over the years.
The Saturn port is notable for having a TON of extra stuff added to the game. Like an anime opening and a Special Saturn Mode with reworked mechanics, art, an arrange soundtrack, voice acting and an exclusive new character. It even had a whole extra disk devoted to just extra's and fanart, it was pretty wild. Though it comes with its own flaws like a total lack of slowdown and the audio sounding like they sampled it from an arcade cab underwater.
The best port to buy for the original arcade version is the Arcade Archives version from Hamster on modern consoles.
Don't buy the Steam version, it's a horribly butchered port by a company that does not care.
For actual multiplayer there is a fairly active community for this game over at Fightcade.

Intro: 00:00
Stage 1 - Really Till - 01:21
Stage 2 - Nanja Monja - 02:30
Stage 3 - Arthur Schmitt - 03:48
Stage 4 - Macky and Pentell - 05:13
Stage 5 - Dark Ran - 07:28
Stage 6 - Mevious - 10:51
Stage 7 - Queen Memory - 13:11
Ending & Credits - 15:47

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[AC] Dodonpachi Daioujou - Stage 5 Secret Technique

Jaimers 2023-05-24 | How to skip the post-midboss spam.

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[Nokia] Ketsui DX - Special Mode ALL Clear - 7,323,540 (G-MODE Archives)

Jaimers 2023-05-21 | Turn on captions for some extra text commentary during the video.

Ketsui DX is a special port of Ketsui that was made in 2005 for flip phones of all things, which was recently ported to Switch courtesy of the G-Mode Archives project.
It's extremely dank and weird, it's quite a curiosity. It's obviously nowhere near the quality of the actual arcade game, but for what it is, it's kind of really good??? It's really impressive how much of Ketsui they managed to recreate on what was basically a calculator.
Most of the Cave games seemed to have gotten a flipphone port back in the day, it's quite wild.

This game is definitely better than the DOJ one I played earlier at least. If only because there are less drums.
Was waiting for this to come to Steam as well but this never got ported there for some reason.

Special is a hidden difficulty that basically changes the game into the Ura loop of the arcade game (at least as much as it can on this hardware). Patterns are buffed and everything shoots blue revenge bullets now, as well as the chip system being changed to accommodate this. This is also the only mode where you fight the true last boss DOOM at the end if you're on 1cc pace. You can't practice this boss either. Special is quite hard, I can't imagine doing this on an actual flipphone.

Used Type B for this run mainly for its speed. Before I used Type A because it has a really powerful spread shot that wrecks stages, but the speed of that ship is so slow that you can barely dodge anything, it's awful. So I guess it evens out? lol

One pretty significant difference from the arcade version to this is that you barely get any i-frames after a death. This sucks a lot against DOOM's bomb shield but also just in general.
Dying also means you can't get your powerups back and without powerups nothing dies. So a lot of the time you're basically forced to use a bomb after a death to get your powerups back.
One trick to mitigate this is dying near the top of the screen. This way the powerups will bounce of the top and drift down the screen, going towards where you respawn instead of away from it.

Scoring in this mode works basically the same as Omote in the arcade version.
Destroy enemies from far away so they shoot more revenge bullets and these revenge bullets get added to the stage multiplier.
Destroy low-value enemies with shot and high-value enemies with lock to cash in on the multiplier.
The score extend at 5 million is actually kinda hard to get, so you do need to do some scoring.

00:00 - Intro
00:38 - Stage 1
03:10 - Stage 2
05:55 - Stage 3
08:30 - Stage 4
11:34 - Stage 5
15:35 - TLB
17:12 - Ending & Credits

Probably the first time this mode ever got cleared.

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Touhou 19 東方獣王園 ~ Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost (Demo) - Perfect Lunatic 1cc (NMNB) (Reimu)

Jaimers 2023-05-07 | Okay no-damage, no-bomb run this time.

Demo for the new Touhou game came out.
After almost 18 years we're actually getting a new versus Phantasmagoria-like game, who would have thought.

The more I play this game the more it basically feels like a repeat of Touhou 18.5.
Stages with random enemy formations with random bosses that use uninspired repeated attacks, with basically the same mechanics and even using the same engine. It even has that same unpolished and underdeveloped vibe that game had. Where the implementation of the mechanics was half-baked, the random enemy formations were shallow, and the boss attacks copy-pasted.

Even just compared to Touhou 9 and 3, who both had unique mechanics and a breakneck pace.
There are just some fundamentally wrong decisions being made here. Being underpowered at all times really ruins the game flow, nothing dies and it really makes your shots feel like they don't have any impact or weight to them. And with no exciting visual feedback it all just feels very unsatisfying to play.
As a Touhou versus game it's very much a poor man's Phantasmagoria so far.

The actual versus part seems kinda tacked on as well, where the opponent screen is kinda there just for show. The CPU won't ever die from getting hit and you're just waiting for it to send its boss over so you can defeat it and end the stage.
I've heard using level 3 and 4 charges makes it send the boss quicker, and this might be a way to circumvent the old Phantasmagoria problem of just waiting for the CPU to die, but I dunno, it just doesn't feel as satisfying.

In my first impressions video I mostly chalked most of these problems up to the ability cards making a return.
Where the game is purposefully gimped so that the cards can have a meaning, which is fixing the parts of the game that were sabotaged before. But I'm not so sure now.
A big reason for this is that you CANNOT select starting cards. Only in VS mode can you select -one- card at the beginning. Meaning that the action of grinding card unlocks can't make the overall gameplay experience better. There aren't that many meaningful card abilities either (in the demo at least). Though there are a select few drops that definitely make a big impact, like being able to charge faster or getting a smaller hitbox. But again, it's entirely random if you get these or not, which sucks.
All card effects so far: cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/507305721759662112/1104718853801521294/Screenshot_20230507_051743_Discord.jpg

I said before that this game is more PoDD-like than PoFV before, but this seems to be entirely based on which character you use.
Reimu's level 2 can chain bullet cancels quite well, but Marisa has zero bullet cancelling abilities whatsoever. A pretty big downside in a game that can throw some complete nonsense at you.

Speaking of nonsense, the balance!
Reimu and Seiran have insane spam abilities and are waaaaay more powerful than all the other shots. You can see Seiran's nonsense in action in this video, and Reimu can randomly do things like this: cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/888726291724009512/1104842451384029276/image.png
Meanwhile Nazrin is worthless. Her focus shot also has a baffling slow movement speed that makes her basically unplayable, she moves at like 1 pixel per frame (yes she's a mouse but don't make a character in your video game useless over a joke).

I used Reimu for this run because her lvl2 is very strong and it can cancel bullets (not all bullet types), if you place the lvl2 on top of a boss it can also basically instakill them. The downside of her lvl2 is that you can't see any bullets while it's up. She also has the advantage of well... not having to fight Reimu.
HOWEVER, she has to fight stage 3 Marisa, who is competing for the most bullshit boss prize.
Marisa's lasers can -completely- wall you if you're unlucky, which happened more times than I'd like to admit. Reimu can somewhat mitigate this by using level 2's, but lasers can't be fully cancelled, so sometimes a random hitbox just flies through the cracks and you still just die.

Also this demo is insanely unstable.
I lost count how many times it has crashed for me now. Restarting a run makes the game crash more often than it does not.
Bizarre bugs as well, like Marisa's shot lasers randomly stop working, making you lose huge damage for no reason. And the game softlocking if you lose under certain conditions.

There is no scoring whatsoever, even though there is a chaining system? Huh?
Not seeing much replay value in this game other than maybe netplay if that's a thing, but the demo at least didn't have it. Maybe the Steam version will have something?
Also no replay system, -again-.
Losing more features each game.

Anyway go play Twinkle Star Sprites.

00:00 - Intro
00:05 - Stage 1: Seiran
01:23 - Stage 2: Aunn
04:00 - Stage 3: Marisa

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Touhou 19 東方獣王園 ~ Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost (Demo) - Lunatic 1cc (Marisa)

Jaimers 2023-05-07 | Quick Lunatic 1cc and first impressions for the time being.

Demo for the new Touhou game came out.
After almost 18 years we're actually getting a new versus Phantasmagoria-like game, who would have thought.

Demo only lets you pick from 5 characters and it only seems to be 3 stages?
Game seems to take more from PoDD than PoFV, as there doesn't seem to be any real massive bullet cancel moves.
Also holy shit new boss sprites (player sprites are still the same from 18 years ago though).

The first thing you probably notice is how insanely tanky every single enemy is.
I had to spam Marisa's level 1 to even kill a single zako, it's disgusting.
This is probably because ability cards rear their ugly heads again and make another comeback in this.
As always since the introduction of these horrible things, the game is gimped to near unplayable levels and then you have to 'unlock' the good game mechanics until the game becomes not trash.

There is also no scoring whatsoever, even though there is a chaining system? Huh?

No replays and I'm also not seeing any netplay or anything, which I really didn't expect anyway. Maybe the Steam version will have something?

Marisa seems to have inherited Chiyuri's angled lasers, which is quite funny.

Still longer than Kioh Gyoku.

00:00 - Intro
00:25 - Stage 1: Nazrin
01:24 - Stage 2: Aunn
04:01 - Stage 3: Reimu

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Touhou 束方嘘時空～ Fools Rush In - Lunatic No-Miss Clear (Ellen)

Jaimers 2023-05-07 | A 1cc of this is a forced no-miss.

Okay a clear with a non-fast character this time.
Ellen is incredibly slow, but she can make up for it with insane damage.
Her level 1 just obliterates everything, and you can spam it incredibly fast.
Downside of a slow character is that it takes much longer to reach the boss, which greatly increases the chances of everything snowballing out of control. You also can't make many mistakes, once the opponent catches up to you, you usually already lost.

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Touhou Fools Rush In is a remake of Touhou 3 that was released back in 2017 by Jynx.
Jynx is mostly known nowadays for the Len'en series, but before that he was pretty famous for releasing videos of remakes of the PC-98 Touhou games. This used to be a yearly event every April Fools. He never released any of those remakes though, except for this one.

That being said this game is still kind of a beta and never really got finished.
It only has the bare minimum of features completed and the game is completely jacked in terms of balance, only 3 out of 9 characters can really beat the game. The game also has a lot of concepts that sound good on paper but don't seem to work well in practice.
The game was mostly used by Jynx as a bonus to promote his arrange album that he released back then. In order to actually get more than two tracks to play in the game you had to actually buy the arrange album and put its music in the game folder. Game is free but the music is not.

The game uses a pretty unique system that mixes the gameplay of the Phantasmagoria games with the racing element of Raizing's Kingdom Grand Prix.
The goal is to reach the finish line and beat the boss before the other player. Each character has different racing speeds and you get stalled whenever a midboss is on screen or when you get hit. Unlike Kingdom Grand Prix though, you don't race faster by moving up the screen.
There is health in this, but HP recovers so quickly that it's basically impossible to die from getting hit.

New mechanics in this are the power meter and the midboss radar.
The meter on the left represents your power meter and it goes up for killing enemies and using charges, you lose a chunk of power when you get hit. I think it's a pretty neat way of fixing the problem that the original PoDD had where the most optimal survival strat was to just never shoot at all.
The midboss radar is the circle at the bottom of the screen and the dot indicates where random midboss encounters are, when these dots turn red the encounter gets triggered. You want to hug the opposite side of the screen they're on to "push" these midbosses away before they get triggered. That being said you can hug the side they're on and still have enough time to push them away before they trigger. The right side is safer than the left because it's easier to get rammed from behind by a popcorn on the left.

The racing and midboss radar seem interesting, but the implementation seems a lot to be desired.
For the radar it mostly just makes you stay to the side of the screen all game, and the racing speed just makes the slower characters super unviable.

The trick to winning is to only use level 4 charges in stages to reflect midbosses back and then spam level 2 charges during the boss to cancel bullets while sneaking in level 1's to do more damage.
Basically every time there is a midboss on your screen, you're losing. You want to get rid of these asap. Luckily the AI didn't read the manual about the midboss radar and will not make conscious attempts to avoid encounters.
Things can spiral out of the control REALLY fast, and suddenly you get endless waves of impossible spam. You have to make sure you don't make too many waves too fast.

Troublesome bosses:
Marisa - Insane laser spam that can easily wall you over and over.
Kana - Hard because she has the fastest racing speed. If you get hit too much you might not be able to catch up.
Chiyuri - See Marisa.
Yumemi - Yumemi has the slowest racing speed but she has an INSANELY jacked boss. It's actually possible to die here from getting hit too much because level 2's don't protect you from the cross spam.

Also yeah this game had a fanmade English patch, which is absolutely wild to me.

Download the game here:
freem.ne.jp/win/game/15082

Buy the soundtrack on Bandcamp here:
tricknostalgie.bandcamp.com/album/3

In order to get the music to play in the game, download the music as ogg files from Bandcamp and rename the files in this manner: https://i.imgur.com/ZHweXR7.png

English patch:
drive.google.com/open?id=1Op_7zbbTG9-fUTIrfUPZXT1NqGe9Vdds

Intro: 00:00
Stage 1 - Reimu Hakurei : 00:26
Stage 2 - Kotohime : 03:09
Stage 3 - Mima : 06:32
Stage 4 - Marisa Kirisame : 09:21
Stage 5 - Rikako: 12:45
Stage 6 - Kana Anaberal: 15:58
Stage 7 - Ellen: 19:07
Stage 8 - Chiyuri Kitashirakawa : 22:22
Stage 9 - Yumemi Okazaki : 25:35

Seihou 2 稀翁玉 ~ Kioh Gyoku - Perfect Clear (NMNB) (Yuuka)

Jaimers 2023-05-07 | A clear of the game without dying or bombing.

Kioh Gyoku came out in 2001 and was the 2nd game in the Seihou series.
Otherwise knows as the sister series to Touhou, since both series originated from the original Amusement Makers doujin group that ZUN was also a part of.
All the music in this game is also done by ZUN, though apart from the last boss you don't get to hear any of them because everything dies so fast.
He also drew the art for Yuuka, who very much exists in this game.

Kioh Gyoku is Seihou's take on a versus Twinkle Star Sprites-like, like the Phantasmagoria's are to Touhou.
It's a strange game for sure, it feels more like a tech demo than an actual full game.
Lots of basic features seem missing (like difficulty selections, or like... an ending) and it has that vibe of something that doesn't feel quite finished. It's also -insanely- short, clocking in under less time to beat the game than it takes to even put ads in a Youtube video.
Though part of the short length is that the AI just dies if you so much as look at it funny. The AI for anything but the last boss just seems incapable of handling anything you throw at it.
They also make you fight only 3 of the 6 main characters, which I don't understand, they could have added 3 more stages to the game and it would have been fine.

The first three stage opponents are randomized from the main six, in stage 4 and 5 you always fight Morgan and Muse.
Out of the main six Erich is definitely by far the worst opponent. His special fires extremely fast aimed lasers that are really hard to react to and can kill you in like two hits.
Morgan is extremely obnoxious because her special is spawning huge bullets right on top of your hitbox. Muse mostly just takes long but is otherwise not that bad.

This game is all about grazing. Grazing charges your meters and it also sends garbage to the opponent. You can chain grazes together for a big attack.

Yuuka is quite good because her level 1 charge attack can kill all enemies on screen at once and send all their revenge bullets to one spot to graze.

00:00 - Intro
00:20 - Stage 1: Gates
01:00 - Stage 2: Marie
01:40 - Stage 3: VIVIT
02:27 - Stage 4: Morgan
03:13 - Stage 5: Muse

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Touhou 束方嘘時空～ Fools Rush In - Lunatic No-Miss Clear (Mima)

Jaimers 2023-04-27 | A 1cc of this is a forced no-miss.

