suicide bullets

New Pinball: Iron Maiden, Stern 1981

2012-01-29T15:55:00.001-08:00

Last weekend, I traveled up to John Dayhuff's place in Battle Creek, MI with my friend Zespy to pick up a new pinball for him, a Williams Grand Lizard. We left early so we could hang and play with John all day on his 70+ pinbal machines, which we did, literally until my hands hurt. It was awesome.

While I was there, I played two early Stern titles, namely Viper and Iron Maiden. Both were so fantastic, I played them for the majority of the 9 or so hours we were there, rarely leaving that corner of the basement.

On the way home I kept thinking and talking about how much I loved playing those early Stern titles and asked him to see if one might be available somewhere, somehow. Now, early Sterns are really sought after and pretty rare, especially Iron Maiden. The production numbers were never published, with guesses between 400 and 1200 and most ended up going to Germany, with a smaller amount staying here on home soil.

Zespy checked all the forums while we were driving home and couldn't find anything for sale. I asked him to check the Pinball Owner's Database as people can list their collection as well as which ones they might sell or trade away. There were only two Iron Maiden's listed in the US - one for $5,500 in MA and another in Hilliard, OH, not working, but available for trade. I emailed him when we stopped at a Denny's for some dinner, my excitement reaching fever pitch. I heard back the next morning.

He was interested in a trade, taking my Big Guns for his Iron Maiden straight up. We worked out a deal in a few hours, with my interest skyrocketing when I saw the condition of the game. It was damn near the most mint I have ever seen a pinball machine - barring the second back glass (it has two for a psuedo 3D effect) which was pretty well devoid of any graphics as they flaked off. It was a stellar deal - my Big Guns straight up for the Iron Maiden. Awesome. I committed to the trade, loaded up the Big Guns and took off at 6 am on Saturday morning for the 12-hour drive there and back with Zespy.

The backglass as its supposed to look above and mine above.

I couldn't believe just how nice the machine looked - no cabinet wear, no playfield wear, even around the inserts and besides the backglass, it was in mint shape. I contacted a guy to make a repro translite for the backglass that week and left it at Zespys for his arcade tech to get it running tip top.

There is something about rare games that interest me and I still can't believe how easily I got this one. I expected to be looking out for weeks or months or maybe years for one to pop up. It's an amazing machine, one I cannot wait to play!

VIDEO: Mushihimesama Matsuri Ver. 1.5 - Maniac Max 1CC

2012-01-18T13:04:00.000-08:00

Here's a 1CC of Maniac Max on the Mushi Matsuri pcb. There isn't much of a try to maximise the scoring potential, but it gives you a good idea of the Mainiac mode of the game.

It looks stellar, the new OST is a great remix and there is a bonus for frequency tapping like the original, notacable if you check out Kubakilla's videos on youtube (Sven666 from shmups).

I owned the original Mushihimesama pcb about three years ago and liked it very much, but the scoring potential I was missing from not perfectly being abe to tap the buttons was always a bummer for me and a strange scoring mechanic, especially for such a beautiful game. It seems that this will also have some more of the same feel as tapping is necessary, but you also get bonuses from proximity based scoring, so it sounds like a good mix of Ketsui and Mushi Futari BL.

Max mode is basically a harder version of the standard mode on the pcb - you start fully powered up and there are more and faster bullets on the screen. Very cool.

Thanks again to Muchi Muchi Spork on the Cave-STG baords for posting these videos.

Ketsui high score #9

2012-01-09T08:39:00.001-08:00

Totally forgot to add this score previously! Set this at the last meet(!) and haven't bettered it yet! I really need to get some more time in on this game. I want this 1CC - just need to put in the time.

However, on reflection, I think I may be afraid to 1CC it - it represents so much to me of why this genre is so much fun. I like that that challenge of the clear is still out there for me and I appreciate this game like very few others. I once told my friend Dave that I felt "Ketsui may be the best video game ever made." I still feel that way. It's like having a bottle of 60 year old scotch. Each glass is great, but you want to make it last and drink it infrequently. Same here.

I set up the candy cab at work with Ketsui in it so that I could practice it after work and it freaked people out. Bad. No one would play it. I thought it would be a bit of a hit, maybe get a few people into playing shmups for score. Deathsmiles was a waaaaaaaay bigger hit.

VIDEO: Mushihimesama Matsuri Ver. 1.5 PCB - Normal Maniac 1CC

2012-01-08T09:05:00.000-08:00

For those that don't know, Cave released a home-only pcb of Mushihimesama's Matsuri version with 6 new versions of the original game. It's being touted by some as the last Cave pcb, which would be a mega bummer, but if it is, early impressions say that its a stellar game, one which should make Cave fans very happy - for the time being at least.

The original Mushihimesama's scoring in Maniac had a very complex frequency tapping scoring systen where you needed to tap the firing buttons at a certain taps-per-second to get the most out of the counter, which turned many off of that mode, including myself. This version takes that out and includes changed versions of Original and ulktra as well as MAX versions of all three modes as well. I'mn still not entirely sure what's up with the scoring, but this vid should help a bit.

Thanks to Muchi Muchi Spork for the great video!

VIDEO: 鮫！鮫！鮫！/Fire Shark - Superplay

2011-12-16T14:31:00.000-08:00

I've decided to start posting up superplay videos as I come across good stuff in my travels through space, time and the internet. This is a great run of Same! Same! Same! and although he uses autofire, it still has some of the core patterns. It's a great game and a good run through. If it doesn't get you stoked to play some old school Toaplan titles, there's something wrong with you!

Donkey Kong 3 high score #4

2011-12-09T16:23:00.000-08:00

Funny thing this high score - I set it while waiting to play Ketsui at work on the Astro City right next to the DK3. I was kind of chilling while playing and all of a sudden I realized I was on level 33 with a 500K score. I freaked out for a second and then chilled out, kept as calm as I could and plowed on. I think I have the later enemies down pretty good. It is totally satisfying to hammer away at guys and dive in and out of tight spots in this game. At times, it feels like a maniac shmup with all the focus you have to pay to it, but really, its a lot like nothing else.

Super happy with this high score - I feel like there is very little to learn here before I can start knocking off an hour at a shot. It had been sometime since I played this one and this was my first game of the night and even then, I got a significant improvement over my last high score at 691,400.

New Pinball: Big Guns, Williams - 1987

2011-11-30T10:08:00.000-08:00

So I have determined that I have a sickness. I told myself I would stop at three. I lied. I got a fourth game, Special Force Girls by Bally, and almost as quicjkly as I got it, fell in love with Big Guns and started a search for a trade.

Luckily, I found one close by for trade + cash from none other than John Dayhuff, a stellar guy and collector of the highest standard. Check out this video of his basement and be careful not to drool:

Yup, 70+ pins in the basement. John told me he has bought and sold 362 pins over the years. Amazing.

