VIDEO: Dodonpachi Saidai-Oujou - C-L 1-All

Here's a good scoring run in Saidai-Oujou with the C-L type ship. Scores are still climbing and there a plenty of videos on youtube show full runs. From all the feedback I have seen, the majority of players are really enjoying this game. A number of people have also commented that this may be one of Cave's best efforts. It certainly looks the part and the play mechanics look stellar, a nod to the old-school bullet-dodging style of Cave and an easier time chaining than previous DP titles. I'm stoked!

Donkey Kong 3 high score #7, 1-hour marathon

Here is my first timed, one-hour marathon score for DK 3 and I have to say, I'm pretty happy with it at 1,221,600. It's also the first time I have rolled the counter and realized there there are no more extends after you roll the counter, which means you have to bank lives to make survival easier in later levels.

I did this on Zespy's machine at Logan Hardware a few days ago, in the backroom and as I played, I kept my iPhone running a countdown timer from one hour. As soon as it hit one hour, I took my hands off the controls and let my remaining guy die off. I'm excited to see just how far I can take it past the loop and if 2 million is possible. I'm also hopeful that this will be another event title in the future.

Dodonpachi Saidai-Oujou - Cave preview video

Goes on sale tomorrow and opinions should be coming shortly from some of the better players in JP and some of the westerners who will be ponying up right off the bat on this kit. I'm very very interested to see what kind of reception this gets as it seems like preorders were lower that what Cave was expecting. I'm assuming this is due to the proliferation of 1.5 releases (Deathsmiles II had something like three revisions!) and arcades may be wary of buying day one.

I hope that this game does extremely well for Cave and going by what I have seen - a return to form of DOJ style chaining with no bullet cancelling - it seems to be what fans have been clamoring for. Long live Cave!

Twin Cobra high score #6

And I am done with this until I get a rapid fire pcb and possibly a set of Kyūkyoku Tiger roms for the pcb or both. Happy with the score, but the fun is getting sucked out of this quickly!

As far as I can tell from watching the Toaplan Superplay I got a little while back, the JP version allows five or six shots on the screen at once while the US only allows three. This makes taking down some bosses impossible without bomb spamming them, which means you only use your bombs for bosses for the most part. It also makes each boss fight last for goddamn ever if you do not have bombs. The stage 5 boss building is a hand-cramp inducing excercise alone.

I'm going to look into an autofire circuit - which is honestly something I should have done a while back - so that I can play Tatsujin, Twin Cobra, Twin Hawk and the multitude of old school STG's I have or want to own, but haven't bought because you NEED autofire - Raiden is top of that list.

New Pinball: Embryon, Bally - 1980

Pinballs from the late 1970's and early 1980's seem to be my favorite and after many hours on my BSD, I determined that I:
A) Like short ball times
B) Like late '70's/early '80's sound effects
C) Like simple rule sets

And so the BSD went up on the block. I contacted John Dayhuff about a possible trade and we worked one out with a friend of his plus cash for a fantastic Bally widebody, 1980's Embryon.

It's the last of the Bally widebodies and one of the best. The speech is amazing, and adds so much to the feel of the game. In getting multiball, the machine begins by saying - "life begins" - in reference to you actually birthing a baby by hitting the capta balls in the center shot, spelling Embryon. It's very cool.

The rule set is pretty diverse, but the tasks are simple, so you are constantly plugging away at getting multiball or building bonus or knocking down the drop targets or roll over lanes for an extra ball.

It's a very fast game for a widebody and after spending sometime this weekend tuning it up, its playing very nicely. The artwork usually gets criticised for being too "PG-13" but I think people just wanted more boobs and less sci-fi guy on the backglass. Personally, I like it.

Now, I have three widebody games (Paragon, Iron Maiden and Embryon), which seems weird - its not like I searched them out just for the sake of them being widebodies - but there is something about that era that just hits me right and Embryon has some of the best qualtites of that age - tremendous sci-fi sound effects, art and playstyle.

Iron Maiden - Stern (Pinball) lives!

Back when I picked this machine up, I knew it wasn't working and had no problem paying someone tp get it working, but as these things go, we got about halfway and couldn't figure out what was wrong. It would boot up, but would exhibit really wierd behavior, like the left slingshot firing the right, the upper right kicker actually firing the knocker etc. We changed some connectors and checked connectivity and thought all that was fine.

I decided to take my backbox up to the only other person I know with an Iron Maiden - John Dayhuff - and see if it was a board issue or what as it was certainly logic getting to the game that was screwy.

We swapped MPU's, solonoid driver boards all for nought. We compared wiring from both units and they were the same. John then started to go through each connector, pulling pins and checking connectivity. Turns out, we missed a broken pin. He spliced in a good pin cut from an old connector and we were up and running.

I cannot begin to tell you how stoked I am that she is alive.

There is still a lot of work to do, like bulbs, cleaning bulb sockets, adjusting some switches, and replacing a broken playfield rail under the playfield. I'm very much looking forward to taking her home and getting some hours in on this machine. So awesome.

Big thanks to John Dayhuff for lending me his time and expertise. I'm so damn happy right now, its scary.

Akai Katana vs Akai Katana Limited Edition - sven666 unboxing/comparison video + SIN LE White mode Stage 1 & 2

Normally, I do not watch unboxing videos, but this one is pretty cool in that its a stupidly rare Akai Katana LE version pcb, which was sold only through the Cave JP shop at a cost of about $2,500 USD. It was made as a consumer only kit and as such, is set to free play right off the bat.

It's an updated version of the arcade version and comes with a "White Mode" and "Red Mode" as selectable, where the Red mode is harder and enemies spawn suicide bullets. Both versions also have no limit on the hit counter whereas the the normal arcade version stopped at 256. Below is a video of SIN running through the first two stages of the LE version.



This will probably be the most expensive and rare pcb Cave has ever mass produced and as such, both videos are a rare chance to see such a unique release in Cave's catalog. I'd be lying if I said it would be somthing I would never shell out that cash for as I do tend to like rarities and this game is all I have been playing on my 360 at the moment.