Touhou Fools Rush In is a remake of Touhou 3 that was released back in 2017 by Jynx.
Jynx is mostly known nowadays for the Len'en series, but before that he was pretty famous for releasing videos of remakes of the PC-98 Touhou games. This used to be a yearly event every April Fools. He never released any of those remakes though, except for this one.

That being said this game is still kind of a beta and never really got finished.
It only has the bare minimum of features completed and the game is completely jacked in terms of balance, only 3 out of 9 characters can really beat the game. The game also has a lot of concepts that sound good on paper but don't seem to work well in practice.
The game was mostly used by Jynx as a bonus to promote his arrange album that he released back then. In order to actually get more than two tracks to play in the game you had to actually buy the arrange album and put its music in the game folder. Game is free but the music is not.

The game uses a pretty unique system that mixes the gameplay of the Phantasmagoria games with the racing element of Raizing's Kingdom Grand Prix.
The goal is to reach the finish line and beat the boss before the other player. Each character has different racing speeds and you get stalled whenever a midboss is on screen or when you get hit. Unlike Kingdom Grand Prix though, you don't race faster by moving up the screen.
There is health in this, but HP recovers so quickly that it's basically impossible to die from getting hit.

New mechanics in this are the power meter and the midboss radar.
The meter on the left represents your power meter and it goes up for killing enemies and using charges, you lose a chunk of power when you get hit. I think it's a pretty neat way of fixing the problem that the original PoDD had where the most optimal survival strat was to just never shoot at all.
The midboss radar is the circle at the bottom of the screen and the dot indicates where random midboss encounters are, when these dots turn red the encounter gets triggered. You want to hug the opposite side of the screen they're on to "push" these midbosses away before they get triggered. That being said you can hug the side they're on and still have enough time to push them away before they trigger. The right side is safer than the left because it's easier to get rammed from behind by a popcorn on the left.

The racing and midboss radar seem interesting, but the implementation seems a lot to be desired.
For the radar it mostly just makes you stay to the side of the screen all game, and the racing speed just makes the slower characters super unviable.

The trick to winning is to only use level 4 charges in stages to reflect midbosses back and then spam level 2 charges during the boss to cancel bullets while sneaking in level 1's to do more damage.
Basically every time there is a midboss on your screen, you're losing. You want to get rid of these asap. Luckily the AI didn't read the manual about the midboss radar and will not make conscious attempts to avoid encounters.
Things can spiral out of the control REALLY fast, and suddenly you get endless waves of impossible spam. You have to make sure you don't make too many waves too fast.

Troublesome bosses:
Marisa - Insane laser spam that can easily wall you over and over.
Kana - Hard because she has the fastest racing speed. If you get hit too much you might not be able to catch up.
Chiyuri - See Marisa.
Yumemi - Yumemi has the slowest racing speed but she has an INSANELY jacked boss. It's actually possible to die here from getting hit too much because level 2's don't protect you from the cross spam.

Also yeah this game had a fanmade English patch, which is absolutely wild to me.

Download the game here:
freem.ne.jp/win/game/15082

Buy the soundtrack on Bandcamp here:
tricknostalgie.bandcamp.com/album/3

In order to get the music to play in the game, download the music as ogg files from Bandcamp and rename the files in this manner: https://i.imgur.com/ZHweXR7.png

English patch:
drive.google.com/open?id=1Op_7zbbTG9-fUTIrfUPZXT1NqGe9Vdds

Intro: 00:00
Stage 1 - Kotohime : 00:30
Stage 2 - Reimu Hakurei : 02:44
Stage 3 - Marisa Kirisame : 05:20
Stage 4 - Kana Anaberal : 08:15
Stage 5 - Rikako Asakura : 10:50
Stage 6 - Ellen : 13:32
Stage 7 - Mima : 16:42
Stage 8 - Chiyuri Kitashirakawa : 19:40
Stage 9 - Yumemi Okazaki : 23:37

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Hollow Knight - Lunatic Radiance - No-Hit

Jaimers 2023-04-17 | A mod for Hollow Knight that slightly increases Absolute Radiance's bullet count.

Somehow missed this one.
The latest entry into Ythundyth never-ending quest to turn every popular new indie title into a bullet hell shmup.

Took about 45 minutes, most of the time was spent just smashing my head against the opener until it let me through. First and third patterns are static but sometimes safespots randomly don't work, it's very weird. The safespot for the spiral attack is 100% consistent though.
I've heard that the Linux and Windows versions behave somewhat differently, which is wild to me.

Hitboxes are absolutely tiny and you can get away with quite some nonsense.
Also uh yeah, speaking of visibility, there's SUPPOSED to be a white dot on the middle of your cloud signaling your hitbox and actually letting you know where you are. But from my experience this dot will randomly just not show up between attempts. This run happened to be one of those times!

Mod download:
gamebanana.com/mods/151161

This mod is kind of a pain in the butt to install because it only works on older versions of Hollow Knight and only on an older version of the modding tool used for Hollow Knight mods.
Took more time to set this up than actually beating the boss.

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Dodonpachi 2-6 C-S Secret Technique

Jaimers 2023-04-16 | Some old unlisted videos from 2013 that Youtube automatically made into Youtube Shorts.
Very bizarre.

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Dodonpachi 2-4 C-S Secret Technique

Dodonpachi 1-6 Boss Final Secret Technique

Touhou 東方命萃酒 ~ Resurrection of Heavens Liquor - Lunatic No-Bomb 1cc (Aya)

Jaimers 2023-04-01 | Turn on captions for some extra text comments during the video.

I can't believe it took me this long to get to one of the best Touhou fangames.
Resurrection of Heaven's Liquor is one of those games that needs no introduction, it was one of the very first fangames of its kind, exploding onto the scene back in 2008 and it changed everything.
It really set the standard back then, and even now nothing has really come close to topping it.

It was also massively ambitious, with branching paths sporting up to 12 different stages depending on the shottype you selected. Something you rarely see nowadays.

The stage 4 boss can either be Remilia, Yukari, Kaguya or Kanoko.
The decision to just play all of their themes at once for the boss music is still inspiring to this day.
From my testing Yukari was the easiest so I went with her.

Aya is a secret character and you unlock her by 1cc'ing Hard or higher.
She's easily the best shottype (and character), being just slightly stronger than the strongest normal shottype, which is Mokou. Her pointblank is really powerful and she still does good damage from afar. Her only weakness is that she's the fastest.
Aya has no dialogue though, which is a shame. She has no ending or credits either, but for the purpose of showing it off I edited in Mokou's ending.

There is another mechanic where you can trigger a few seconds of invincibility if you fill the bar in the bottom-left, but I'm not skilled enough to use it in a meaningful way since it activates automatically and takes like two stages before it can be used.

I guess it goes without saying, but this has insane input lag and insanely big hitboxes.
Good controls and hitboxes weren't invented in Touhou yet.

00:00 - Intro
00:30 - Stage 1B
02:40 - Stage 2
05:50 - Stage 3
09:31 - Stage 4B
12:55 - Stage 5
16:55 - Stage 6
22:04 - Ending & Credits

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[Steam] Akai Katana Shin - True Last Boss (No-Miss, No-Bomb)

Jaimers 2023-03-05 | Turn on captions for extra commentary during the video.

You trigger the TLB by not dying until stage 7.
If you fulfill those conditions the normal last boss will get replaced by this ultra-buffed version.
Shin is the only mode with a TLB (though the Exa version also added it to Zetsu mode).

The boss is not too bad but it's very technical execution-wise.
Phase 1 is mostly easy with the safespot, but for phase 2 it's very important to finish it at a specific time so you can cancel lasers for energy and have the crystal be in the middle of the screen.
Where the crystal is on the last phase is dependent on when you end the 2nd phase.
You need it to be close on the left so you can pointblank it for steel and keep a cancel loop going. The last phase is mostly undodgeable without. Pointblank the crystal for steel and hit the lasers to recharge energy.

There is no way to practice the TLB via the practice mode.
There is however an exploit you can do. In normal play, keep using the Restart option to reset stages until you no-miss to stage 7, and then you can use Restart to start at the boss every time.
A similar exploit existed for Zatsuza and Hivac in the DFK port, as well as in the Deathsmiles II port.

Explanation of mechanics: youtube.com/watch?v=i_fNaGowftM

------------------------------------

Playing on the newest Akai Katana port that came out on Steam and all modern consoles last December. Courtesy of CITY CONNECTION's new TAKE×0FF branch, these are also the guys that did the latest Deathsmiles collection. This new port includes a new Matsumoto arranged soundtrack and better practice options from previous ports. You can now practice starting from midbosses among other things.

So they pretty much hit it out of the park with Deathsmiles last time, how did they fare on Akai Katana?
Well they... didn't.
Launch was a trainwreck, the game had almost no slowdown, input lag was not great and it had horrible graphics and gameplay bugs.
Weird bugs like lasers not pushing you back while in Gennin mode and the screen getting more blurry the further away you got from the middle of the screen.
It was clear this needed at least a couple more months in the oven as they only recently managed to patch out all the bugs and errors. The port is quite good now.

Thanks to Flubman for gifting me the game.

Buy the game on Steam here:
store.steampowered.com/app/2076220/Akai_Katana_Shin

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[Steam] Out Zone - Normal 3-ALL Clear - 4,282,400

Jaimers 2023-02-21 | Turn on captions for some extra text commentary during the video.

New Toaplan Steam ports came out courtesy of Bitwave.
Based on the arcade versions, this first batch includes Out Zone, Tatsujin/Truxton, Zero Wing and Kyuukyoku Tiger/Twin Cobra.

Having Toaplan games be on Steam is pretty wild.
Didn't expect that in a million years.

They got some things really good in this.
The slowdown is correct and the input lag is -really- low.
It also has good practice options, savestates, replays, gadgets and leaderboards.
Some very neat things too like a hitbox viewer and ability to reduce the hitbox.
Kyuukyoku Tiger and Tatsujin even have widescreen arrange modes added to them.
Some bizarre stuff too like a 'Dodge' option that quote, "automatically dodges enemies and bullets".

Base input lag is 2 frames, which is already really good, but what's really interesting about these ports is that they also have uncapped framerate, which is something I've rarely seen with ports of old games.
Meaning that if you have say a 240 hertz monitor, you can play these games at 240 FPS and the input lag would be insanely low, beating even runahead on regular emulators.

So pretty incredible out of the gate.
What's wrong with the ports is uh... everything else.

- Out Zone is based on the wrong romset.
It's based on the 'outzonec' romset in Mame, which is the oldest version available and is based on an old unfinished prototype. It's very buggy, has a lot of missing content and wrong music plays in the wrong stages. Important secrets that you use to score the game with are simply not there and tons of regular enemies are used as placeholders for enemy sprites they didn't finish yet. The final boss is also unfinished, it's missing graphics and patterns.

There is Hard mode, which is based on *another* wrong romset (outzoneh), but it's closer to the actual game since it has all the missing content Normal mode is missing.
It's a weird version where enemies start with 2nd loop behavior but bosses are still the same.

- All of the dipswitches are wrong by default.
Besides difficulty being too high, they also start you with less lives and you only get two extends, even though you should be getting an extend every 300k points.
The option to select 300k every isn't even there. Or maybe they're mislabeled???

- The games are running too fast.
Like Out Zone is supposed to run at 55.161545 Hz, but they made the base speed for all games 60 Hz. This makes the game run almost 10% too fast.
I tested how long it takes for energy to run out and you die in the Steam port over 4 seconds faster: tinyurl.com/mr34ppzw

- Audio is just *atrocious* all across the board.
Sound effects are wrong and they sound awful, and music is playing in the wrong stages at the wrong tempo with missing undertones.
It's also completely missing 4 out of 7 stage themes. (!!!)

- The good things about the port are half-baked too.
Like the gadgets are useless, even though you could have useful things in there.
Like I keep losing track of how many C items I've collected for the Zero Wing secrets and having a gadget there that just tells me would have been extremely nice.
Practice mode is missing a lot of options too, like being able to select speed up or not.
The hitbox viewer is pretty broken, and the widescreen modes look very janky too. Like nothing got updated to actually accommodate these. Animations didn't get adjusted and enemies just spawn out of existence now.

All the other ports seem to suffer from these same problems too.
Audio in Tatsujin is especially awful, and stage 1 seems to have a wrong background.
Zero Wing has a layer problem at the top that shows things you're not supposed to see.

Kyuukyoku Tiger probably got the worst treatment.
The base game is already really hard, but now besides the game also running too fast, the difficulty is also off. Enemies shoot far more than they're supposed to and their shooting timings and angles also seem wrong.
Which is most evident in that safespots simply don't work -at all- anymore. (!!!)
This is a huge problem with the stage 10 boss in particular.
Enemies can fire at you in spots that they shouldn't be able to, which implies that something is fundamentally wrong with how enemies aim and shoot.

Hopefully most of the egregious problems get patched out.
This has the potential to be definitive ports, even beating out traditional emulation (but probably not M2), but it's really not there yet by a long shot.
This is like a rare case of a port getting all the advanced features right but then just falling flat on their face on the fundamentals, and forgets about actually porting the game well in the first place.

Buy the game here:
store.steampowered.com/app/2022920/Out_Zone

00:00 - Loop 1
22:03 - Loop 2
42:55 - Loop 3

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Touhou 东方雪莲华 ~ Abyss Soul Lotus - Perfect Extra Stage (ExNNNN)

Jaimers 2023-02-08 | A clear of the Extra stage without dying, bombing, getting hit and switching characters.
Technically speaking switching characters gives you a slight advantage, but it doesn't really matter much. I added that because I didn't need it.

Extra stage time.
Cool boss with a lot of fun patterns. Not too terribly hard but maybe that's just because Reimu homing is kind of overpowered in this.

For the midboss you can kind of do the same thing every time.
The third spell looks annoying, but you have so much time to find Waldo that it really doesn't matter.

Tricky patterns on the boss are spell 1, 2, 5, 8, 9 and 10.
Nonspells 6 and 7 can also be tricky.

Spell 1: Pretty tricky but once you get used to the weird curving it gets a lot easier.
Spell 2: The random lasers at the start are AWFUL. It was so awful they patched it to add warning lines, but it's still kind of a gacha moment. If you do enough damage you can skip the second wave of lasers. The card takes no damage during lasers so skipping it helps a lot.
Spell 5: This gave me a lot of trouble for the longest time, until I realized that if you position yourself between two rocks you're safe from everything that happens between waves. You only have to move up and down to avoid the curvy lasers.
Spell 6: This one looks impressive but it's entirely static.
Spell 7: Your meter gets drained depending on how many butterflies are left at the end. The initial burst of RNG at the start can be bad sometimes.
Spell 8: This spell gets pretty scary because Reimu homing sucks at killing the big fireballs, which makes it easy to get walled. But if you do the same thing every time it somehow works.
Spell 9: The first three phases of this survival sucks because the random lasers from spell 2 make a reappearance and RNG on phase 3 can be rather bad. Phase 2 is also tricky to dodge.
Spell 10: Final. This looks easy but it can be rather treacherous with the rocks. The rocks also hide the bullets so they can sneak up on you. I believe the bullets are static though so memo where they are even when you can't see them. Last phase is a visual challenge, it's not too bad but it's easy to choke and the hitboxes are massive.