Zespy (owner of Logan Hardware and friend) and I headed up on a Saturday to swap and played in the arcade all day, chilling out with John and talking pins as well as looking at spares (I also bought a used but in excellent shape Paragon playfield for $40) and generally feeling like we were in pinball heaven.

While I was there and before we did the swap, I played his restored Big Guns to check it against the one I would be trading for and even though mine was not fully shopped (John just did the electrics and switches and stuff, no rubbers, needs no plastics), it played just the same.

It's a fun and fast paced game with a cool space-medieval theme and great music by Chris Granner. It was a co-designed game with Python Angelo and Mark Richie. The gameplay requires you to lock two balls in the large cannons on the playfield and then shoot the center shot to start multiball. When you start multiball, the two locked balls get shot out of the cannons and fly through the air, ending up in the wire form ramps that feed down to your flippers. I was wary at first about this kind of feature, but from everything I read, I heard they were reliable and sure as hell, they haven't missed a beat.

It has a simple rule set but a lot of challenging gameplay. It's one of those "just one more ball" pins, which I love. It always feels like you only needed one more shot...

It also has the tallest backbox of any pinball that I know of that also houses a bagatelle style mini-game, much like the plunger roll-over lanes at the top of most games, but one that fires a ball into the bagatelle and ramdomly bounces around to light the lanes, though you do have a lane change flipper button.

There's a great video by blkdog7 on youtube that goes over the game he owns and he's also a great commentator:

Right now, its at Zespy's in the warehouse before I bring it home and it needs some playfield cleanup, some bulbs and some locks installed, which we have already started to do. I swear, this one is the last for a while! I also have a new shmup pcb on its way which will need some love soon...

New Pinball: Bram Stoker's Dracula - Williams, 1993

2011-11-02T07:42:00.000-07:00

Bram Stoker's Dracula is the pin I have probably plyed the most in my lifetime. Working at a video store in the mid-nineties, we had a Mortal Kombat machine (later a MK2) and a Bram Stoker's Dracula pin. I played the hell out of MK and got very, very good at it as well as very, very good at MK2 to the point where I could head over to the local arcade and play on a quarter for the afternoon, playing the locals and chilling hard.

When I had no one to play against or got sick of playing through the game on one player, I would plays games of Dracula. It seemed to me to be a really hard game, very dark and lacked any sort of humour, unlike MK2 with its Friendships and Babalitys.

I never was any good at it back in the day, eschweing rulesets for adreneline rushes of constantly firing flippers, but I did really like it and played a bunch of it.

While I was watching the tutorials by Bowen on Tilt Warning, a tutorial came up for this and I watched the whole thing a few times in a row and saw almost everything that could be done in the game and just flipped. I started looking into what BSD's sold for and luckily, they tended to go rather cheap for 1990's DMD games - $1,500 being about average.

I kept my eyes open for one locally and found one in Watertown, WI, about 2 1/2 hours away. I immediately jumped on it and started putting the money together. I picked it up a week after getting my Firepower and Paragon.

When I went to go see it, the seller was right up front with a bunch of small issues - like the playfield sliding rails being disconnected under the playfield and the touch-ups on the cabinet, which were actually very nicely done. The playfield is immaculate for the most part with no significant wear anywhere that I can find. It has either been cleaned and waxed super regularly when on location or has a new playfield installed at some point. All the ramps are in perfect shape, with only two small guide plastics (one for the coffin ramp and one for the plunger) missing - which I have already cut out of acrylic and installed. The DMD is in perfect shape, the backbox is stellar and the GI - which I initially thought was dim - is totally fine.

I took it home, set her up after having to call a friend in to help me get it up the stairs and checked it out in detail. After playing a bunch of games, I found that the 10 opto board is probably on its way out and ordered a new one as it was firing the loop switch when I would plunge a ball. I tried cleaning the opto's for the Castle Lock and it didn't seem to change a thing, so I ordered a new opto board for it. One of the bumpers was a bit lethargic, so I made a few adjustments and its back to normal, but will probably need to be rebuilt at some point in the future. The rest of it is perfect.

The gameplay is excellent and very rewarding with triple multi-ball being the goal to earn killer jackpots after locking two of the four balls and shooting the Jackpot scoop. It also has the Mist multiball - a ball that travels across the playfield by a magnet underneath - which may be the coolest feature of any pin I have seen.

The Coffin multiball is also stellar and features the best and most impressive animation in the game. After starting Coffin multiball, you need to shoot the Coffin ramp enough times to spell DRACULA, with one letter awarded in single multiball play, two in double multiball play and three for triple multiball play. One you spell DRACULA, you actually kill him on the DMD, standing over his body, driving a stake through his heart and watching his face turn to a skull. The game volume gets louder when in multiball and the lightshow when you take out Dracula is amazing. I actually drained a ball the first time I did it because I was watching the animation so intently.

The backbox and cabinet art is also amazing, though the backglass is just ok. The cabinet and backbox ahave a screen of Dracula's castle with the Williams logo on the top of it - just killer stuff.

The speech and DMD is very cool and it uses tons of speech samples from the game, featuring all of the main characters from the Francis Ford Copola movie, including Anthony Hopkins, Gary Oldman, Tom Waits, Winona Ryder and Neo. There's a lot of great quotes from Gary Oldman, including "Iam the monster that breathing men would kill" and "They say you are a man of good...taste." There's also a great quote from Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing, which in the movie is somewhat humorous but comes off as super dark in the game, which is "I just want to cut off her head and take out her heart." Awesome stuff.

I have been playing a ton of pinball at home for the last five days as Zespy is out of town and loving the selection I have put together. Officially, I now have a pin from each decade of the best years (in my mind) of pinball - 1970's, 1980's and 1990's.

New Pinball: Paragon - Bally, 1979

2011-10-31T13:18:00.000-07:00

Paragon is one of the hardest of the late 1970's/early 1980's pins, one that probably scares more people away from it than endears them to it. It's a widebody, which means it plays somewhat slower than a regular pin, but it requires extremely fast reflexes and a great amout of skill and touch on the flippers to make any sort of a descent score. Which is probably why I love it as I do.

I wanted to get a pin that was equal parts hard and rewarding with fast ball times and old school play. Even though its only the year before Firepower, it feels like its from another age of pinball and quite possibly the best example of that style of play.

Thanks to Bowen Kerins, I got a chance to learn a lot about this game and just how difficult it is before ever buying it. His tutorials on the PAPA blog, Tilt Warning, are exceptional and a lot of fun to watch.

http://tiltwarning.com/blog/games-of-the-week/paragon/

I found one locally in amazing shape for a stellar price and snatched it up the same week I got the Firepower. It's a very hard and super rewarding game, one that requires a lot of patience and determination. It doesn't hand you jackpots or multiballs every five seconds. If there was such a thing as a 'Pro' machine, this might be it. I'm really dedicated to learning this machine and getting to the 5x multiplier frequently - out of the hundred or so games I have played I have maybe gotten it five times.