Nonspell 6 can be scary if you get bad RNG from the sides.
Nonspell 7 is kind of like Pristine Lunacy Light.
Nonspell 8 looks scary but it's static and easy.

The stage section doesn't exist.

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Another ludicrously high-quality Chinese Touhou fangame just dropped.
China is absolutely cracked when it comes to these fangames.

东方雪莲华, no relation to the celebrity Vtuber of the same name, was made by the same team that developed Shining Shooting Star. It took approximately 7 years for them to make the game, with the first demo releasing in 2018.

This is also one of the first fangames made in Unity afaik, which means you can do things like run the game at 120 FPS and get buttery smooth controls, because game logic isn't tied to framerate like stupid engines.

System and mechanics:
en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Abyss_Soul_Lotus/Strategy

Game is quite good, patterns are fun to dodge and stage design has a good flow. I especially like the part in stage 4 where it makes you go all around the screen.
The system also feels pretty thought-out and is fun to engage with. Chaining juicy cancels together is very satisfying. Planning around the chain timer and the multiplier bonus you get from character switching also adds a lot of depth to the routing.

Probably what sets this game apart the most is the timer.
You have a 24 minute timer to beat the game. However this will run out long before the game actually ends. And when the timer runs out you will be unable to get any more meter, essentially making you walking dead. You have to collect fragments to slow down the timer, while avoiding getting hit and dying as that takes off a big chunk of your time.

The game doesn't have a traditional bomb system, instead you fill up a meter by collecting fragments you get from bullet cancels.
This has three layers and getting hit eats one of these layers. Which means you can get hit quite a lot in this game and not die, so long as you don't get hit too many times in a row.
This system makes the game quite forgiving while still being challenging for score as you're constantly consuming meter for that.
You're far more likely to run out of time before running out of lives though, which is interesting. You basically need to do -some- scoring to actually survive.

Shoutouts to Eradrazil for gifting me the game. Thank you!

Buy the game here:
store.steampowered.com/app/1000440

00:00 - Intro
00:28 - Stage Section First Half
01:36 - Midboss
02:42 - Stage Section Second Half
03:39 - Extra Boss

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Touhou 东方雪莲华 ~ Abyss Soul Lotus - Lunatic 1cc + TLB (No-Miss)

Jaimers 2023-02-06 | A clear of Lunatic without dying and getting all the secret spellcards.

Another ludicrously high-quality Chinese Touhou fangame just dropped.
China is absolutely cracked when it comes to these fangames.

东方雪莲华, no relation to the celebrity Vtuber of the same name, was made by the same team that developed Shining Shooting Star. It took approximately 7 years for them to make the game, with the first demo releasing in 2018.

This is also one of the first fangames made in Unity afaik, which means you can do things like run the game at 120 FPS and get buttery smooth controls, because game logic isn't tied to framerate like stupid engines.

System and mechanics:
en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Abyss_Soul_Lotus/Strategy

Game is quite good, patterns are fun to dodge and stage design has a good flow. I especially like the part in stage 4 where it makes you go all around the screen.
The system also feels pretty thought-out and is fun to engage with. Chaining juicy cancels together is very satisfying. Planning around the chain timer and the multiplier bonus you get from character switching also adds a lot of depth to the routing.

Probably what sets this game apart the most is the timer.
You have a 24 minute timer to beat the game. However this will run out long before the game actually ends. And when the timer runs out you will be unable to get any more meter, essentially making you walking dead. You have to collect fragments to slow down the timer, while avoiding getting hit and dying as that takes off a big chunk of your time.

The game doesn't have a traditional bomb system, instead you fill up a meter by collecting fragments you get from bullet cancels.
This has three layers and getting hit eats one of these layers. Which means you can get hit quite a lot in this game and not die, so long as you don't get hit too many times in a row.
This system makes the game quite forgiving while still being challenging for score as you're constantly consuming meter for that.
You're far more likely to run out of time before running out of lives though, which is interesting. You basically need to do -some- scoring to actually survive.

There is also a True Last Boss, sorta.
If you beat stage 3 with 18 or more minutes remaining on the clock, you enter a sort of Ura route where all the bosses will have an extra spell at the end of their fights.
These spells are pretty wild and unique, you definitely need to practice some of these if you want to stand a chance against them. The stage 4 lanterns literally steal your lives and you can instantly game over there if too many lock on to you at once. The stage 6 spell also drains your meter and it's very easy to lose the no-miss there.

The biggest complaint you can probably give the game is that the practice options are a bit lacking compared to what is generally accepted nowadays.
At least it doesn't have a useless spell practice mode where the pattern instantly resets when you get hit like all the other ones.

Shoutouts to Eradrazil for gifting me the game. Thank you!

Buy the game here:
store.steampowered.com/app/1000440

00:00 - Intro
00:39 - Stage 1
04:03 - Stage 2
08:07 - Stage 3
13:25 - Stage 4
18:56 - Stage 5
26:25 - Stage 6
36:45 - Ending & Credits

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Seihou Shuusou Gyoku - Perfect Stage 6 Lunatic (NMNB)

Jaimers 2023-01-06 | A clear of stage 6 on Lunatic without dying and bombing.

Playing some Shuusou Gyoku to celebrate the recent fan patch that makes the game run on modern versions of Windows.
Previously the game was basically unplayable as it couldn't run on anything modern without glitching or having extreme slowdown.
Go grab the patch here: twitter.com/ReC98Project/status/1609352449864654849

Seihou is the sister series to Touhou, with this game being the first in the series.
Shuusou Gyoku came out in 2000, which was between Mystic Square and the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil back when ZUN was still part of the Amusement Makers doujin group. ZUN did all the music and contributed some of the graphics.

You play as a combat maid robot called VIVIT, made by Erich in order to rescue his daughter that got trapped in another dimension after an experiment with cactus energy went horribly wrong.
Reimu and Marisa are also there.

Insane final boss.
Wild RNG combined with ludicrously precise patterns. Took like 10 hours just to do this once.
This stage was a huge wall for me back in the day and was the only Lunatic stage I couldn't perfect.
Shoutouts to Innocence and ZPS for finding some strats that make this a whole lot more doable.

Form 1:
Form one has like 9 different attacks that it randomly chooses from. Some are a lot harder than others. The boss can usually fire of about 6 attacks before it times out. It can repeat the same attack twice but it's pretty rare.
Laser spam is by far the worst and you're basically dead if you get it anywhere other than the very first attack. On the first attack you can at least line yourself up in a very tight safespot using the BGM text.
The corner safespot for the flower attack basically saves this fight as it was like undodgeable before. It only works on high rank though, so it's not perfect.
The first form has a very short timer and you'll likely time out even during normal play. Timing out is better for this though, as it lowers the rank for the rest of the fight (I think).
You can see Innocence getting different patterns on this form than I do in his perfect of the stage: youtube.com/watch?v=O5CiAelGCfA

Form 2:
Form two is more consistent but still really hard.
The opener is crazy hard on high rank as the blue lanes get really wide. The yellow balls also get really in the way but luckily you can anticipate the direction to move in for the second wave as it's always the opposite direction from the first.
The order of attacks in phase 2 is a bit random, watch the boss sprite so see what attack she's going to do.
The turret circle attack has a similar exploit as Shinmyoumaru's 2nd non. If you position yourself up a bit all the random bullet spam will get misdirected to the side.
You can speedkill the final phase before anything fires.

Form 3:
Form three is easily the hardest. There are at least 3 patterns in this that are crazy tight, the rainbow death spiral in phase 1 and laser hell followed by the dense grey lanes in phase 2.
Laser hell is insanely hard and random, there is barely any room inbetween the lasers for you to dodge. Feels like I just got lucky every time I got through it.
Luckily phase 3 can be cheezed.

Also shoutouts to Akaldar for making a SpoilerAL SSG for this game so you can practice the bosses and their individual forms. Can also adjust the rank and make it fixed if you want.
Download the SSG here: mediafire.com/file/3nazdn3jdzwrqql/Seihou_Shuusou_Gyoku_SpoilerAL_SSG.rar
The SSG doesn't seem to work with the new patch from my experience though, which is unfortunate.

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Sonic Frontiers - True Last Boss (No-Miss, No-Bomb)

Jaimers 2023-01-05 | New official Sonic shmup just came out.
Pretty bold new direction for Sega to take the series in.
For this game they came up with this color polarity gimmick that seems really unique and never done before.
There is also this weird open world minigame but I don't think that's really going to take off.

The TLB only shows up if you 1cc on Hard Mode.

Buy the game on Steam here:
store.steampowered.com/app/1237320/Sonic_Frontiers

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[AC] Gundhara - ALL Clear 1,91 Million (No-Miss)

Jaimers 2023-01-01 | Happy New Year!

Turn on captions for some extra text comments during the video.

Gundhara was released in arcades in 1995. It was made by MOSS, the guys that also made the Raiden series, and was published by Banpresto. The game is a lot like Out Zone in that it's a mix of a shmup and a run and gun.
The game is really cool so it's a shame it's so underrated and unknown in general.

Run from the La Calice Cup Winter tournament.

Story:
"Suddenly children disappeared from town. Secret inrestigater Sarah entered secretly into the hideout, to find the reason in the hideout, children were brainwashing. It was preperation for world war3, to rule the world. The goverment opened emergency meeting, to chose two soldiers, then they started fighting."

System:
Just like Out Zone, the player controls the scrolling of the screen. Often you want to slowly and carefully move up the screen to not spawn too many enemies at once, as it gets overwhelming very fast if you don't.
You can shoot in any direction and holding the button down locks your position in place.
You have one main shot and a subshot in the form of the missiles.
Besides your shots and bombs, you also have a short-range kick in this game. It's not terribly powerful but it does cancel any bullets it touches. You're wide open after using it though, so you have to be careful. Kicking only works on humanoid enemies and bullets/missiles. Kicking plays heavily into the scoring system of the game.
If you take too long in a single section the game will tell you to hurry up. If you don't progress fast enough a plane will pass by and divebomb you (even indoors). This will kill you but you can use bomb i-frames to get past it.

Weapons:
The game has a ton of different weapons but there are only two you'd ever want to use.
- Laser is very good for survival play. You can tell this is a MOSS game because the laser is exactly like the toothpaste laser in Raiden II/DX.
- Vulcan is incredibly strong with 30 hertz autofire and is what you mostly want to use for scoring.
The only downside to the Vulcan is that you can't lock your position if you're using autofire.

Bombs and Lives:
Enemies drop boxes that have the word "charge" on them. Picking them up slowly fills the meter at the top. Once the meter is fully charged you get a bomb and the meter resets.
There is an armor pickup in stage 3 that gives you one free hit. It's the only one in the game so use it wisely.
There is only one score extend in the game. There does exist a secret extend in stage 4 during the office section if you shoot a desk, but which desk and whether it appears at all seems to be entirely random. It didn't appear for me this run.

Scoring:
Scoring consists of about three major factors; kicking, weapon bonuses and rescuing kids.
- Kicking is by far the biggest source of score. Killing multiple enemies with a single kick starts a chain that goes from 200 to 400 to 800 to 1600 and then 1600 for every enemy after. This also counts for boxes or missiles. If an enemy is worth 100 points you get 100 for the enemy + 200 for the kick for 300 total, so even kicking a single enemy is always worth more than shooting it.
You want to put autofire on kick to minimize the time you're left open after a kick.
- When you're at max power you get 10k bonuses for every surplus weapon you pick up and 3k for every surplus missile you pick up. This adds up a lot over the course of the game if you no-miss.
- Every stage has three trapped kids. Freeing all of them and -not- shooting them until they leave the bottom of the screen gives you 10k at the end-of-stage bonus as well as 1k for every individual kid that you rescue.

The game is not that terribly hard if you just play for survival, so I'd say it's a good beginner arcade 1cc.

The worst part of the game is having to wait like 5 seconds on every powerup before it turns into the weapon you want.

Music is only coming through from the left channel because of a Shmupmame bug.

00:00 - Intro
01:00 - Mission 1 - Base
06:15 - Mission 2 - Highway
09:45 - Mission 3 - Temple
15:38 - Mission 4 - Laboratory
22:51 - Mission 5 - Airport
27:13 - Mission 6 - Big Boss
33:15 - Ending & Credits

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[Arcade] G.I. Joe - ALL Clear / 1CC - Score: 3323 (Roadblock)

Jaimers 2022-12-25 | Turn on captions for some extra text commentary during the video.

G.I. Joe is a Cabal-like arcade shooter made by Konami that released in arcades in 1992.
Like NAM-1975, it shares many elements with Cabal, though I'd say this game really perfected the style. It's fast and frantic, with not one dull moment, tons of variety in stages and the screen is always full with targets to try and optimize your score. It has some pretty impressive graphical effects for the time as well and is probably one of the best licensed games out there. Though as it's a 3D game done entirely with 2D sprites the perspective can feel rather wonky at times.

Newer versions of Mame have broken graphics for this game in many places, which actually makes it pretty hard to parse what is even going on.
It used to work just fine, but after a certain update it just broke, and has stayed broken for over 15 years now.
In order to play the game with proper graphics you need Mame 0.115, which is a build from 2007.

System:
You only get one extra life in this and there are no extends.
Though you do have a healthbar that can take three hits, and you can get health back from rare drops.
You can carry up to 9 missiles and they do big damage in a splash radiance, these drop very frequently and you're expected to spam them.
Enemies can drop an autofire powerup if you don't have it yet, you lose it after taking any sort of damage. Usually enemies drop these immediately after you lose it, but there are like no drops at all in the final stage and it's really dumb. I just use external auto for this to save myself the mashing.
The reticle is always in front of you and you can only move it up or down. Unlike NAM, there is no dodge-roll or any to way to fix your lock.

Scoring:
Scoring consists entirely of optimizing kills, which is actually quite hard as there are so many enemies and only so little time. Proper use of the missiles is essential to get most of them before they leave the screen.
Some targets are worth more than others and need to be prioritized. Like the foot soldiers are only worth 1 point while the vehicles are worth 2. A lot of background stuff can be shot as well for higher values.
Bosses usually have extra parts you can destroy and enemies you can milk. The Baroness ship especially has tons of destructible parts you can destroy even though it's not very obvious you can: https://i.imgur.com/hnEYEXI.png. This boss seems to have some extremely weird bug(?) going on with it though, if you shoot it during the phase transition you just get completely random score. It ranges from 0 to like 70 points and I have no idea what causes it. But that's probably where the extra mystery score from the world record comes from. Example: youtube.com/watch?v=O7eoCPRLrJc

The hardest part of the game by far is Destro.
It's a very chaotic fight and losing a life here is pretty expected, meaning you're forced to do the final stage without dying most of the time. The game would be -so- much easier if you had just one more extra life in this.
Shoot them before they shoot you is the name of the game here.

Used Roadblock because that's what the world record used.
Not sure if there is really any difference between the characters aside from different reticles.

Old run from the La Calice Cup tournament from 2020.

00:00 - Intro
02:04 - Mission 1-1: Chemical Plant
05:04 - Mission 1-2: Air Base
10:25 - Mission 1-3: Cobra's Weapons Plant
14:48 - Mission 2-1: Jungle
20:16 - Mission 2-2: Cavern Base
28:18 - Mission 3: The Final Battle
33:10 - Ending & Credits

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Barfer Sickmess 2 - Arcade Mode No-Miss Clear (Grandfather)

Jaimers 2022-12-24 | Turn on captions for some extra text commentary during the video.

Barfer Sickmess 2 is a Christmas-themed freeware shmup that came out in 2006.
Where you save Christmas by throwing up all over the elderly.