It also got some of the most bitchin' artwork I have ever seen on a pinball machine, courtesy of Paul Faris. The backglass, playfield and ever cabinet side art is stellar.

This is definitely one of my favorite machines of all time, maybe only second to my most recent acquisition...

New Pinball: Firepower - Williams, 1980

2011-10-30T08:22:00.000-07:00

I knew that I was going to be getting a few machines - based on my rule of threes (three of any one thing is the minimum number you should have) - and I knew I dug early 1980's games, being that is when I grew up. What better way to get started than 1980's Firepower by Williams.

After 1979's Flash, Williams needed another game that pushed the envelope and got Flash's creator, Steve Richie ( The King Of Flow) and their best programer, Eugene Jarvis, to make one of the best pins of all-time.

1980's Firepower was a return to multiball, but that may be the only old idea on the machine. The sounds are stellar, early electro gun sounds, explosions, bleeps and bloops and just awesome. The art package is very cool - sci-fi, slightly comic book style and even has a bit of a story - you are in a fire fight and need to take down the enemy ship, or ships.

For the first time, the displays did something besides just display score - they counted down 9 to 1 when you locked the third ball for multiball. Which seems like a small thing now, but back in the day, even people inside at Williams were worried that when the display showed something besides the score, that the score might forever disappear. It didn't and its an awesome bit of showyness that makes getting multiball just so much fun.

It's a really tough game, but super fun, fast and challenging. It's a great one to turn the volume up on and play for an hour and just immerse yourself in. So awesome.

Pinball Hall Of Fame (Las Vegas, NV) and a burgeoning pinball obsession

2011-10-20T07:41:00.000-07:00

For some reason, arcade people and pinball people seem to be pretty seperate groups of people. Not a lot of arcade guys collect or play pinball much and vice-versa. But strangely, it seems like a good amount of my fellow shmuppers have gotten into pinball in the last few years. Having played a bunch when I was younger in the second golden age of pinball in the early 1980's, I thought maybe I would have some fun getting into and playing older machines.

Like most things with me, if I get into it, I have to know everything about it, like who was the best designer, what are the best titles, what are the hardest games, what games are the hardest to find, etc. I learned and read what felt like the entire internet's worth of pinball information - and then realized I was heading out to Vegas on business - right where the Pinball Hall Of Fame is located.

Normally, I do a lot of reading and chilling out in Vegas, preferring scotch and a good cigar from one of the many Davidoff stands in the Venetian where we usually stay rather than nights of drinking and gambling and strip clubs - not that I don't enjoy naked girls and alchohol, but Vegas is pretty much overkill on all fronts.

The second night I was there I got a chance to check it out and took a cab out there, past the airport, way off the strip and arrived in a little strip mall where the Pinball HoF lies. The sign is almost an afterthought, a vinyl banner about 5'x3', hung up about 25 feet off the ground, so you need to crane your neck up and squint to see it. I was a bit put off by this, but hey, the Libarace Museum is right across the street, so the HoF is in good company, it should be great right?...

And it was. There are a ton of games - way too many to play on three successive nights of aggressive playing. Most were in good shape, with a couple of small problems, some were in excellent shape and some were completely shut off. A lot of the games I had come to play were in good working order, like Firepower, Eight Ball Deluxe, Funhouse, Mata Hari, Whitewater, Space Shuttle, Medieval Madness, Centigrade 37, Cyclone and Black Knight.

I played the hell out of Firepower and dug the sounds, very early 1980's Williams, like playing Defender and Robotron together. Centigrade 37 is an early Gottleib EM machine and is incredible amounts of fun, with its Jack Kirby-inspired backglass and art. It's not very difficult and I did roll the counter while I was there. I played Eight Ball Deluxe and enjoyed the hell out of it, Black Knight for two nights pretty intently, had a killer game of Medieval Madness rolling until they turned off the games on me while they were closing. I was so into the game, I didn't even notice they had shut down!

It think it was at the time that I realized that I was hopelessly and happily addicted. I pretty much knew I was going to buy a few machines very soon and that I probably had the beginnings of a new hobby on my hands.

When I got back to Chicago, I started looking through Craigslist and every pinball forum I could find, contacting owners and getting some good deep knowledge aout the games through my own research. And because I am a bit of a competitive guy, I started to learn about competitive players and their techniques and found Bowen's tutorials on the PAPA (Professiona and Amateur Pinball Association) blog, Tilt Warning. I have now watched every tutorial on there about 5-10 each. No bullshit.

I've learned about post-transfers, drop catches, live catches and 'Shatzing the Inlane' and am loving every moment of playing. It helps that I have made fast friends with Zespy - a fellow video game/pinball and record guy and the owner of Logan Hardware - a used record and arcade room with a bunch of pinballs and tons of arcades. It is now my favorite store in Chicago. I play there at least three nights a week, getting in games of Pinbot and Doctor Who and Johnny Mnemonic while buying Weather Report and Hawkwind records. Awesome.

This past week, I picked up two new pinballs, classics from two different decades (update post soon to follow) and I am hopefully going to have a third on its way soon. I am also headed out to the Pinball Expo in Wheeling tonight to play as long as I continue to stand up as the room is open all night for free play, some 100+ games being present.

2011 CAGDC Tourney - Richie Knucklez Arcade

2011-09-28T08:47:00.000-07:00

After a week in Las Vegas for the Interbike trade show (the bike industries big trade show), I flew out from Vegas to Philly to head over to the 2011 CAGDC Tourney. I hadn't played in a tourney since 2008 and was hoping for a great weekend of playing games and chilling.

The arcade is stellar - Richie Knucklez's place is packed with some fantastic titles, all kept up and near tip-top condition. The selection ranges from the familiar (Galaga, Star Wars, Frogger) to the player's titles (DK3, Gorf, Crystal Castles, Food Fight) to massive amounts of old school racing games (Pole Position 2, Stocker, Monaco GP) and then some rare classics (Crossbow, Bosconian, Hunchback, Swimmer). There were even a few pinballs - Stargate abnd Roller Disco, the former being a lot of fun with good ramp shots and a pretty deep ruleset and the later being just ok, but mostly missable, except for the theme, which is dope.

I showed up Friday night after flying all day and drove right from the airport to the arcade to practice Friday night. I started in on DK3 and Crystal, but also on Bosconian, Satan's Hollow, Stocker and some other titles. I also played a ton of Stargate, because, hell, it's my entry fee and I wanted to play some pinball too.

I had a good night and played more than talked to others. I fell inlove with Sega's Monaco GP, a mini-cabaret style driving game with frantic pace and good controls. I also got really into Bosconian, but could never seem to get a good game going. I left that night feeling a bit sore and very tired and but excited for Saturday's competition.

I woke up Saturday and felt like shit. I was super exhausted and felt lightheaded, but I headed out after some breakfast and played until 2 pm. I knew something was up when I stopped playing for a short bit. I went back to the hotel thinking I just needed some rest and paseed out on the bed and woke up 6 hours later with a raging fever. Now, I run a fever very rarely, even when I have been pretty sick. Last time I did was about 15 years ago when I got Scarlet Fever, so I was pretty freaked out.

I packed my self in ice and stayed on the hotel bed for a few hours, trying to eat and relax and I just felt like I was getting worse. I ended up taking an ice cold shower, which sucked major, but it did break the fever. I crashed out again at about 11 pm and woke in the morning feeling pretty good. Fever was gone and I got the chance to talk with Mark Alpiger, my roommate briefly before I left.

He did tell me I was doing great on the titles I manage to put scores up for - a 560K score on DK3 and a weak completed game of CC at 761K, along with some good scores on other machines like Crossbow, Monaco GP and Food Fight. I was bummed about not being about to finish the competition, but very relieved that I wasn't in a hospital, so it was kind of a trade off.

Thanks to Mark for sharing a hotel room with me and getting me coffee and a sweet roll Sunday morning and to Richie for hosting such a great tourney - at least for the time I was there.

Donkey Kong 3 high score #3

2011-09-09T07:29:00.000-07:00

This will probably be the last high score until the tourney next week. I think I have a great game rolling here and can take down a top spot on this and maybe Crystal, though I haven't been practicing that. I'd like to take the top spot on DK3 and chill for the rest of the tourney, play some pinball and take a lot of photos. I will have Linda's flip cam, so I will be taking some video and uploading that as well.

This 598,100 score was just 900 shy of my 600K goal for the night and I feel pretty good about setting a 600K game for the tourney. I'm hoping for an hour marathon game, but that would be the best possible result.

I also really want to place in the tourney, but unless I can take down top scores on two of my games and then finish high on the rest, I don't think that is gonna happen. Who knows though, really anything cabn happen. This tourney should be a lot of fun.

Cloak & Dagger high score #2, 1CC ALL

2011-09-06T10:47:00.000-07:00

Not a bad first 1CC of this game, no real point pressing here and a pretty average run back up to the top. It was extremely satisfying to finish this game though. The last few floors were pretty easy and I ran most of them quickly, taking out the guards and moving to the exit, just working on the clear.

I have a good plan for the floors up to 33, using the floor 7 warp, and a pretty good idea of how to run the floors on the back, but - according to the rules on Twin Galaxies:

Special Note: player cannot start from a floor lower than nine (9).

Which makes me a little wary of John McAlister's WR score on there as I a few of his MARP runs which are about the same score and he does use the 7th floor warp. I did send an email to TG asking for clarification and have not heard back, but I will try and see what patterns can be built from starting on 9 and working up without warps. I don't think there is a cave level until the 20's and I would need to search for a warp there. It may be advantago7us to play every floor and rack up some points by killing guards and collecting boxes, but those express bonuses you can get from skipping floors may be where its at.

All of that aside, I am super stoked on this game still. I'm so excited to own it and super excited to play it each and everytime.

New Cab: Zwackery - Bally/Midway 1986

2011-08-28T07:03:00.001-07:00

They don't come much rarer than this 1986 machine by Bally/Midway - Zwackery. I never saw one in person until two weeks ago and my interest in the machine sparked a trade deal and a week after that, here we are!

It's a strange game with controls similar to Discs of Tron. But where the Discs of Tron controls are somewhat intuitive, Zwackery's are not. You control your character with a flight stick and a spinner, which can be pushed down and pulled up. The flight stick also has a thumb button and a trigger, making it pretty difficult to get use to the controls. The game even has a tutorial right off the bat to get you familiar, but it will take more time than that to get good.

I played about a dozen games the second night I got it and at that point, I had a pretty good feel for the controls and what they do. I could even slay the enemies I wanted to instead of flailing about, but I hadn't even started in on the spells, of which there are a few. It's pretty intimidating, but a very unique and eventually, a very rewarding game.

The graphics are just stellar and very advanced - I believe this was the very first 32 bit game in the arcades. It's fantasy themed, a swords and sorcery side-scrolling adventure. I haven't really got that far in the game, mostly due to playing a lot of C&D right now, but its an interesting game and one I will have to play a bit more when I can pry my fingers off the C&D. I may not get the chance though as it is up for sale currently at KLOV and there is an offer pending and a few interested parties, so we shall see. I was really on the fence about this being a keeper or not, but I think I will be happier with a pinball machine in the collection as I seem to be gripped by late 1970's/early 1980's pins at the moment.

Cloak & Dagger high score #1

2011-08-27T12:27:00.000-07:00

Progress is happing very quick here. I have been practicing it a bit every time I can, getting a bit further and trying to figure out what the best path through the game is to max out points. I'll post this up as my first high score, a 1,090,165 score that got me to level 22 going back up. There is a lot of point pressing opportunities here and some interesting places to score and I am just loving the gameplay and time I am spending on this machine.

I added castors to the bottom and dialed it in a bit more monitor wise and its as good as its gonna be. I will start recording runs shortly as I am getting closer and closer to the clear. I have been trying new things on every run - using the 'express' elevator in different places, suiciding on high scoring floors, looking for the fastest path through the maze levels and seeing if spawning more than one superguard per floor is possible (I haven't done it yet).

I will be submitting a high score to Twin Galaxies at some point here as I feel the need to get some TG world record scores under my belt. Whenever I play in these vintage arcade tourneys, everyone else either has 'WR Holder in ...' or 'Former WR Holder...' titles and mine is always 'Good player at...'. My turn for a WR.

New PCB: Cadash - Taito 1989

2011-08-23T18:31:00.000-07:00

I first knew about this game through watching KET play via his UStream channel and I was always intrigued by it. It's a combination platformer and RPG, which is a weird combination for an arcade title, but it definitely works. It's a fantasy themed game with a Mage, Priestess, Warrior and a Ninja as playable characters. Ninjas were big in '89.

Like most RPG's, you kill stuff for experience and do some dungeon crawling for items and boss fights. The sprites are well drawn, like a grown up Rastan with equally as good music. There are hidden pathways in the game and it is satisfying to find them and strangely, pretty easy to do so.

It does require some planning on your part, so you really have to learn the stages and layouts to know what items to get and what level you should be at before tackling certain parts of the dungeon. It feels weird to level grind in an arcade title, but its always enjoyable.

I have made it a bout three levels into the game and I'm not really sure how many there are but its awesome fun. Got it off KLOV for cheap and I'm stoked that I own this piece of Taito history.

Donkey Kong 3 high score #2

2011-08-23T18:25:00.000-07:00

Making some serious progress here. Went from some 200K games, to 300K to 400K to this high score, 523,700. It was plagued with stupid moves, but I am still learning alot of the patterns. I am making some progress on the later enemies and getting use to their movements. I'm right at about the point where the game does not get any harder. A few more levels should do it. There are no enemies remaining that I haven't seen, so I should be able to do pretty well here.