This game takes after the Turbo Force school of shmup design where every powerup drop is gacha and they only last temporarily. So you either get lucky or the game is impossible. It even has the rare invincibility drop that Turbo Force had.

Bosses are also insanely random and impossible if you don't instakill them with the bomb.
A lot of bosses randomly rush you and their sprites are too big for you to move out of the way. The stage 6 boss also has randomly chosen attacks and some of them are literally impossible to dodge.

The game also randomly crashes, which is another layer of RNG.

Besides Arcade Mode the game also has four harder modes.
All of them are impossible.

Merry Christmas everyone.

Download the game here:
http://www.caiman.us/scripts/fw/f2677.html

Intro - 00:00
Stage 1 - 00:57
Stage 2 - 01:55
Stage 3 - 02:57
Stage 4 - 04:17
Stage 5 - 05:52
Stage 6 - 06:54
Ending - 07:47

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GunVein - Expert ALL Clear / 1CC - 10,5 Million (Type C)

Jaimers 2022-12-01 | Turn on captions for some extra text comments throughout the video.

Very good new shmup that just came out.

Gunvein was developed and published by NGDEV, who you might know for games like NEO XYX and Razion. Games made for the Neo-Geo and -only- the Neo-Geo. Gunvein actually got released on Steam though, with it coming out on PS4 and Switch later down the line.
Now I said NGDEV is the developer, but this game is mostly the brainchild of boghog, who is a long-standing member of the community and someone who really loves shmups and knows what makes them tick. Inspired by games from CAVE, Taito and Raizing, it plays very much like some of the best arcade shmups.

I ended up putting way more time into this game than I thought I would.
Game is very fun to play and figuring out how to optimize the score was also very engaging.

System:
- You can only carry three lives and three bombs at a time, which creates an interesting dynamic as you can't really hoard resources.
- You need 10 bomb fragments to create a bomb, unlike some Raizing games, you can't use partial bombs.
- You can however use 5 fragments to activate a hyper.
- In Expert you get an extend every 600k points, if you already have max lives when that happens you get a 1-hit shield instead.
- You can also shoot some stuff in the background to uncover bomb fragments.
- Gold bomb fragments give you about 1 second of i-frames.
- If you press both the shot and focus buttons twice at the same time you can cancel all i-frames you currently have.

Scoring:
Scoring is basically bombing enemies and speedkilling them when you're not bombing.
Score gives you more bomb fragments which gives you more bombs for more scoring.
You can only have three lives in stock at a time, and dying fills up the first bomb slot, so dying on purpose is also a big strategy for score. You actually don't want the shield in this case as it makes SD'ing more difficult.
The same technically applies to bosses and midbosses, but it's generally more beneficial to milk the extra enemies they spawn.
Hypers are generally strictly for survival, they don't spawn the gold stars like normal bombs do.
There is a hidden enemy value multiplier that increases with every bomb fragment you collect, so getting tons of fragments quickly is also very important.

Ships:
Type C is a very fun ship with a very unique and satisfying shot.
You build up a strong bomb in front of you and drop it on enemies for major damage. If you build it up all the way it will even launch forward until it hits something. Feels a bit like the Pink Sweets rose cracker but without it cancelling any bullets.
It's a very strong ship too and easily the strongest shot in the game, it's very good at speedkilling enemies. Though the bomb is very weak and doesn't last long, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's ideal for milking the stage 4 boss for example, which is the most lucrative milk in the game. The i-frames also last for like 5 seconds which is kinda ludicrous.

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I lost about 300k in stage 5 in this run, so 11 million is probably possible.
You can also milk the stage 3 boss's first two phases but it's only worth like 100k and it's incredibly long and dangerous to do.

This game might have an overabundance of i-frames.
Bombs give i-frames, shields give i-frames, hypers give i-frames, gold fragments give i-frames, in a system where you want to SD a lot you can kinda see where that might be a problem.
All the complaining actually let boghog to implement what is basically a self-destruct button in a patch, which is pretty hilarious.
The game itself is not too bad to clear, even on Expert because of this. Hypers are also insanely powerful and for only 5 fragments really cheap to use. Once you start scoring you'll also be showered in resources. For a 10 million score I basically got 17 lives and like 80 bombs.

The biggest negative you can probably say about the game is that in terms of presentation it might come over a bit bland, as it doesn't really stand out.
Besides "very good shmup gameplay" there is not much else for people to grab on to here. There is no worldbuilding or context for anything you do, and there aren't any particularity unique or memorable set pieces. The music slaps though.

Also the game might be too easy???

Easy candidate for SOTY (Shmup Of The Year).

Buy the game on Steam here:
store.steampowered.com/app/2025840/Gunvein

Intro - 00:00
Stage 1 - 00:30
Stage 2 - 03:41
Stage 3 - 10:33
Stage 4 - 14:30
Stage 5 - 20:49
Credits - 26:48

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[Steam I・II] Deathsmiles - Death Mode Level 3 EX-ALL - 294 Million (Souffle)

Jaimers 2022-11-04 | Turn on captions for some extra text commentary during the run.

Little bit late for Halloween but it should still be fine right?

Deathsmiles is Cave's iconic Halloween themed bullet hell that first came out in arcades in 2007 and was Cave's highest grossing arcade success.
After the initial release it also got a Mega Black Label release with adjusted mechanics and added content.
It has gotten many ports since, some more successful than others.
Currently playing the Deathsmiles I・II collection which came out on Steam and every modern console recently.
This port is basically the definite version of the game, it's really good and makes the other version on Steam obsolete. Way better slowdown accuracy, less input lag and -brand new- playable characters with multiple new soundtracks.

The DLC adds the 5 main girls from Mahou Otome as playable characters. Mahou Otome being Cave's big mobile gacha game that takes place in the Deathsmiles universe.
The characters get their own dialogue too and I really like how they managed to blend the new art with the old. Seeing them edited into the old Deathsmiles cutscene art is quite a trip.
And they're not just pallet swaps of existing characters either, they tried to add and expand on the already existing Deathsmiles roster with new and unique shots.
Plumeria for example lets you put your familiar stationary, you can then hide inside it while it acts as a perfect shield against revenge bullets. It's very unique and new, especially for a very established game that hasn't seen new content since 2010.
Two new soundtracks for the game too, one is composed of existing Mahou Otome tracks and another is an arranged soundtrack that blends the Mahou Otome tracks with the Deathsmiles soundtrack.
Overall very high effort DLC.

I used Souffle for this run. She's very strong and her shot can angle in the direction you move towards, giving her good coverage too. Probably the easiest to clear Death Mode out of the new characters?
Her down side is that her lock-on shot sucks, it's very weak and your meter drains -very- slowly while using it, making hyper recharges extremely hard.
So basically very good for survival and more sucky for score (she's extremely good in the Version 1.1 modes though).

Deathsmiles gives you many options to adjust the difficulty to your skill level.
The first 6 stages let you pick between level 1 to 3 for the difficulty. If you pick level 3 four times you activate Death Mode Level 1, and unique revenge bullets start appearing that you can cancel with your option familiar.
There is an optional very hard EX stage you can pick after the first 6 stages. Going there increases your Death Mode level by 1, putting you in Death Mode Level 2 if you were already at Level 1.
Going to the final stage then puts you in Death Mode Level 3, which is the hardest you can make the game on the Vanilla release.
On Death Mode Level 3 enemies shoot an insane amount of revenge bullets and the final bosses also get buffed. Jitterbug even gains an additional phase with a crazy final attack.

Deathsmiles is a very complex game when it comes to scoring so here's some textbooks to get you started on this course:
Mechanics: shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?t=33625
Overview: trueachievements.com/game/Deathsmiles/walkthrough/6
Insane enemy item chart: cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/649671696277569548/1004001897742598225/Dsmilesshotchart.jpg
All of this will be on the test.

Oversimplified tl;dr:
1) Kill each enemy with the right shot for more items to fill the hyper.
2) Hyper for more items and get to fever mode asap at 10k.
3) Spawn tons of items right before the hyper ends for an instant refill.
4) Break items into skulls during hyper, don't break them outside hyper.
4) ????
5) Profit.

There are actually still more advanced scoring mechanics that are simply not explained anywhere in English, like the tutorial bug, the item limit or the burn points combined with enemy i-frame scoring. There is a very good Japanese guide that explains everything though! - https://deathsmiles.game-info.wiki/
Maybe I or someone else can translate all of that onto the wiki at some point.

Twitch VOD with live commentary:
twitch.tv/videos/1640944848

Buy the game on Steam here:
store.steampowered.com/app/1884300/Deathsmiles_III

00:00 - Intro
01:45 - Stage A-1 - Port Town
04:24 - Stage C-2 - Volcano
08:12 - Stage B-1 - Forest of the Lost
11:20 - Stage A-2 - Graveyard
14:07 - Stage C-1 - Lake Shore
16:45 - Stage B-2 - Swamp Wastes
20:12 - Intermission
21:09 - EXTRA - Gorge
26:54 - FINAL - Hades Castle
40:06 - Ending & Credits

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[RPG Maker] Predation Sugar - Bitter Clear

Jaimers 2022-10-31 | Cute little Halloween themed expansion for Predation II for the season.
Bitter is the hidden highest difficulty and it's quite silly.

Predation II caught my eye because it's this unique blend of an RPG Maker horror adventure with full-on shmup stages in-between major story segments. A story with mystery and intrigue as well, might look more into it later.

Patterns are completely different on other difficulties.

Can't get enough of these RPG Maker shmups.

Anyway Happy Halloween.

Download the game here:
freegame-mugen.jp/shooting/game_9868.html

Download Predation II here:
wodifes.net/game/show/448

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Hazelnut Hex - Hard Mode 1cc - 4,382,250 Points (1-Miss)

Jaimers 2022-10-17 | Turn on captions for some extra commentary during the video.

Hazelnut Hex is a new indie arcade-style shoot 'em up from chunderfins that came out on Switch and itch.io recently.
The game has a very nice art style, 2D animation and plenty of hot jams.
As a shmup it's also really good with a legit scoring system that's really fun to try and optimize.

Difficulties:
The game has two difficulties, Normal and Moderate.
Moderate is a bit of a misleading name, but it's definitely harder than Normal. Enemies are far more aggressive and fire more bullets.
Moderate is mostly better for score since more bullets means bigger bullet cancels.

Lives and bombs:
You start the game with 3 lives and get extends every 500k points. Getting hit makes you lose one level of power and your option.
Bombs are accumulated from gathering star items. Enemies drop more star items if you kill them with high multipliers. You can carry a maximum of 6 bombs at a time.

Shots:
The game has three shottypes; A, B and C.
C seems by far the best shot since the wide shot covers most of the screen and can get most of the popcorn this way. A forward focus shot is not really necessary since the charge shot covers most of that need.
The charge shot is a strong piercing projectile that cancels bullets in its wake. You charge it up by not shooting for a couple of seconds and it also serves as the main scoring mechanic of the game.

Scoring:
- Every subsequent enemy you kill with the same charge shot increases the multiplier with which their base score value gets multiplied. So ideally you want to line up low value enemies first and kill the high value enemy at the end.
- Powerup item medaling. After reaching max power, the nuts will start at 1000 points and increase by 100 for every you pick up. These can go up to 6000+ points in long stages and reset back to 1000 if you get hit.
- Bullet cancels during a bomb give 100 points for each bullet cancelled. Want to use bombs during high bullet intensive patterns. Bosses also shoot a single big spray of bullets when you get them down to a certain health threshold. This is telegraphic with a sound effect and is basically your cue to bomb.
- Stars give +50 points and enemies spawn more if you kill them with high multipliers.

Besides that there are also stage end bonuses:
- Max Hit Bonus: Not totally sure but might be related to the chains you got.
- Max Cancel Bonus: Highest bullet cancel x2. You want to always bomb at least once per stage to get this bonus.
- Damage Bonus: 20k for no-miss (30k in stage 5) with less points for each hit.
- Sam Bonus: 20k if you still have the option squirrel at the end of a stage.

The chaining is quite fun, but for how much the system depends on precise trick shots it's also somewhat maddening how much randomness there is in many enemy waves. There are many enemies that move in random directions or have a random vertical spawn point, so chaining there becomes a bit of a crapshoot and score can vary a lot between good and bad luck.

4.5 million is probably possible in this.
The death in stage 5 was pretty painful.

Buy the game here:
chunderfins.itch.io/hazelnut-hex

00:00 - Intro
00:41 - Stage 1
03:49 - Stage 2
07:58 - Stage 3
11:36 - Stage 4
15:56 - Stage 5
21:55 - Ending
23:26 - Credits

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DD-Shooter V1.2 - Very Hard Clear (No-Hit)

Jaimers 2022-08-29 | Visual Challenge.

Stumbled upon this strange looking Yukkuri game.
These designs sure get wilder and wilder.
What will the Touhou community come up with next.

Download here:
cky2433.itch.io/dd-shooter-enhanced-edition

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[AC] Gun Frontier - ALL Clear (No-Miss) + Rank Gadget

Jaimers 2022-08-22 | Turn on captions for text commentary.

Gun Frontier came out in arcades in 1990 and was made by Taito, one of the most prolific arcade shmup developers of the time.
In terms of presentation Taito was way ahead of everyone else, they always had the coolest and most stylish games of that era.
While everyone else was doing generic military shooters here we have a cyberpunk wild west setting where you play as a flying gun shooting other giant guns.
Their soundtracks were also always top-tier, courtesy of ZUNTATA (no ZUNTATA here though).

This came out on PS4 and Switch about a week ago or so courtesy of Arcade Archives.
There was a Saturn port of this in 1997, but that port wasn't very faithful to the arcade since it had no rank among other things.
So essentially this is the first time this got a real port since the game came out 32 years ago.

Gun Frontier is the first game in a trilogy of Taito games.
This trilogy composing of Gun Frontier, Dino Rex and Metal Black.
All extremely good games made by mostly the same people. These people would then later start a little known company you might know by the name of G.rev. Interviews revealed Border Down was very much intended as a spiritual successor to Metal Black.
Dino Rex is kind of the odd one out here, being a dinosaur fighting game that is also somehow connected to the lore of the trilogy??? It's weird man.

This game is also special because it was the primary inspiration for Battle Garegga.
This was Yagawa's favorite game and you can see a lot of Garegga similarities in this. In the way the bomb system works, to the game starting with the stationary tanks that drop bomb fragments, down to the cloud background.
Also the rank. This game has a nuclear rank system like Battle Garegga that you need to manage if you want a chance at clearing the game.

The rank system was very mysterious in how it actually worked but it did eventually get cracked.
The shmups wiki page recently got all the details on it and it's pretty wild: https://shmups.wiki/library/Gun_Frontier/Advanced_Rank
These details seem very unknown, at least I've seen nobody actually dodging bomb fragments before? I mostly figured out these optimal strats by myself, but figuring it out was a lot of fun.
The main things you need to be aware off are:
- Rank increases dramatically the higher your shot frequency is. The highest you can shoot without getting a rank penalty is 6.6hz.
- Rank increases by one every 10 seconds and +1 for every full bomb in stock.
If you have five bombs in stock (which you'll have for the majority of the game), you're essentially quintupling the rank increase. Therefore avoid bomb fragments like the plaque.

From my experimenting I've found it's optimal to start collecting bomb fragments starting from stage 3. Stage 5 will always have very high rank no matter what you do, so it's more advantageous to get a few extra bombs for it to make it a lot more consistent. And the difficulty increase in stage 3 and 4 is negligible.

There's a plugin you can download for Mame that gives you a gadget that shows the actual rank, including the timer rank and rate interval for shot button presses.
Incredibly useful for actually tracking rank and figuring out how to best manipulate it.
You can download it here: ss1.xrea.com/nekoziman.s601.xrea.com/cheat

The pixel art and effects in this game are out of control.
Bursting the dam to kill the stage 3 boss, the way those big tanks in stage 5 fall into the abyss below and that stage 2 waterfall are just so sick.
The waterfall is the main reason the game got greenlit and there is a crazy story behind it. The dude that made it had to work in his underwear in a 40 °C room where the pc would overheat every hour. He had to keep switching pc's and copying everything to floppy every time it's wild.
You can read more about this story and the circumstances around the game from this translated interview from the amazing folks over at Shmuplations: shmuplations.com/gunfrontier

The gameplay in this game is probably one of the most unique I've seen in a shmup.
The dangerous enemies here aren't the bosses or midbosses, or even the medium enemies, it's the popcorn. The popcorn in this game are probably one of the most evil enemies I've seen in a shmup. They have very deliberate design to creep up on you while dodging your shots, and then circle around you while taking pointblank potshots at you from every angle. They'll fire bullets completely horizontal or even from behind you. They can even anticipate where you're going and fire bullets ahead of you. Where they spawn is also completely random. Beating this game requires you to be very intimate with how their AI works and how to deal with them.

00:00 - Intro
01:17 - Stage 1
03:21 - Stage 2
06:56 - Stage 3
10:42 - Stage 4
13:58 - Stage 5
20:46 - Stage 6
22:15 - Ending & Credits

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Touhou 18.5: 100th Black Market - Overdrive No-Death Clear (Blank Card, No-Actives, No-Magic Circle)

Jaimers 2022-08-16 | Fun has been unlocked.

From the oldest Windows game, we now go to the newest one.

100th Black Market is the latest Touhou spinoff game that came out the other day.
The idea here was to expand on the Touhou 18 card system in an environment where they could be fully realized and make more sense.

It's a very different game from all the previous games in the series.
It's still scene-based like the photo games and Violet Detector, but the scenes are much longer and have roguelike elements to them now. Each scene consists of several enemy waves and boss encounters selected semi-randomly, broken up by card shop menus where you can buy random cards just like in Touhou 18. The focus is very much on the cards and unlocking them through grinding as without them you can't really do anything.

The main mechanic is the magic circle you can place on top of bullets to slow them down and give you bullet money. You then use that bullet money to buy in-stage cards and buy cards outside of stages with the normal money to use them as starting cards.
The total number of cards got increased to 85 this time and they all have various effects: en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/100th_Black_Market/Ability_Cards

Overdrive is a "hidden difficulty", the Joon card makes it so that every wave is set to the maximum difficulty possible so long as you have it equipped, which is Overdrive in this case.
For extra challenge I also equipped the Blank card, which makes you not able to buy cards between waves, meaning I could only rely on the cards that I could bring in myself.
I also opted to not get any of the actives cards or any of the passives cards that can cancel bullets. And also no magic circle for good measure.
I mostly went with the cards that give power. The Tanuki and Riceball cards give +3 and +1 power respectively and the Jinzo card strengthens all your shots including subshots. Also Wolf for bigger shots and Centipede for the Challenge Market since it's a very long stage.

Not all waves are created equal.
Stage waves seem like a real mixed bag, quality and balance seems all over the place. There are some waves that are the realest shit you've ever seen and then there are waves that are just kinda... there?
There are some waves I really like, like there is that one overlapping wave in stage 4 where you need to do crowd control on both sides of the screen, the patterns compliment each other really well there too. But it's clear more effort went into some waves than others.
Now you can probably say this is a byproduct of it being a roguelike, having to design quantity over quality, but I'd rather have the whole game be exciting instead of getting bad luck in the 'good design gacha'.
Some waves seem completely antithetical to the main mechanic of the game too, where you can't really do much of anything to get bullet money.

I didn't really like the game at first, but I could make the game quite fun by playing like this, so I guess you get out of it what you put into it. It took a while to get there though.
But I do feel like the game is kinda half-baked. It has very Violet Detector vibes where you can kinda feel the general lack of polish and depth. Particularly in the boss patterns which are just... uninspired. You won't find any of the complex, intricate and pretty patterns the series is known for in this game.
The card system is also not as deep as first glance would suggest, there are 85 cards but only like a handful of them are actually useful and the effect variety is not that diverse. Like there are 20 different variations of "cancel bullet".

Probably the main problem is that there is too little gameplay content and not enough polish in the content there is to fully realize the roguelike system it's going for. Because of this shallowness the game gets repetitive and dull very fast.
It's a fun little experiment to mess around in for a couple of hours, trying to find the most game-breaking builds to farm with, or doing silly stuff like this, but in its current form the game doesn't really have the scope or depth to make the game engaging in the long run. It feels more like a proof of concept than anything else.
Roguelikes are very ambitious projects that take massive amounts of time and effort to create and do well, since you have to create so much content and balance everything so well. But compared to other shmups that tried the roguelike thing like Monolith, Dezatopia or even Len'en 4, this game just kinda falls short.

Buy the game on Steam here:
store.steampowered.com/app/2097720/Black_Market_of_Bulletphilia___100th_Black_Market

00:00 - Intro
00:36 - Tutorial
05:27 - 1st Market
08:22 - 2nd Market
12:15 - 3rd Market
16:49 - 4th Market
22:00 - 5th Market
28:32 - 6th Market
35:39 - End of Market
40:28 - Challenge Market

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Touhou 6: The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil - Perfect Extra Stage (No-Miss, No-Bomb)

Jaimers 2022-08-12 | Happy 20th anniversary to EoSD, the game that basically started it all.
In order to celebrate, here's a 12 year old replay for a 20 year old game.

Old run from 2010 beating the Extra stage without dying and bombing.
Not sure why I never uploaded it before, I never really uploaded many of my old Extra perfects from back in those days.

Still probably one of the harder Extra stages, you get very few resources comparatively and the patterns revolve a lot around random dodging. QED is also a really nasty final pattern.

Man I forgot how much MarisaA just melts bosses. Remember that being a thing?

Also trying a new upscale method.

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[AC] Dodonpachi Saidaioujou - Inbachi Final Clear

Jaimers 2022-07-17 | Silly pattern.

Final pattern of Inbachi, the alternate true last boss of the game that took nearly 10 years since its first release in 2012 to be beaten.

The main obstacle was the final by far, but recently we have access to save states, so we can train in the hyperbolic time chamber to try and figure it out just a tiny bit more.
The pattern is complete and utter nonsense, but with enough pattern analysis, practice, determination and some good luck, it's possible to make a dent in it.

Technical stuff:
Blue bullets are shot by the 8 crystals around Inbachi. The crystals move according to one of 6 possible patterns, chosen at random; these are the direction and angular velocity of the crystal's orbit (Clockwise/Counter-clockwise, slow/medium/fast). Their initial shooting direction is also randomized. Crystals spawn every 78 frames.
Because of the three different angular velocities of the crystals we get three different types of blue lanes. The faster the velocity, the more space there is between the blue bullets. The types of lanes we thus get are wide (easy), dense (hard) or walls (impossible). Image comparison courtesy of Sairyou: twitter.com/SrhuDSTG/status/1494180864930217985?s=20&t=A2zHeAfCFu1XNyq-jJjMpw
New crystal rings spawn before the previous one despawns, which causes all sorts of insane clown fiesta overlaps.
Basically you want to pray you get lots of wide gap lanes and not too many awful overlaps.

Red bullets are shot by Inbachi in circles of 32. No randomness here, one of them is aimed at the player. One circle is shot every 234 frames.
After 18 frames in game, each red bullet will start shooting one fugu bullet every 4 frames, up to 15 times. The direction rotates every time but it is static. Each circle of red bullets alternates between shooting inwards and outwards.

The hardest part of the final is a combination of a couple of factors:
- The extreme amount of health.
- The boss is invulnerable for a long time after dying, bombing and hypering.
- Bullets are so fast they will be on you long before the boss iframes run out.
You're basically forced to dodge it to do any kind of damage to it, you can't really do any sort of cheezing.

Everything causing long boss iframes is a big problem. There is however one exception to this rule: autobombs.
Autobombs cause very few iframes to the boss, meaning you can do damage the soonest after it. Which means the period of time after an autobomb is the most crucial in this fight.

Another trick was found out recently that made this a tiny bit more doable.
In Daioujou there was this bug where activating a hyper right after bombing would cause the hyper to lose their initial invulnerability period. Meaning you basically died instantly if you hypered right after bombing, a big problem on the Hibachi fight.
This same problematic bug exists in this game too, but you can actually use it to your advantage here!
If you trigger the bug right after autobombing, the boss will skip the hyper iframes and have the autobomb iframes instead. You can get hyper damage in earlier this way. Level 1 hypers do +10% damage, so it can be quite worth it.

Another thing to consider in this fight is how you build up hypers.
You charge a hyper by pointblanking and dying. A death will give you +50% hyper meter but ONLY when you die outside of hyper. Meaning you ideally want to always die outside of hyper.
A trick here is that autobombs cancel the hyper. So if you want to maximize the amount of hypers you want to do loops of hyper - autobomb - die - repeat, with the exception of your last life.
You can get around four hypers in the final this way. Besides the extra damage increase, hypers are also very useful for their initial screen cancels.

Besides pointblanking for hyper after a death, it's also possible to cancel a pink wave by cancelling the initial red bullets during iframes.

On Expert to trigger Inbachi at the end of the game you need to:
- No-Miss.
- No-Bomb.
- Get all the bee perfects.
- Max HIT Count ≥ 10,000.
- Rank 15 or more.
During a normal run it's possible to get to Inbachi at about rank 16 with a level 8 hyper. You then build that hyper up to a level 10 on the second pattern, use it and end the first phase right at the start of the third pattern.
REALLY IMPORTANT: the final phase takes damage for about a second before the phase transition iframes kick in. You really want to get Level 10 pointblank damage in during this.

The pattern does get easier over time since you keep dropping rank by dying a bunch.

Done with A-EX. The speed really helps with dodging the fast bullets and the smaller Expert hitbox is ESSENTIAL for this. This fight is 100% impossible with the larger Shot/Laser hitbox.

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OPEN ARMS MAXIMUM - ALL Clear (1-Miss, 7,149,501 Pts) (SHMUP Creator)

Jaimers 2022-06-27 | Turn on captions for some extra text comments.

Now here's something really cool.
One of the (first?) shmups made with the newly released SHMUP Creator on Steam.
SHMUP Creator is a make-your-own shmup maker from bulo studio. One of its main selling points is that you don't need to know any code to make shmups with it, it's all done in the in-game editor. So basically anybody can make a shmup with it. Advanced users will probably find the options you have pretty limiting, but if you can already make something like this with it that's already really impressive. Especially since this is still an early version of the software.
Another really great thing about this creator is that it supports higher refresh rates. I played this at 180 hertz and the game felt incredibly smooth to control.

OPEN ARMS MAXIMUM is made by Kanzaki Shintarou, really good shmup player and kusoge connoisseur. Lots of very interesting and obscure shmups so be sure to check him out: youtube.com/channel/UCAgzZWtunjsr0mV6CDcCdGQ
As a reflection of the creator, OPEN ARMS MAXIMUM is a very hard game.
Very fast bullet patterns and crazy pace, some nasty RNG in places too.

Your shot is crazy powerful at pointblank, so you're incentivized to get up in enemy's faces as much as possible. The scoring system also revolves around letting enemies fill the screen with bullets before finishing them off. Really good risk-reward implementation all around.
The game is really good. The speed and pacing is top-notch and the scoring system is really fun. Every enemy you kill will cancel its bullets and basically every enemy will shoot additional patterns for you to cancel if you let them live for a bit. Bosses also periodically shoot a bunch of bullets to the sides that you want to time the bosskill with.

You get 5 hits per life and you can replenish a hit with a shield powerup. You'll need them because the game is quite crazy. You get some i-frames after a hit, but not that many. There are no bombs in this.
The UI says you have 5 lives but the 0 doesn't count here, so it's more like 4 lives.

Some silly hits at the start here but it didn't really matter since you can easily recover those anyway.

Download the game here:
kanzaki-shintarou.itch.io/open-arms-maximum

Buy SHMUP Creator on Steam here:
store.steampowered.com/app/1289520/SHMUP_Creator

00:00 - Intro
00:17 - Stage 1
03:51 - Stage 2
07:41 - Stage 3
11:47 - Stage 4
16:40 - Stage 5
23:01 - Credits

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IDOL Ra.De. - No-Miss Clear (Chihaya - 80,120,416)

Jaimers 2022-06-09 | Turn on captions for some extra commentary.

IDOL Ra.De is a doujin shmup from 2006 made by the doujin circle D.N.A. Software, who you might know for games like Moedan or Touhou Unreal Mahjong. As well as some Madoka Magica fangames.

The game is designed as a 5 minute caravan score-attack mode, much in the vein of Hudson caravan shmups like Star Soldier. You have 5 minutes to score as much as possible and you have infinite lives, but every hit reduces 3 seconds off the clock.

As you might be able to guess, this is basically ESP Ra.De with Idolmaster characters.

Scoring wise this game is essentially Esprade with a Daifukkatsu Black Label rank meter.
Rank goes up over time and goes up a lot if you use the power shot. Rank goes down with bullet cancels and dying.
So for score you want to drive up the rank to max ASAP and then cancel as many bullets as possible while maintaining a x16 chain from hitting enemies with the power shot.
Bullet cancels work like in Espgaluda where the multiplier increases the more bullets are cancelled in a single cancel.
The second half of the stage has some enemies that give screen cancels that are worth a shitton of score if you optimize the cancel (~21 million per cancel).
The time remaining bonus isn't that huge, but there is an enormous 10 million no-miss bonus so you never want to get hit anyway.

The last boss is complete nonsense on max rank, a lot of the patterns don't even seem dodgeable at all. Luckily you can drop the rank to near zero by doing a big bullet cancel near the end. Fighting the boss on max rank isn't even worth that much (couple million at most?), so it's like a huge meme.
The first phase of the midboss is the hardest part of the run because you have to actually dodge it on max rank.

Chihaya seems like the best because her pointblank does absurd amounts of damage.
The producer dude seems to raise rank absurdly fast with his power shot, but he is really hard to use.

Game is a bit of an oddity. I love that it exists but I can't deny that it feels more like a tech demo than anything else, what with it basically having only four enemy types and wildly unbalanced boss patterns.
Also I have no idea if this is abandonware or not at this point, it's not even listed on the D.N.A. Software site anymore.

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Drainus - Ridiculous Mode 2-ALL 1cc Clear + Full Story (Fresh Save/No-Restarts)

Jaimers 2022-05-25 | So Team Ladybug just shadowdropped a new game, and it's actually a shmup.

You might know Team Ladybug for games like Touhou Luna Nights and Record of Lodoss War.
They're known for their insanely high quality pixel art and overall quality, and this game is no different.
Someone on that team apparently really loves shmups, you can see tons of references to classic shmups and you can feel a great sense of respect for them.
Just on a glance you can see inspiration from Gradius V, Gradius Gaiden, Darius Gaiden, Progear and Fantasy Zone. Hell there is even a Gradius III cube rush reference thrown in there. They know.
Just like their previous games, this game boosts insane pixel art and oozes quality.