My games are lasting about a half hour in the upper 400K range to 500K, so, even with my limited math skills, I think if I can hit a mill, I should be good for the competition.

This game really is a shmup and super fun - fluid and satisfying and demanding on the later levels.

New cab: Cloak & Dagger - Atari 1983

2011-08-21T06:33:00.000-07:00

Finally! After looking for this game pretty seriously for the last ten years, I have finally found one! Cloak & Dagger is my holy grail of cabs, having become obsessed with it a few times over the years. Words cannot really do justice to my happiness and excitement, especially after playing it for the first time last night, on a dedicated cab and not through emulation. It's very similar to Robotron: 2084 in that it is a two-stick shooter, but differs in that there is an end to the game and warps to later levels and way more interesting floors and layouts.

You start out on the first floor, going down into Dr. Boom's Bomb Factory complex to find him and there are 33 levels downward. Once you hit the bottom, you get a chance to fight Dr. Boom, recover the stolen USAF plans and head back to the surface, now with harder floors. Each floor on the way down has a bomb in the center of the floor with a burning fuse, so you enter the floor, kill the guards, get pieces to a map to get out of a minefield map every 4 floors or so, sometimes grab an extra life in a box and head to the exit. You also have an igniter button, so that if you want to rack up some good points, you can ignite the fuse at a way shorter point to set the bomb off sooner. If you can time the bomb explosion - which engulfs the screen when it detonates - getting you into the elevator at the end of the level just before the blast reaches the door, you'll get a ton of points and flames will lick out from the cracks between the elevator doors in the cut scene. Awesome, just awesome fun.

I got into it at first as a child after watching the Disney movie of the same name and thinking how amazing the game looked, how cool the elevator cut scenes were, how awesome the music sounded. Later, when I started buying arcade games in the mid to late 1990's, I started looking for one again, reconnection with the interest in it of my youth, but I could not find one anywhere at any price. And these were the days when op's were dying to sell you stuff out of the backroom, before nostalgia hit on arcade cabs and where you could walk out with original Star Wars and Tron's for $150 a piece.

I kept looking around for years, finding a few for sale from time to time, but I was either too late or the price was waaaaaaaay to high. Finally, I found a local collector who had a B, B+ machine for sale for $1250 and as I was hemming and hawing, out of the blue came an email from someone on VAPS with a Cloak & Dagger, A- condition with a spare original marquee, a spare Agent X board (prototype version of C&D) and a spare C&D board too for $650. Holy. Shit.

I completely flipped out. He sent pictures and video's of the machine, its full sideart, its nearly pristine control panel and I just exploded with happiness. I immediately accepted his offer without any haggling and agreed to make the trip up from Chicago to Minneapolis, MN that following weekend and 15 1/2 hours later, here we are.

I installed it into the SRAM arcade for the time being and need to get some castors on it and tweak the monitor a bit too, but the rest of it is tip top. The joysticks are even tight and the CP is so clean underneath, it looks like it just came out of the factory, as does the coin box and all of the boards inside the cab. Just crazy nice.

I got in a few credits on it and posted a 900K score on it the first night, ending at level 30 on the way back up, using the warp on level 7 to head to level 30. There are a number of warps in the game and I will work on the short path first to get a good score and then maybe other longer paths to maximize the score if possible. The WR is 1,497,744 and I think I can give it some serious competition. My 900k score puts me in 3rd place for the game on Twin Galaxies with over 25 submitted scores, so I feel pretty good about that.

I'm super happy to own this and it came at a time when I had spare cash and time, like fate stepped in a decreed it was my time to own one. Thanks, fate. I'm f*^king happy as hell.

Donkey Kong 3 high score #1

2011-08-17T19:43:00.001-07:00

I have been practicing after work for the past two nights and tonight I played for about an hour and a half, setting my first high score. It's a stellar game and really a lot of fun when you get the hang of it. It's very fast paced and requires some deft maneuvering and platforming skills. It feels like some sort of bastard child of a caravan title and Donkey Kong and it is quite possibly my favorite DK title.

I set this high score pretty quickly after starting this evening. It was the first time I had passed 350k and I just kept storming though to end up at 463,500. I'm not really sure how long it took and since I need to be able to marathon this for an hour, I definitely have to start timing myself.

New PCB: Progear - Cave/Capcom 2001

2011-08-17T06:34:00.000-07:00

After getting Dave's PCB which had decided to have a melt down, I started to hunger for Progear. It didn't help that the few weeks leading up to me actually getting his Astro City and Progear board, I wantched the CKDF superplay and the Futobishi superplay numerous times. I also read through the high score boards on shmups and Cave-STG. I got seriously stoked.

I looked through a lot of sales posts on shmups to no avail, but also seriously considered trying to get a Phoenixed edition of the board as I really didn't want to have happen to my PCB at some future date what happened to Dave's board. The idea of having a ticking time bomb in the closet, ready to go off and kill a fantastic game is a little unnerving.

Luckily, I did find a Phoenixed board that I ended up with in trade, along with the Daimakaimura and I'm pretty stoked to say the least. It's an excellent looking board and one I actually feel safe with.

The game is one of only three Cave horizontals, the other two being 2007's Deathsmiles and 2011's Akai Katana. It was made for Capcom on their CPS2 hardware and was Cave's only foray into that hardware.

The graphics are done by none only than Joker Jun, who worked on such classic STG titles as Dogyuun, Batsugun, Dodonpachi, ESPrade and Guwange. His art style here looks excellent - kind of a steam punk meets more of a manga style akin to Batsugun rather than Dodonpachi. The sprites do have a look all their own, as Jun seems keen to make sure he isn't retreading what's he's drawn previously.

The soundtrack is beyond awesome, especially the stage 1,2 and 5 tracks and it ranks as one of my all-time Cave favorties. The gameplay is also very fluid and enjoyable, though the jeweling combo mechanic is pretty different. When you get it to work, it's great amounts of fun watching bullets turn into diamonds.

Speaking of bullets, the bullet spreads are super-organic, right up there with Ketsui. There are so many amazing bullet patterns and massive bullet spread moments that it can be a bit unnerving at first and then super-satisfying later dodging them.

I haven't been able to get any time in on this, save for a credit or two to test it out, but I am still very stoked to play this. I may move my cab at home horizontal for the time being so I can catch up on these great PCB's!

It's been a busy month with new acquisitions, with the DK3 cab and the Astro City cab, the Progear and Daimakaimura pcb's. I also have another horizontal platformer PCB on its way from Canada I am very excited about and a long road trip to make on Saturday to Minneapolis, MN, 8-hours away from me in Chicago to grab a cab I have been waiting for since I started buying full size arcade games back in 1996...

New PCB: Daimakaimura - Capcom 1988

2011-08-16T07:46:00.000-07:00

If you have been following my blog these past few months, you know how much time I have sunk into Ghosts 'N Goblins. I dig it. It's hard, but enjoyable and Capcom mostly seems to hit it out of the park with their arcade platformers. So, after getting Dave's cab and keeping it as a horizontal cab, I decided to try and scrounge up a few good hori games.

I got this in a good trade with a fellow shmups member who ended up taking the Deathsmiles kit in trade for this and another new board on my list. Daimakaimura is the sequel to GnG and is a fantastic platformer - way easier and more fun than the original. The music is as haunting as the first with a good fantasy theme and just gets stuck in your head instantly.

The graphics are also of supreme quality, with very detailed sprites and backgrounds. There is so much good enemy sprite and background interaction that it lends a depth to the game you might not even notice at first, as ghouls pop out from behind trees in the background and red devils sit on piles of skulls.

I have found myself enjoying the hell out of this, wishing I had more time after work this week to enjoy it. Last night, I got a chance to get a few games in before I had to roll home and later, after I was out with friends for a weekly get together, I almost drove back to work to play for a while, but I knew I would have been there waaaaay to late into the morning to do me any good the next day.

New cab: Donkey Kong 3 - Nintendo - 1983

2011-08-12T12:32:00.000-07:00

Long time coming. This is a cab I have wanted to add for a while and everytime I had one on the line, it got away, either by being crappy or by me just plain missing out.

Not this one. I found this on the local craigslist and secured a sweet deal on it. The side art is immaculate on both sides, the CP looks brand new, the marquee is in stellar shape as well. It also plays amazingly well - sticks, buttoms, all crisp and clean, like the Perrier of arcade controls.

The inside of this thing is immaculate, almost no dust. I think you could operate off it. The bottom, which tend to get destroyed after a while on Nintendo cabs, is almost brand new looking. It's creepy how clean this thing is.

It does have a small monitor issue with the horizontal coil, but I have a coil adjustment tool on its way. The t-molding is also cracked in a few places, so I'll order some of that as well at some point.

I bought this for two reasons: 1) I will be competing in the CAGDC Tournament at Richie Knucklez's arcade in NJ in September and choose this as one of the titles I can vote in and 2) I love this game.

It's like a weird combination of Galaga and a platformer and once you get the hang of it, it plays super fluid and its very rewarding. It's a very fast paced game and really enjoyable, especially for shmups fans.

It also has nothing to do with the general DK story lineas this game stars Stanley, a gardner and not Mario. Strange choice by Nintendo, but really, who cares who is in the game - its still awesome.

I have knocked off a few games of around 300K and I hope to be able to marathon this for an hour for the tourney and feel pretty good at being able to do that.

Deathsmiles high score #2

2011-08-09T07:12:00.000-07:00

Now I am starting to get a better idea of what's going on. You do get bored with keeping rank low - without suicide bullets, the game is pretty easy. I didn't care enough to beat it on low rank, but now, I am playing on lvl 3 rank for each stage and the suicide bullets make it a lot more fun and challenging.

I have only played a dozen or so credits of this recently, but I can get to the final stage almost everytime. I am hoping for 100 mil + scores soon as I can see a lot of places where I am missing out on big scoring opportunities. The clear should be right around the corner without the EX stage. Haven't even tried that bad boy yet. I think there may be a great opportunity to score well there, but I haven't looked into it.

I did have a Rosa All Clear superplay on my harddrive for a while and it has since dissapeared - if anyone has it, let me know! I'm also hoping to hunt down the DVD and see what's up. It'd be nice to see what I am missing.

SRAM arcade, Deathsmiles high score #1

2011-08-05T09:09:00.000-07:00

The Ghosts 'N Goblins needed some company, so I brought the vs. cab in. Shortly after that, my buddy Dave decided to get out of his cab and pcb's. I decided to pick his cab up and had it shipped from Cali. It arrived safe and sound, along with Out Zone, Deathsmiles and Progear. I set it up last night, played one credit of Deathsmiles and died on Tyranosatan at the end of 4-2 while the cleaning guy was asking me where I get all these games.

I managed 53,384,272 before I died, which doesn't seem too crappy for having no idea what I am doing scoring wise. I also didn't rank up to Lvl 3 until it made me. I'll have to try it with the rank on high soon.

The bad news is that Dave's Progear's battery decided to explode at some point during the last year or so as it was sitting and coated a corner of the board in some caustic acid and melted away a number of traces and chip legs. I'm gonna clean it off and send it out and see what the possibility of getting it working again are. I know that the board has now suicided, but I have no idea what the costs of resurrection might be. Damn.

I do feel blessed to have a job where after work, we have a beer fridge stocked with super good free beer, a nice stereo, tons of Nerf guns (mostly modded) and now three arcades. This is one of the many reasons I love my job and love working here at SRAM.

Ghosts 'N Goblins (ARC) - high score #4

2011-07-07T18:38:00.000-07:00

I basically took two weeks off from playing this game, having two different trips back to back keeping me out of town. I just started in on it again tonight and blew away my old high score, but more importantly, I got the the end of stage 6 two different credits in a row. Once I get some solid patterns down for the dual Satans at the end of 6, I should be good for the loop - which I am absolutely dying to pass.

I honestly cannot believe how much time I have devoted to this game, but I am psyched at getting as far as I have. It's an excellent game, one of Capcom's best. Hopefully, I will be reaching the end of the first loop soon!

Ghosts 'N Goblins (ARC) high score #3

2011-06-26T07:25:00.001-07:00

The progress from here on out is slow - I can get to the end of stage 5 regularly on 1CC, but cannot defeat the stage boss with any regular occurrence. I still have to find a good pattern for him. I have got to the bosses at the end of stage 6, right at the end of the game, just before your first fight with the devil or whomever has captured your girl, but have not passed them with the shield. I had previously beat them with the knife, but when you do, the game sends you back to the beginning of stage 5 as no weapon but the shield can beat the end boss.

I'm playing this every night after work for about an hour each night and I am still working on the stage 5 and 6 patterns. Hoping to get something down soon to oass the end of the first loop! I'm really eager to start in on the second loop and work for the good ending.

Ghosts 'N Goblins (ARC) high score #2

2011-06-09T07:27:00.000-07:00

A bit of progress, but progress I'm really happy about! I finally made it to stage 6 on one credit and died facing the dragon from stage 3 during the boss rush. He pretty much made a beeline for me and I kept retreating, but to no avail.

I did up my score quite a bit to 127,800 and I can feel the 1cc within reach. I still need a lot more practice on stage 5 and a good solid strategy for one bottle neck, before the end of the stage that I cannot seem to figure out a good pattern for. This time that I did pass it, was mostly due to luck and some quick shooting.

I'm not sure just how hard the stage 5 full boss rush is gonna be, but I have solid strats down for most of the bosses, so I hope not too tough. I know that completeing the first loop will feel like a great accomplishment, but it is a 2-loop game and that second loop will probably beckon...