Game system is all about absorbing bullets while using the i-frame mechanic.
This meter drains while you use it and refills when you're not.
Absorbing bullets charges your reflect lasers and fills your energy tanks and bombs. You can use these energy tanks to buy upgrades in the pause menu.
The gameplay reminds me of IKUSAAAAAAAN! at times where you just want to absorb as many bullets as possible while abusing the i-frame mechanic as much as possible.

Ridiculous is the hardest difficulty in the game.
Patterns are significantly buffed and you die in one hit, normally getting hit makes you lose power and you only die after you lose all your power.
In the 2nd loop enemies shoot tons of red bullets too, so you actually have to dodge a lot. Red bullets cannot be absorbed, though bombs give a few i-frames you can use to bypass red bullets.
Ridiculous mode is easily the best part of the game.

For upgrades you want to upgrade Guard asap since more absorbing = more powerups.
After that you want a shield and eventually Emergency Power-up to compliment it.
I don't even buy weapons until stage 3 but for weapons you just want to get the most powerful and expensive ones.
After that you want to jailbreak slot 1 so you can put the x1.2 attack EX slot in there.
For the 2nd loop you want to save 27 tanks so you can immediately buy the new 2nd loop weapons and shield. I think you generate less energy tanks in the 2nd loop, so you mostly want to get everything done in the 1st loop.

Dying is pretty bad in this game because you lose all your power.
You're basically unable to kill anything in this state, so chaindeaths will happen or worse.
The Emergency Power-up bomb is the best way to recover in this situation, if you have a bunch of bombs stocked up you can recover most of your power on the spot.

Unfortunately the game doesn't live up to it's full potential and is ultimately broken.
The game has super wacky balance and Story Mode has infinite patterns. Things don't time out, so you can just milk for score and powerups forever, making this kind of a sham. Some power-ups are also super busted while others serve little purpose. Combining the Emergency Power-up Super Bomb with the shield is a super broken combination, as soon as your shield breaks just pop one of these and you'll get it back immediately for basically infinite shields.

Now here's the thing: there is actually an Arcade mode that HAS TIMEOUTS.
The fact that Arcade mode fixes some of these issues but not Story mode is maddening to me.
So just play Arcade Mode then right? Unfortunately Arcade Mode is limited to Hard Mode only, and Hard mode is unplayably easy. If Arcade had Ridiculous this would be perfect but alas.
The Arcade mode in concept is really cool btw. It even has an attract screen with 'insert credit' and it's really authentic. You can also only access the pause menu once per stage and the pause menu has a timer now.

This game would be incredible if it had just a few tiny tweaks and it's a shame really.
Maybe EXA will pick it up and make a true arcade mode that nobody will be able to play.

I guess a no-death clear wouldn't be -that- much harder, but it's kinda obnoxious to try this on a game that's super long like this.

Buy the game on Steam here:
store.steampowered.com/app/1975360/DRAINUS

Did a different Ridiculous clear on Twitch with commentary as well:
twitch.tv/videos/1492584268

00:00 - Intro
00:50 - Stage 1-1 - Planet Halpax
10:40 - Stage 1-2 - Lunar Railway Mazzaroth
23:24 - Stage 1-3 - Planet Chammatter
30:02 - Stage 1-4 - Battleship Kharlal
41:14 - Stage 1-5 - Kharlal Mobile Fortress Exterior
49:16 - Stage 1-6 - Kharlal Mobile Fortress Interior
1:00:38 - Stage 2-1 - Deja Vu Planet Halpax
1:07:36 - Stage 2-2 - Deja Vu Lunar Railway Mazzaroth
1:14:44 - Stage 2-3 - Deja Vu Planet Chammatter
1:21:16 - Stage 2-4 - Deja Vu Battleship Kharlal
1:32:12 - Stage 2-5 - Deja Vu Kharlal Mobile Fortress Exterior
1:39:22 - Stage 2-6 - Deja Vu Kharlal Mobile Fortress Interior
Ending & Credits: 1:47:38

Some funny scuff in this run.

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Mahou Otome - Dodonpachi Daioujou Event - 2nd Loop Clear (NMNB)

Jaimers 2022-05-15 | Mahou Otome had a DOJ event some time ago which was pretty neat.
It had a 1st loop stage and a 2nd loop stage, and the 2nd loop had a TLB at the end.
It had a short little story about the SDOJ characters getting infused with the souls of the DOJ characters.

Didn't capture it on video, but if you pick the 2nd loop stage there is even the warning from actual DOJ and it's amazing: https://i.imgur.com/p7OPJYK.jpg

The laser aura works like perfectly for this stage because of all the destructible bullets from all sides.

Also no this video is not just an excuse to post Longhena content.

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Mahou Otome came out in 2015 and is Cave's long-running free mobile gacha game that's set in the Deathsmiles universe.
It's basically the sole thing that kept Cave afloat all these years.

This game is pretty incredible just in how much of a giant hodgepodge of everything Cave it is.
Fighting Larsa with Deathsmiles enemies while Reco pilots the SDOJ Type A ship with the Ketsui guys and Longhena as support while the Muchi Muchi Pork girls cheer on.
Basically everything Cave is in this game, and if it isn't it's only a matter of time. Besides characters it also has the shottypes like the DDP laser and a shot that's basically Hibachi's washing machine.
Now you too can have Longhena as your husbando.

This game has had 6 years of constant non-stop content added to it now, it is actually absurd how huge this game is.
There are over 2374 units that all have different combinations of shottypes and skills and they all have a personal story, each of the 15 main characters has over 90 different costumes, each has a skill tree that makes Path of Exile blush, there is an in-game FORUM, in-game user-reviews for all the shottypes, there are monthly score tournaments and daily guild wars where guilds compete against each other for rewards, it's really nuts.
It should also not be understated that there are like ten thousand people playing this game every day. I really can't say the same thing for any other shmup.
You can see all the different units here: gomaotsu.jp/character_all
The page actually takes forever to load because there are just that many.

There is also so much LORE. So much new story, art and music for existing Cave games. Longhena for example got tons of new art and they even gave him a VOICE. He also plays a part in the story which is great because it takes place in the Deathsmiles universe and it all reads like a giant crossover fanfiction, it's amazing.
There's also a part where the DDP Type A,B and C ships got turned into anime girls and it's hysterical.

The game features stamps that you can use in the in-game forums and DM's. Longhena got a bunch of voiced stamps and they are the best: https://i.imgur.com/jLv0f4M.png

The only real issues with the game is that it's still hampered by your typical gacha game issues like stamina, useless units and overabundance of in-game currency. If you're looking for metagaming there's only a small handful of units that are viable, and they don't pop up that often.

It's very, very different from an arcade game but it's still a really absurd and interesting game for what it is. And underneath all the gacha it's still a Cave game with Cave quality.

Insane guide for the game that's somewhat outdated but it should give you a good idea: drive.google.com/file/d/0B6hzMDGe4X2Va0dCMVVmNGh2aTg/edit

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Pocky & Rocky Reshrined - Hard, No Death Clear + All Secrets (Ikazuchi - 6,417,180 pts)

Jaimers 2022-05-11 | Turn on captions for some extra commentary.

Decided to do another run because a lot of cool new tech got found.

The biggest discoveries being shop manipulation and item duping.
The shops usually give you a random reward, but what you get is actually determined by the last digit of your coin count.
- For 50 coin shops you want a 3 or an 8 to get the shield.
- For 100 coin shops you want a 4 or a 9 to get the extend.
- 300 coin shops always give a guaranteed extend.
Might be a cool little nod to the original arcade Kiki Kaikai where extends spawn if your last three score digits end in zero.

For Item duping you need to understand how the game registers picking up items first.
You pick up an item by either touching them directly OR touching them with the deflect hurtbox. In order for the dupe to happen both situations need to happen at the same time.
You need to be right under the item and be in a reflect frames when it falls on you. Run forward as soon as the chest breaks and then reflect. You'll get the same item twice.

In a nutshell scoring in this game is:
- Not getting hit and not bombing (30k for excess health items and bombs, 50k for excess shields)
- Getting all the secret chests and shops.
- Shop manipulation to get all extends and shields.
- Item duping to get double the value of items.
- Milking. You lose score from the time bonus but you only lose 200 points per second so milking is still worth more.

Pocky & Rocky Reshrined came out about a month ago on Japanese PS4 and Switch, with the Western release coming later in June.
Continuing the trend of modern sequels to random old games, Reshrined is a sequel to the 1992 SNES Pocky & Rocky.
This time actually made by the original developers; Natsume. Lately they've been making remakes/sequels to their old IP's in the style of the originals, which is pretty cool.
Before this they did Wild Guns Reloaded and The Ninja Warriors Once Again.

The original title of the series is Kiki Kaikai, which started as an arcade title in 1986 and got several ports and sequels, including one on the GBA. When the games were brought overseas they were renamed to Pocky & Rocky.
Kiki Kaikai is set in a somewhat land of fantasy, inhabited by humans and youkai, and Sayo-chan, the miko of the Shrine and the main character of the series, is often tasked with resolving supernatural "incidents".
As you can probably tell Kikai Kaikai was one of the major inspirations for Touhou, especially if you know the PC-98 games.

The game has a Story mode and a Free mode.
Story mode features all the story (obviously) and has preset characters for you to use during stages. Certain abilities are also locked until stage 3.
Free mode lets you choose between one of the five playable characters to play the entire game with, with all abilities unlocked from the start.

Hard mode is the hardest difficulty in the game. Enemies are more aggressive and shoot more, and some enemies now shoot revenge bullets. Though it's not -that- much more difficult than Normal.
The most significant change is that you lose power after getting hit and you can't pick it back up again unlike Normal. There is sort of a Gradius syndrome going on if you get hit too many times in a row, it's really hard to survive at low power and it's usually a downwards spiral when it happens.

Game manual: imgur.com/a/SeMGZjC
The movement speed in this game is really slow, so it's not really about dodging and more about making good use of the slide, reflect and shield.
Every character has different shots for blue, green and red powerups, but red is usually the strongest. It does the most damage and this game mostly has tanky enemies instead of popcorn, so raw power is just overall more usefull.
Powerups work kinda weirdly in this. You need to keep picking up powerups of the same color to increase their strength, if you keep switching you'll not power up anything. Different color powerups are their for a liability and can be actively more dangerous than the enemies if you accidentally switch to a shit shot. The hardest attack on the stage 2 boss is when it drops a bunch of powerups on you.
The reflect is really good. Its range is pretty huge and reflect most bullets. It also does decent contact damage and pushes you away from enemies so they don't ram into you when they're moving towards you.
The dash is mostly for movement since it doesn't give you i-frames.

The game is great fun and has absolutely gorgeous pixel art. Definitely recommended.

00:00 - Intro
00:11 - Stage 1: The Haunted Shrine
04:06 - Stage 2: Enchanted Forest
13:20 - Stage 3: An Ancient Land
20:05 - Stage 4: The Underworld
27:37 - Stage 5: Cursed Airship
36:49 - Stage 6: The Burning City
38:59 - Stage 7: Battle with Black Mantle
49:20 - Stage 8: The Final Battle
51:09 - Ending & Credits

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Touhou 8 ~ Imperishable Night - Perfect Extra Stage (Type A)

Jaimers 2022-04-29 | Old replay from 2010.
No-miss, no-bomb clear of the Extra stage that I never uploaded for some reason.

Not exactly sure what the meta is today, but back then Type A was the best for NMNB Extra because the piercing of the laser would hit both Mokou and her wings at the same time for extra damage.
It makes the stage a bit harder but it generally doesn't matter that much.

The last nonspell is harder than everything else in the stage combined.

Download mod:
drive.google.com/file/d/1uC4eovUvyY8dmYNN-klQQvW_S7UL-uju/view?usp=sharing

Download TATE mod:
github.com/massanoori/THRotator

Huge shoutouts to Baf for making the mod, go follow him:
youtube.com/channel/UC9UA8pb41L2-GwGL6YdDm7w

00:00 - Stage
04:05 - Boss

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[AC] Andro Dunos - 2-ALL Clear (3,1 Million to 3-6)

Jaimers 2022-04-27 | Old run from 2014.
I thought I uploaded this before but I guess I didn't. But with the recent Andro Dunos II release and all I guess now is as good as any. The sequel takes a lot from the original so you can find lots of similarities and references in here.

Andro Dunos is a somewhat average Neo-Geo shmup, but it has a cool weapon switching mechanic like the Thunderforce series. You can freely switch between four different weapons on the fly and most of the game is centered around strategic use of your various weapons to get past enemies and obstacles. Each weapon powers up individually and each weapon has a unique and powerful special attack.

Probably the most memorable part of this game is the absolutely bizarre rank system, where the game becomes near impossible if you so much as dare to power up more than one weapon throughout the game, kinda defeating the point of the multi-weapon system. And don't even think about collecting all the bonus point items.

So yeah rank management is a pretty big deal in this.
- Only pick up blue S powerups and exactly -one- yellow M to keep the rank from getting out of control.
- NEVER pick up every single B bonus item in a stage, the rank increase from the Perfect Bonus is huge. Just make sure to miss one per stage.
- Using charge shots also increases the rank so uh, don't use them much.
Rank increases enemy aggression, bullet speed and enemy HP. Enemies get extremely tanky if the rank gets too high.

Game loops infinitely, and rank just keeps getting higher and higher.
Rank management is essential if you're going for very high loops.
Here's a video of loop 2 without any rank management whatsoever to compare: youtube.com/watch?v=bV83ICS6KHw#t=31m40s

For the most part the system is the same as Andro Dunos II, with a couple of exceptions:
- Charge shots drain the weapon you're using by 1 power level and there is no cooldown, but it raises rank.
- All subweapons need to be powered up individually, instead of them all being under one general subweapon banner.
- At the end of stages you don't get extra powerup rewards for collecting bonus items.

00:00 - Intro
01:06 - Stage 1 - The Moon
04:56 - Stage 2 - Mechanized Unit
10:18 - Stage 3 - Alien
13:56 - Stage 4 - Caven
17:34 - Stage 5 - Meteorite
21:32 - Stage 6 - Secret Base
25:28 - Stage 7 - Core
32:21 - Loop 2
1:04:25 - Loop 3

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Pocky & Rocky Reshrined - Story Mode - Hard Mode 1cc (No-Death, No-Bomb)

Jaimers 2022-04-26 | Pocky & Rocky Reshrined came out about a week ago on Japanese PS4 and Switch, with the Western release coming about 2 months later.
Continuing the trend of modern sequels to random old games, Reshrined is a sequel to the 1992 SNES Pocky & Rocky.
This time actually made by the original developers; Natsume. Lately they've been making remakes/sequels to their old IP's in the style of the originals, which is pretty cool.
Before this they did Wild Guns Reloaded and The Ninja Warriors Once Again.

The original title of the series is Kiki Kaikai, which started as an arcade title in 1986 and got several ports and sequels, including one on the GBA. When the games were brought overseas they were renamed to Pocky & Rocky.
Kiki Kaikai is set in a somewhat land of fantasy, inhabited by humans and youkai, and Sayo-chan, the miko of the Shrine and the main character of the series, is often tasked with resolving supernatural "incidents".
As you can probably tell Kikai Kaikai was one of the major inspirations for Touhou, especially if you know the PC-98 games.

The game has a Story mode and a Free mode.
Story mode features all the story (obviously) and has preset characters for you to use during stages. Certain abilities are also locked until stage 3.
Free mode lets you choose between one of the five playable characters to play the entire game with, with all abilities unlocked from the start.