Ketsui update

2011-06-08T06:24:00.000-07:00

I have been practicing Ketsui each night, sometimes a credit, sometimes more. I'm really taking it easy, but I am also still learning alot as I go.

As it stands right now, I can consistently get scores in the 65-70 mill range without too much trouble. In fact, last night, I played a game while watching Law and Order, losing all my lives besides one in the first two stages. Then I turned my focus to the game and no-missed stage 3 and finally made it to stage 5, finishing about halfway through with just over 70 mil.

I will be working on the 1cc for the next few months, getting more familiar with the early stages, but really working on five, as I have no patterns for it. I think I will probably go back to my old grind and play through the game a few times a day using continues when necessary to get some patterns down. With an aggressive bomb strategy, and some good patterns for 5, I think I can do it. Ideally, I'd like to hit around 100 mil, but I will need a good set of strats for 4 and 5 for that to happen.

Ghosts 'N Goblins (ARC) - high score #1

2011-06-02T07:29:00.000-07:00

After I bought this cab, I realized it may be the heaviest arcade cab ever built and I happen to live on the second floor of a two floor walk-up. So, since I bought it, it has resided in my garage, waiting to see the light of day again.

And because I have an awesome job and work for a great company in SRAM, I was told to bring it in for our department and viola - now I can work on the game! Woohoo!

Manhandling the cab into my car and up to the thrid floor at work was pretty easy with an elevator involved at work, so I got it set up in a night, made a few adjustments to the dips and monitor, cracked open an ice cold Heineken and got right down to playing.

It only took a few credits to get rolling again and that first night, I was making it to the end of the third stage with regularity.

Last night, I started playing while everyone was hanging out after work on the porch and drinking beer and started getting to the fourth stage and then the fifth on a single credit. Wow. I actually impressed myself at how fast I was progressing! It does help that you can glitch the boss on stage 4 if, as soon as you hear the boss music, you turn right around and start walking backwards. It takes a few seconds of walking and then the end stage 'Take A Key For Coming In!' greeting pops up and you are done.

Stage 5 is still pretty tough, though I did make it to the boss a few times, but have only fought him 3-4 times and really am not sure about his patterns. I have watched a few superplays - one from Superplay.co.uk and another from the AEX archives which have certainly helped, but this game really requires you to know eqach of the attack patterns of each of the enemies to sucessfully defeat them. It's not a simple case of memorization, as the enemy AI can do - and often does - create new movements and patterns on the go. Red Devils seem to be the best at this.

I ended up my playing last night on stage 5, one stage from the end of the game. Stage 6 is pretty much a boss rush with a short stage in between bosses to get to the end battle and then - you get to do it all over again.

For those who don't know, at the end of all 6 stages, you fight Lucifer and if you defeat him, the game tells you that 'This Room Is a Trap Devised By Satan" and to go back to the beginning and challenge it again. So you have to beat it TWICE to get the real ending. The second loop is harder, with more and quicker projectiles. When you beat it the second time, it gives you the good ending and then allows you to keep playing through it if you'd like. I'm not sure if the subsequent levels are any harder than the second loop, but I can't imagine making it through three loops of this game.

HCBailly - Let's Play'er - You Tube

2011-05-25T15:51:00.000-07:00

This is the first time I have posted about a LP'er outside of my 'Best of the Rest' posts, but I have been going through all of the back catalog posts for HCBailly and digging his stuff.

His commentary is excellent, funny, and punctuated with little video shorts when appropriate. It seems like the bulk of his material is old school RPG's - pretty much right up my alley.

Check him out if you are an LP watcher and enjoy. Stellar.

Final Fantasy V Advance - job system, yea!

2011-05-25T08:06:00.001-07:00

Just blasting through the game now - that is, when I have time to play! Now I realize why shmups are so good for someone with so little spare time - easy to pick up and put down, short games.

I started playing the other night after I got home late after chilling with friends and picked up the Advance at like 1:12 am or something. I played for a little while and then looked at the clock - 2:53 am. Holy shit, that sucked.

But the game itself is awesome. The job system is a lot of fun and I find that I want to grind just to get my characters to complete learning their jobs. The problem is, I am now super over powered in the game and just mowing down the story line.

I'm hoping to finish this in the next week or so and move onto either Persona 1 for the PSP or Etrian Odessey III for the DS. And I may just get back to Ketsui as well...

Final Fantasy V - GBA

2011-04-17T08:02:00.000-07:00

After the meet, I am ususally a bit burned out by STG's, so I tend to play RPG's for a while after it ends, getting my drive back. This year, I decided to pick up FFV for the GBA - a game I have had in the collection for a while, but haven't played.

It usually takes alot to keep me going nowadays in an RPG and I find myself tending towards the Shin Megami Tensei RPG's and their difficult battle system and dark story, rather than FF titles, but FFV has got me hooked.

The job system is excellent, letting you level up jobs for each character to get specific abilities that transfer to another job class once you have learned them. So, you can have a white mage who also can fight two-handed or a black mage who can use a dragoon's jumping attack. The amount of different jobs is impressive and enjoyable to work with in the confines of traditional FF RPG.

The story is typical FF fare, with crystal shards that need to be gathered to topple the big boss, Exdeath. However, this takes place between two different worlds, with a quick real time battle system and a fun - if incredibly melodramatic - story.

I find myself playing it like I did FFI back in the day - staring at the screen for hours, saying, I'll turn it off right after the next battle, and then staying on it for an hour more. Really enjoyable and a good distraction from STG's for sure.

Chicagoland Winter Carnival 2011 - March 4-6th - event recap

2011-03-25T07:58:00.000-07:00

Everytime I do one of these get togethers, I am reminded of Stephen Fatsis's "Word Freak", a novel about the world of competitive Scrabble playing and the intense people involved. It's the level of competition and dedication that always blows me away in that novel and here at these meets.

I always learn so much while simultaneously being pushed to work harder and be better. Which is evidenced by the fact that at each meet, I have set new personal bests on games I work on - Sky Shark, Batsugun, Dodonpachi and for this meet, Raiden and Ketsui.

Raiden, I cannot seem to get away from it. I've never been a huge fan of the game but for some reason, I am compelled to keep playing it. I'm sure it has to do something with Seibu's love for Toaplan, but the point blanking from the side fields still sucks. I did happen to get to the 4th stage - something which I have never done before - and now I think I kinda like it.

I posted a 78,220,694 score for Ketsui, ending at 1-5 and during the run, I made some impressive moves which I probably shouldn't have gotten away with, but I did. Awesome. My patterns for 4 are coming along, but I really need to start working on five as I can get there often enough that I need to do something other than bomb.

And as usual, I'm always impressed by the level of respect everyone brings - nothing was broken, stolen or even left dirty, save for some glasses. This is a great community.