Hard mode is the hardest difficulty in the game. Enemies are more aggressive and shoot more, and some enemies now shoot revenge bullets. Though it's not -that- much more difficult than Normal.
The most significant change is that you lose power after getting hit and you can't pick it back up again unlike Normal. There is sort of a Gradius syndrome going on if you get hit too many times in a row, it's really hard to survive at low power and it's usually a downwards spiral when it happens.

Game manual: imgur.com/a/SeMGZjC
The movement speed in this game is really slow, so it's not really about dodging and more about making good use of the slide, reflect and shield
Every character has different shots for blue, green and red powerups, but red is usually the strongest. It does the most damage and this game mostly has tanky enemies instead of popcorn, so just raw power towers over everything else in overall usefulness.
Powerups work kinda weirdly in this. You need to keep picking up powerups of the same color to increase their strength, if you keep switching you'll not power up anything. Different color powerups are their for a liability and can be actively more dangerous than the enemies if you accidentally switch to a shit shot. The hardest attack on the stage 2 boss is when it drops a bunch of powerups on you.
The reflect is really good. Its range is pretty huge and reflect most bullets. It also does decent contact damage and pushes you away from enemies so they don't ram into you when they're moving towards you.
The dash is mostly for movement since it doesn't give you i-frames.

Pocky can have three mirrors on screen at once and they shoot aimed shots at enemies when you shoot any of the mirrors.
The mirror shots don't go through other mirrors though, so you need to align them so that doesn't happen.
You can also use the shield barrier to activate the mirrors instead of your shot, so you can use that for additional DPS or if you want to shoot two targets at once.

You can use coins that enemies drop on roulettes spread across the stages.
These can give you a variety of items, including 1ups, but it can also change your current shot. I got kinda screwed over by one in stage 2 where it gave me an awful shot and then I just didn't bother anymore lol. I did kinda forget that the 300? coin roulettes give you guaranteed 1up. Probably missed like 3 or 4 extends that way.

There are also some secret item boxes spread across stages.
These are invisible and can only be uncovered with the gohei or other melee attack.

The game is great fun and has absolutely gorgeous pixel art. Definitely recommended.

Pocky is probably the weakest character in the game which is kinda sad.
Rocky's blue shot is mega trash but his charge lets him fire from a fixed point which is huge.
Ikazuchi red lock-on laser is mega powerful and Hotaru Gozen has super powerful melee attacks.
Ame-No-Uzume is just mega broken and just a better Pocky in every way.

Some cutscenes were added in post.

00:00 - Intro
00:20 - Story
01:23 - Stage 1: The Haunted Shrine
04:55 - Story
06:34 - Stage 2: Enchanted Forest
13:54 - Story
16:43 - Stage 3: An Ancient Land
22:20 - Story
24:03 - Stage 4: The Underworld
30:37 - Story
33:30 - Stage 5: Cursed Airship
41:25 - Story
44:36 - Stage 6: The Burning City
46:25 - Story
51:04 - Stage 7: Battle with Black Mantle
1:00:30 - Story
1:02:25 - Stage 8: The Final Battle
1:04:51 - Ending & Credits

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Andro Dunos II - Android 1cc (No-Miss/No-Deaths) + Respect 1992 Bonus Stages

Jaimers 2022-04-19 | Turn on captions for some extra commentary.

Looks like random modern sequels to random old arcade games is a trend now.
Andro Dunos II came out recently on Nintendo Switch, PS4, Steam, 3DS and, for some reason, Dreamcast and is the sequel to the 1992 Andro Dunos from Visco.
This sequel is made by Picorinne Soft, developer of games like Infinos Gaiden and Battle Crust,
which were all pretty good.

Android is the hardest difficulty in the game.
Enemies shoot more and bosses have some new attacks. It's not -that- much harder than Arcade in the sense that the same routes work for both, but Android definitely requires a lot more proactiveness from the player to remove threats before they overwhelm you.

Andro Dunos was an alright Neo-Geo shmup, the coolest thing about it was the weapon switching mechanic like the Thunderforce series.
Probably the most memorable part of it was this absolutely bizarre rank system, where the game would become near impossible if you so much as dared to power up more than one weapon, kinda defeating the point of the multi-weapon system. And don't even think about collecting all the bonus point items.
This game doesn't have that though, and in terms of overall level design it's definitely quite a step up from the original. Far more interesting design and the pacing is way better, whereas the original often suffered from dead air.

System
This game, like the original, lets you freely switch between four different weapons on the fly and most of the game is centered around strategic use of your various weapons to get past enemies and obstacles.
Each weapon powers up individually and each weapon has a unique and powerful special attack that's on a cooldown. You can only use the special again once the cooldown is over and the weapon you used the special with will be stuck at level 1 for the duration of it. Specials are always at max power regardless of a weapon's current power level.
Figuring out how to most optimally make use of your weapons to get max DPS and do speedkills on bosses is very fun.
- Blue Shot: Strong forward focus. The most powerful shot from afar and also the most powerful pointblank if the missiles hit the target as well. The special cancels bullets and also pierces enemies, which is useful for enemies that are protected in armor or hide behind other enemies.
- Green shot: Lets you shoot in 5 different directions at once on max power. The best shot for stages and the most versatile shot in general since it can hit most of the screen. Special does damage in a big circle around you and also cancels bullets. The most defensive tool in your arsenal.
- Yellow shot: Backshot. The special on this is just straight-up broken, it does an absolutely absurd amount of damage. But its usefulness is somewhat limited since chances to hit enemies and bosses from behind is somewhat rare.
- Grey shot: Wide shot. Good against swarms of popcorn, though it needs to be powered up to be really useful. The special gives you a huge wide shot and does the most damage, aside from backshot, if you can land every single shot onto a target.

Every stage has 30 bonus items that get dropped by certain enemies.
For every 10 you collect you get a bonus level up that you can use between stages to power up any of your various weapons.
I like this system because it incentivizes getting them all and it makes the stages more involved and dynamic.

Scoring
Not much scoring going on in this besides enemy destruction, picking up the bonus items and picking up powerups at max power for +2000 points. Bosses also have some destructible parts you can destroy. After every stage you can cash the powerups in for +5000 points instead of using them.
Scoring would probably involve a balance of powering up the least amount of weapons while still not losing out on score from enemy destruction.

The Respect 1992 stages are bonus stages you can unlock and are remakes of stage 1 and 3 of the original Andro Dunos, which is pretty neat. Respect B even has a unique boss.

The game has a practice mode, but it's probably one of the worst practice modes I've seen in a while. It only lets you start at the beginning of stages and they start you with close to no power, which is not useful in the slightest. It's better than nothing but not by much.

Buy the game on Steam here:
store.steampowered.com/app/1856900/Andro_Dunos_II

00:00 - Intro
01:40 - Stage 1 - Our Planet
05:04 - Stage 2 - Space Colony
08:54 - Stage 3 - Asteroid
12:57 - Stage 4 - Deep Sea
18:08 - Stage 5 - Machine City
22:33 - Stage 6 - Battleship
28:54 - Stage 7 - Secret Base
36:53 - Ending & Credits
40:03 - Bonus Stage 1 - Respect 1992 A
43:25 - Bonus Stage 2 - Respect 1992 B

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SOL CRESTA - PlatinumHard ALL Clear (No-Miss/ No-Deaths)

Jaimers 2022-04-06 | It's the year 2022 and Platinum Games, developer of cult classics like Bayonetta and Nier Automata, releases a fully-fledged shmup with all the bells and whistles of a big studio budget, directed by the famous Hideki Kamiya of Resident Evil and Devil May Cry fame, with music by the equally as famous Yuzo Koshiro, with an epic 2 hour long story that's fully voice acted.
And all for a sequel to a jank 1985 arcade shmup that was made by a company that was mostly known for making arcade shovelware.

It pays deep respect to this original Cresta series, keeping the original jank base while trying to modernize it as much as possible. With many different references and enemies making a return from the original games. Silly music and designs from the originals clashing heavily with the serious plot of the game.

Platinum Hard is the hardest difficulty you can start from (though the game loops infinitely and later loops keep getting slightly more difficult I believe). In-game Platinum Hard is labeled as loop 5.
Platinum Hard has some very notable differences from the difficulties before it:
- Formation attacks are severely nerfed, they only last about half as long as normal.
- In addition, formation attacks are now consumables. After you use them once you need to collect a chip of the same kind again in order to use it again. This includes the phoenix formation.
- The amount of shields you have is limited to only one.
- Sol Gauge gets reset upon death (including losing your command input shots)
- More enemies and obstacles.
- Addition of a lot of bouncing bullets during midbosses and bosses.
- Tons of revenge bullets in general.
I like Platinum Hard because it forces you to master and use all of the many mechanics of the game. Normally you can just ignore most of these and still clear the game.

The game plays quite differently to most other shmups out there.
The amount of mechanics and options they crammed into this game is so massive that it almost feels like you're playing a mix of a character action game and a shmup.
You have 3 shots that you can mix and match in 9 different ways, 3 different charge attacks, 9 different formation attacks, 5 different command input attacks, a bullet time mechanic, options you can use defensively and offensively...
Besides that the scoring system is also comprised of a million different mechanics and secrets.
Platinum released a video explaining all the gameplay mechanics, scoring mechanics and secrets and it lasts over 2 hours long (yes there are that many): store.steampowered.com/news/app/1575640/view/5254017618798009772

For survival I found that bullet time is kinda the answer to everything.
It's massively overpowered and you get so much of it. Besides the slowdown, you can also cancel bullets with the tail of your ships and can get more shots off than you normally would.
Also spam command attacks constantly.

The game has a lot of story with character chatter going on almost constantly.
There is just one problem though; they made far more story than game. So all the story got contained in a separate Dramatic Mode DLC where in order to fit the story in they had to artificially lengthen the game. What this usually means is adding a ton of dead air to let the dialogue finish. You're not likely to replay this mode much, which I think is a shame. Ginga Force/Natsuki Chronicles handled this way better.

Visually the game looks like vomit because it uses a weird filter to make polygonal graphics look like fake pixel art, with no way to turn it off. The gameplay is great fun though, it offers a lot of variety in playstyles and is strategically rich. It's also very unique.

On Switch the game has 10 frames of input lag but on PC it felt like one of the smoothest games I've played with Special K injected. This is part because you can play at framerates far above 60, something not many shmups have but really need.

The game had a very rough launch with more game-breaking bugs and softlocks than any other shmup in history. Random softlocks is also a bad combination if your game has infinite loops.

A game having infinite loops in 2022 is also very wild, and I think it ultimately does more harm to the game than good. You can have all the scoring mechanics in the world, but ultimately the only thing that matters is endurance and nothing else.
I did two loops once and still had 32 lives in stock, I don't think it's actually possible to game over in this game once you learn it a bit and that scares me.

Buy the game on Steam here:
store.steampowered.com/app/1575640/SOL_CRESTA

00:00 - Intro
03:52 - Stage 01: Neptune
10:56 - Stage 02: Uranus
17:45 - Stage 03: Saturn
27:10 - Stage 04: Mars
34:40 - Stage 05: Terra
41:40 - Stage 06: Mercury
50:23 - Stage 07: Sol
01:05:15 - Ending & Credits:

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Touhou 15 東方紺珠伝 ~ Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom - Lunatic Pristine Danmaku Hell - Perfect Timeout

Jaimers 2022-04-01 | I changed my mind, Junko is the best Touhou boss ever.

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[PS4] Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid Burst Forth!! Choro-gon☆Breath! - Extreme (No-Damage, No-Bombs)

Jaimers 2022-04-01 | Turn on captions for some extra commentary.

Clear of the highest difficulty on Story Mode without getting hit, taking any damage or using any bombs.

New MOSS shmup that came out about a week ago on PS4 and Switch.
It was made by Kaminari Games, which is a subsidiary of MOSS, known for making games like Raiden V and Caladrius Blaze. So if things remind you of those games that's why. The game even has the shame breaks from Caladrius.
They sure went in a weird direction with this new game.

System
- You have three playable characters you can freely switch between. Each one has their own unique shot, bomb, melee attack, movement speed and leader perk like in Senjin Aleste. The game has no focus button, so switching becomes necessary if you want to slow down or speed up.
- Every character has their own healthbar and getting hit takes a good chunk out of it. Getting hit sometimes gives you a temporary hyper. The healthbars of inactive characters slowly regenerate over time, but once a character dies they're perma-death. In order to access the final stage none of the characters are allowed to die. Rank drops quite a bit after a character dies too.
- The melee is pretty unusual. If you press the button you'll dash towards the nearest enemy on screen to strike them, kinda like a teleport. You can also charge it it to do more damage. During the dash you can pass through bullets, but you'll always take a little bit of damage from them, which is obviously not viable for this category. It's also very easy to just dash straight into a moving enemy hitbox and take a million damage. It's situational at best.
- The way power works in this game is quite unusual too. You fill up the power meter by shooting and melee'ing enemies and you go up a power level at certain thresholds. Some shots are much better at building power than others, the wide shot in particular increases power at a much faster rate. During bosses melee gives more power than shot.
- Probably the weirdest part of the game is the inclusion of the backstep mechanic. It's functionally the same thing as the melee, but instead of dashing at an enemy you dash back to the bottom of the screen. I've honestly never seen anything like it and I'm... not sure if there is a single use for it. In theory it lets you pointblank a bit more, but you probably lose more damage than you would just moving away yourself duo to the doppler effect.

Characters
Green girl
- Strong forward focus shot.
- Medium melee damage.
- Medium speed.
- Leader perk: shot power increase.

Blue girl
- Wide shot.
- Strongest melee.
- Lowest speed.
- Leader perk: melee power increase.

Pink Girl
- Homing shot.
- Weakest melee.
- Fastest speed.
- Shots can cancel bullets.
- Weak bomb but it heals everyone.
- Little HP.
- Leader perk: bombs regenerate faster.

Scoring
Scoring in this game is a bit unusual too. It's enemy kill chaining, but the score you get and how lenient the chaining is depends on the Risk Rate you set at the start of the game. The higher the Risk Rate the more score you get, but the shorter the chain timer is and the more damage you take from enemies. On Risk Rate 5 a single hit takes out half your healthbar, it's pretty nutty. Very risk-reward.

The game has a lot of bonus content. In the stages you can collect random treasure and picture pieces to build over 30 different illustrations with special voice overs. Some are more rare than others and the rarer stuff has more chance to drop on higher Risk Rates, which is cool.
There are also 5 different endings based on things like which character you used the most.
The game also has a LOT of dialogue, it feels like a visual novel at times. And it's all voiced acted too.

I'm not really sure what MOSS was thinking when making this story and characters, I don't think it will really catch on.

Shoutouts to ため for some of the strats.

00:00 - Intro
00:56 - Stage 1
04:16 - Stage 2
07:49 - Stage 3
11:29 - Stage 4
15:20 - Stage 5
19:57 - Stage 6
23:02 - Ending & Credits

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[AC] Dodonpachi Saidaioujou - Hibachi (No-Miss, No-Bomb)

Jaimers 2022-01-31 | Was only going for a no-miss but accidentally no-bombed too.

Dodonpachi Saidaioujou came out in arcades in 2012 and was the final game in the Donpachi series made by Cave.
Hibachi is one of two True Last Bosses in this game, in order to trigger her at the end of the game you need to:
- Beat the game with 1 death or less.
- Get at least 3 Bee Perfect Stages.
The Hibachi fight in this game is modeled after all the past Hibachi fights. Every attack is based on a Hibachi attack from a different game in the series.

Shmups wiki page for SDOJ: https://shmups.wiki/library/DoDonPachi_SaiDaiOuJou

The Hibachi fight is a lot easier with Expert type, since you get a smaller player hitbox on Expert.
Hibachi herself doesn't change at all on Expert.

Doing this NMNB requires not shooting the boss for most of the fight, there are a lot of reasons for this:
- Need a high hyper level for the final phase to end it before washing machine starts again.
- To build hypers you need to pointblank, which is only really possible on the fourth attack.
- The hard attacks are the first two and you can't end the first phase before you have to redo the first two attacks again anyway.
- Not shooting makes you redo the third and fourth attacks but those are fairly easy anyway.
- The fireballs on the second pattern are only visible if you don't shoot.
- It's easier to dodge in general because of better bullet visibility.

- Phase 1
Attack 1 - Static but with random boss movement.
Easily the hardest attack in the fight that is not washing machine. It's very fast and hard to react to. You can somewhat learn it after playing it a lot but it still takes a bit of luck I'd say. Want to stay near the big red bullets and cross over to the left whenever possible. Usually the boss movement will give you an opening.

Attack 2 - Fireballs thrown into random directions. When the fireballs touch the walls they explode into sets of bullets. Watch the fireballs and dodge accordingly. The fireballs themselves can't hurt you but you can only see them if you stop shooting, since your own bullets cover them up completely. This attack can be particularly nasty if you get unlucky.

Attack 3 - Static with some slight variation on where it starts in the pattern and how it overlaps. Not too bad after you learn how to read it. Want to stay a bit to the left of the middle. Some waves will wall you extremely quickly if you don't move out immediately, recognizing when this is about to happen is key.

Attack 4: Where the red and blue lines first spawn is random. The easiest attack probably. Just follow along with the flow to the right and then alternate between dodging blue and red. You can pointblank the entirely of the attack here, which is the key to doing damage as well as charging your hyper for the final.

- Phase 2:
Final phase alternates between two attacks, washing machine and fugusashi. It starts with a short washing machine, then fugusashi and after a bit it will switch back to a long washing machine, then fugusashi again etc.
Washing machine is nigh undodgeable, so you want to end the final phase before the washing machine starts up again. For this you need to bring a level 6 hyper into the final.
Fugusashi is static with random boss movement again I think. It's a lot more dogeable and not -that- bad after you get used to it. It can get hell if the boss moves very low on the screen though.

At the start you can pointblank on the right of the boss. The red bullets are static, the blue bullets and the boss movement is random. You can skip most of the first washing machine with the hyper activation, but you still need to dodge for about a second or two (or use an autobomb). Look at Hibachi's movement to decide on which side of the screen you're going to dodge. Usually you can safety sit in the bottom right for a second or two if you're lucky.

It's possible to bring a level 7 hyper into the final but it didn't seem worth the extra rank increase. The boss dies at around the same time with a level 6 and level 7 hyper.

Rank 10 is about as low as I could manage to get the rank in a real run without outright doing TAS crap.

Type A has the fastest speed which helps a lot for attack 1, 3 and the final.

Omake: twitter.com/JaimersSTG/status/1477777529578700806
Apparently the RNG in this fight doesn't change until you press the shot or laser button. You can kinda cheeze the entire first cycle like this with seeded RNG on a savestate. I made sure to laser her at the start for a bit to make sure I got a random seed as to make this as legit as possible.

Very fun TLB, I think it's easily one of the best TLB's Cave ever made.

Also shoutouts to Sairyou for being the first to finally beat Inbachi:
youtube.com/watch?v=wqlQDHL8F8I

00:00 - Intro
00:45 - Boss

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[AC] Raiden Fighters Jet - TLB ALL Clear - 130,643,564 (Ixion Slave)

Jaimers 2022-01-27 | Raiden Fighters Jet came out in arcades in 1998 and was the third and last game in the Raiden Fighters series. It was made by Seibu Kaihatsu, the same guys that made the Raiden series.

Even though it has Raiden in the name, it really has nothing at all to do with Raiden in terms of gameplay. It was originally a new IP called Gun Dogs, but Seibu changed the name to be part of the Raiden series since it gathered more attention that way.

The Raiden Fighters games are all incredibly good games, I easily find them some of the best shmups ever made. The stages are all incredibly condensed with constant new and cool stuff to do while you zip all over the screen at super high speeds. Almost no dead air or repeated things, the game moves forward like a roller coaster. The music also perfectly encapsulates this. There is so much going on that it's basically impossible to explain everything in real-time.

Jet added a couple of new things to the Raiden Fighters formula.
The game now has non-linear stage progression. How well you play affects what stage you will be sent to after you complete it. Another big thing is that secret bonuses now get multiplied based on how quickly you uncover them in succession, which adds another layer of depth to the scoring as well as make it way harder.

Very in-depth guide for the game and the other Raiden Fighters games. Shows all the secrets, mechanics and stage progression rules. Absolutely required reading:
http://rf-emporium.ghegs.com/rfjet/secrets.htm

TLB requirements:
- Rank well enough to reach the Real Battle stages.
- Don't die on Real Battle Phase 1.
- Beat Real Battle Phase 2 without using a continue.

The game has a crazy amount of ships and every ship also has a Slave variant.
The Judge Spear Slave is probably the best Slave ship, it's very fast and has a very strong bomb. It's one of the best ships for scoring, but the speed is very hard to control. The Ixion Slave is a good compromise, it has more controllable speed but the bomb is weaker, which makes some of the setups harder to execute.
Slaves have their ups and down sides. They are easier to use since they have a smaller hitbox and you don't have to worry about weapon switching, but the smaller hitbox makes it harder to graze and pick up medals, which is bad for scoring.

Scoring in these games can be categorized in a couple of main categories:
- Medaling.
- Uncovering secrets (and chaining them in Jet).
- Grazing.
The medal system is very weird and complicated so I suggest just reading the guide for how they work. But the main gist of it is that you max out their value in stage 1 and then never worry about them again. Stage 1 basically has a completely separate scoring system over the rest of the game if you do this. Medal value drops when one drops off the screen.
Grazing is really hard in these games with the ship being so fast and the graze hitboxes being so small. But you can graze bullets continuously in this at least.

Scoring is very difficult but the survival isn't easy either.
Something that adds to this is that there are zero extends in this. You only get the two extra lives you start with and that's it. Not that it really matters since you need to no-miss most of the game anyway for the TLB requirements.

Run from the Calice Cup tournament from like 8 months ago. Wanted to do a better run but didn't really get around to it.
I try to do a lot of scoring tricks in this but end up failing most of them, so I don't really recommend copying this if you're going to do that lol.
I do want to go back to this at some point and do a better run though.

One trick I noticed is that the last phase of the last boss has less HP if you time out the first phase. Which lets you kill the boss before the final pattern gets really hard.

Intro - 00:00
LEVEL 01 (ENEMY LAUNCH BASE) - 00:40
LEVEL 05 (MINES) - 02:37
LEVEL 15 (JUNGLE) - 04:26
LEVEL 30 (CANYON) - 07:07
LEVEL 45 (ICE RIVER) - 08:57
REAL BATTLE PHASE 1 (NIGHT SKY OVER CITY) - 10:35
REAL BATTLE PHASE 2 (WEAPONS FACTORY) - 12:11
True Last Boss - 16:38
Ending & Credits - 18:35

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[AC] Dodonpachi Saidaioujou & KNUCKLES - Arcade ALL Clear + TLB Sans Undertale

Jaimers 2021-12-10 | Turn on captions for some extra comments.

So Saidaioujou is now finally playable in Mame after nine and a half years of waiting.
Except the only playable version is a romhack where all the assets are replaced with memes.
Knuckles, Hello Kitty and a T-Rex team up to fight Sans Undertale while getting advice from Garfield through the operator.

But all jokes aside, this Mame release is a pretty big deal.
Before this the only way to play the game was via PCB, the EXA version or the Xbox360 port. The 360 port suffered from severe input lag, the PCB costs $6000 and the EXA version costs $2000. So until now there really wasn't an accessible or ideal way to play the game.
And even though Mame currently adds input lag to modern Cave games made on the Cv1k hardware, the input lag is still much better than on 360.
Though this romhack is a meme, the readme hints at a proper release on April 20th, the 10-year anniversary of the game.

Requirements to trigger the TLB:
- Beat the game with 1 death or less.
- At least 3 Bee Perfect Stages.

Shmups wiki page for SDOJ: https://shmups.wiki/library/DoDonPachi_SaiDaiOuJou

Overclock CPU: 38%
Blitter: 50%
In order to get slowdown to work you need to fiddle a bit with the CPU and Blitter settings. The above felt pretty close to PCB, at least for Shot/Laser.

SDOJ is still one of the most popular games in the arcade.
Every time arcade HEY streams the game for a week it's always a big event with thousands of people watching.
There are a bunch of guys there that can do like Hibachi clears all day long and the chat keeps track of how many Hibachi kills there were in the week.
This survival route is probably the most safe and optimum for a Hibachi clear.
You avoid hypers until stage 5 for a low-rank Hibachi and use a super-safe hyper route for stage 5. Stalling the first midboss is also a good strategy to avoid triggering the 4th midboss, who is quite a scamp.

SDOJ is still one of the most fun games Cave ever put out. Once you learn it it's a real joy to play.

Yes Inbachi is still Sans.
Which means he truly is the hardest videogame boss ever made.
https://i.imgur.com/tJDYtT7.png
https://i.imgur.com/w4ASxje.jpg
Inbachi still has not been beaten to this day.

00:00 - Intro
00:30 - Stage 1
03:26 - Stage 2
06:30 - Stage 3
11:16 - Stage 4
16:26 - Stage 5
25:30 - TLB
29:41 - Ending & Credits

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[Nokia] Dodonpachi Daioujou DX - Special Mode ALL Clear - 26,563,480

Jaimers 2021-11-29 | Turn on captions for some extra comments.

Dodonpachi Daioujou DX is a special port of DOJ that was made for flip phones of the 2005 era of all things, which was recently ported to Steam and Switch courtesy of the G-Mode Archives project.
It's extremely dank and weird, it's quite a curiosity. It's obviously nowhere near the quality of the actual arcade game, but for what it is, it's kind of really good??? It's really impressive how much of DOJ they actually managed to recreate on what was basically a calculator.

People seem really angry that this port exists but I'm not sure why. It -is- pretty funny that this is the only accessible version of DOJ that got a modern port though. Really hope M2 ports DOJ properly at some point in the future.

The game has four difficulties: easy, normal, hard and special.
Hard is basically supposed to be the 1st loop of the arcade version while Special is the 2nd loop.
You fight proper Hibachi on Hard while on Special you fight Double Hibachi from Death Label.
Special looked absolutely impossible at first but I found some tricks and exploits that makes it not that bad.
I'm not sure how they expected you to do this on an actual flip phone though.

The 2nd score extend is at 9 million, which is actually somewhat hard to get in Special.
You need to chain and score at least somewhat to get it.

Some notable differences from arcade in this:
- You get barely any i-frames after a death. Which is a pretty big problem against Hibachi where normally a lot of your damage comes from abusing those.
- It takes longer to switch from shot to laser.
- Laser bombs seem to do way more damage.
- Your speed is slower.
- A lot of attacks that are usually random are static in this.

Compared to the arcade version, this game is a lot shorter as it seems stages were abridged a lot for some reason.
Because the stages are so short, full chains aren't worth nearly as much in this. In fact a lot of your score seems to come from boss hits, so saving your hypers for the bosses seems to generally be the better strategy.

B-S seemed like the best shot for this. The wide shot is very good for making stages not a nightmare and it has a huge stock of insanely powerful bombs.
Unlike arcade, Exy doesn't seem that useful in this because you get less hypers.

For the rest the game basically functions identically to arcade DOJ. It even has the rank and everything.
So uh I guess I'll link the DOJ wiki page: https://shmups.wiki/library/DoDonPachi_DaiOuJou

The game has this weird thing where shot is on V for some reason and the laser won't activate if you're holding shot.
Shoutouts to inakilbss for making a patch that fixes the control jank. You can download it from here: github.com/inakilbss/DOJDX_Control_Fix

Buy the game on Steam here: store.steampowered.com/app/1751100/GMODE_DX

00:00 - Intro
00:35 - Stage 1
02:37 - Stage 2
04:12 - Stage 3
06:35 - Stage 4
09:21 - Stage 5
15:05 - Ending

Probably first clear of this.

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Touhou 17.5 Gouyoku Ibun - Hard Mode - Flandre 1cc + TLB (No Deaths)

Jaimers 2021-11-05 | New official Touhou spin-off game from the usual guys at Tasafro.

Game has been in development hell for quite some time now. One of their main programmers ran into health issues and it was apparently a real struggle for them to get this game out.
You can kinda notice that they just wanted to put the game out after the numerous delays. The core gameplay and story is there, but it's missing basically everything else.

The game is quite unique and hard to pin down as a specific genre. It's like a bullet hell bosses-only beat-em-up with shades of Suguri/Sora. There are a lot of bullets but you don't really dodge things, you're supposed to cancel them or use i-frames to move through them, which most of your moves have. The theme this time is oil, and the art also has an oil painting motif. The game is quite pretty.

A lot of the difficulty of the game comes from learning the really unorthodox control schemes and gameplay rules, for which there is basically zero tutorialization. The game can feel quite jank as a result of that. But if you can get past the initial hurdle of figuring out all this obtuse stuff you can find yourself having quite a good time here.

Flandre's scenario is basically the 'true route' of the game and is the only route that has the TLB.
It's also unique in that it's the only route where you can choose between different bosses to fight. You can choose between three doors with the left being the easiest and the bosses getting harder the more you go to the right.
In order to trigger the TLB you need to choose all the hardest bosses.
The TLB has a unique mechanic where you need to cancel bullets into water to charge your special, which is the only thing that can hurt the boss.

The game has two difficulties, Normal and Hard. Differences being:
- You take half damage on Normal.
- On Normal bosses have half HP.
- On Normal spell cards take less hits to break/stun.
- Some attacks are removed entirely on Normal.
It's pretty clear Hard is the difficulty the game was designed for, with Normal just giving you more leniency. On Normal you can generally get past everything by just tanking and button mashing, but on Hard you need to actually learn the patterns and dodge them (for the most part).

Kutaka is easily the hardest boss here. I'm not really sure how you're supposed to dodge a lot of this, especially the final two spellcards. The second Yuuma fight plus TLB is also quite rough, you really need to learn the patterns so you don't lose too much health for the TLB. The big bubbles do an entire orb of damage so you really want to avoid touching them. Reimu is a pushover for some reason.

Flandre's biggest weakness is that she's really slow and needs to rely on her special moves to move around quickly. This eats up your special meter at the bottom, so it's always a balancing act to make sure you don't run out at a critical moment. Need to touch the ground at points to recharge it.

With all the issues going on, there's been some rumors that this will probably be their last touhou game and likely their last game period, which would be really sad if true.

First time Flandre returns to an official Touhou game in a meaningful capacity in 19 years.

Buy the game here:
store.steampowered.com/app/1440500/_

00:00 - Intro
01:18 - Stage 1 Yuugi Hoshiguma
04:31 - Stage 2 Murasa Minamitsu
08:07 - Stage 3 Kutaka Niwatari
11:32 - Stage 4 Reimu Hakurei
14:37 - Stage 5A Yuuma Toutetsu
19:48 - Stage 5B Yuuma Toutetsu
24:07 - TLB
27:35 - Credits

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