As for the meet itself, Zerst killed everything. He made a 523,160 score on Nexzr Special 2-Minute Mode and pretty much led from the beginning of the competition. He also destroyed the Super Secret Midnight Scoring Competition, which was Zoo Keeper this year. He posted a crazy 3+ mil score and I don't think anyone even went near the machine after that.

We did Livestream the event, which was very cool and pretty fun. Next meet, we'll do the same. We started around 2pm and showed the Nexzr competition and then some DDP, Twinkle Star Sprites, Ketsuipachi and Zoo Keeper. It was cool to see people watching and being down for staying signed in the whole time.

Andi was pretty much the MC of the event, getting people organized at dinner and corralling people for events. Big thanks to you homeboy.

Thanks again for everyone who attended and I look forward to doing another this fall!

Chicagoland Winter Carnival 2011 - March 4-6th

2011-03-01T21:34:00.001-08:00

Although I expect everyone who reads this blog that finds it through Cave-STG and some of the other shmup forums I am on is well aware of this, I though it was worth mentioning and reminind those of you hoping to attend.

The Chicagoland Winter Carnival 2011 will be held this weekend at my place, here in Chicago, IL. Details are on the shmups forum under Shmupmeets here:
http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=24367

Please pm me though shmups for my address and vitals if you haven't already. I will be live streaming at the event under www.livestream.com/suicidebullets on Saturday, pretty much all day. Dave K. is also holding his meet and will be streaming it as well. Pretty cool.

New PCB: Ketsui - Cave 2002 (again!)

2011-02-15T10:58:00.000-08:00

This is a game I should have probably never sold, but - thanks to Dave - its back in my stable! This PCB was originally MrMonkeyMan's on which he set the western record, which is a cool plus, but really, I'm just so stoked to have a Ketsui PCB back in the house!

It's fun playing this in MAME, but its justy not the same as playing it on a cab. It's such a fun game and my Saturn pad, while awesome for some shmups, just doesn't work for me on Ketsui.

Its pretty cool that my first post on this very blog was about first getting this PCB (http://suicidebullets.blogspot.com/2008/01/ketsui-arrives.html) and I feel just as stoked to own it again.

I hope to laydown a new high score soon and see just how far my skill set has come in the last few years since owning this beauty. I think I have the skills to finally nail the 1CC with some work. I was amazed when I got MAME to work with Ketsui just how much I remembered in terms of enemy placement and timing.

I'm ver happy to have this back in the stable and it's going to take quite a lot to get me to part with it again! Thanks, Dave.

Thunder Dragon 2 high score #2

2011-02-09T21:10:00.001-08:00

Well, I'm back to playing this mess. For some reason, I cannot stop playing it - and I don't even think its that great a game. I tried explaining why I like to play it to gunbird18 tonight, and I couldn't come up with a good reason, I think its because its hard and badly designed - I play because I want to find out where the patterns and fluidity are in this thing.

For whatever reason, I would like to 1cc this, but I don't think it'll happen any time soon. The rank can get brutal and I have no rank management strategies at all. For now, It's a good game to waste my time with while I take a break from DP and DDP, before my new pcb acquisition arrives next week...

Ketsuipachi - Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu Black Label Ketsui Arrange - Stages 1 & 2 - XBox 360

2011-02-02T13:31:00.000-08:00

If you haven't been paying attention, Cave, somehow, for some awesome reason, decided to release a stand alone disc release of Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu Black Label Arrange mode, which players are referring to as Ketsuipachi. It's a mix of DFK and Ketsui, using the a-type ship with 6 (!) options, an arrange soundtrack and 1/2/3/4/5/10 chips though the same mechanics as Ketsui.

Unbelieveable.

I have been putting off getting a Japanese XBox 360, but it's time to pony up and go for it. This game looks damn near orgasmic.

New PCB: Dodonpachi Daioujou pcb + arts, Cave 2002

2011-02-02T11:09:00.000-08:00

Not exactly a new pcb, but I finally got the art work for the game from Dave and shot this photo as I am currently looking to swap my vanilla pcb and arts for a Black Label one. It just looked too nice to not post it up!

I did get a chance to check out Black Label as it is now fully emulated in MAME (along with Ketsui and Espgaluda) - which seems totally bananas. It is a lot of fun, very, very similar to the original but the frequency of hypers does make it quite a bit more fun. The 1 or 2 loop choice is very cool, as is the option of choosing Black Label or the original version when you power up the pcb.

Now that I have 1cc'd Donpachi and Dodonpachi, maybe this one is next...

Donpachi (ARC) high score #4: 10,681,380 1-All, ended at 2-3

2011-01-27T17:47:00.000-08:00

Yes! Got home tonight and did three runs of Donpachi and finally cleared the loop, setting a new high score at 10,681,380 and reaching stage 2-3, finally dying at the last blast of enemies before the end boss.

In two days, I added almost 5 mil to my score and moved myself from 69th on the Shmups scoreboard (one position away from the bottom) to 21st. Awesome. I have to say, I am really enjoying this game recently and the second loop is a good deal of fun. I hope that I can push this score up, get some good chains together (I already know a few places I think have 100+ chains hiding in them) and get into the top ten. I would have to beat stanski's score of 15,262,990 at 2-4 with a 103 chain. It would be quite an accomplishment and one that I think is within my grasp.

Donpachi (ARC) high score #3

2011-01-25T19:47:00.001-08:00

Andi came by tonight and we dug into a few games on the new MAME box including ESPrade, and Strikers 1945 and played a few credits on Donpachi. I had my best game to date, getting to stage 5 with a life in reserve and 6 or 7 bombs. I died pretty fast, which sucked, especially since I wasted all those bombs, but I set a new high score for myself at 5,880,250. A big jump from my last high score and I feel very near the clear on this game. I'm pretty stoked to say the least!

Twin Cobra high score #4

2011-01-20T16:51:00.001-08:00

Damn, its good to have the MAME box back! Been playing Twin Cobra again and set a new high score of 1,073,850 and just had a blast. Only problem is is that the game is crazy long - ten stages to be exact - and I tire pretty quickly of playing the first few. I really like stage 5 and beyond and may have to start utilizing save states to practice further without the major time penalty.

Donpachi (ARC) high score #2

2011-01-16T11:20:00.000-08:00

A new Donpachi score means only one thing - got a new MAME box! Specifically an IBM Thinkpad running ShmupMAME and it runs it excellently. I set it up Friday and played a bit on Saturday, getting some time in on Twin Cobra and Donpachi. I actually really enjoyed Donpachi and credit fed the game a number of times working on the later stages and then set this score, not really destroying my old one, but more setting up my future progress. I was actually working on chains where I knew I could get 20 and 30 hit runs when timed right and it shows in this score.

I'm excited to have a MAME box back and I'm hoping to get some good progress on DP here in the near future.

2010 Best of the Rest - ver 1.5

2011-01-09T08:11:00.000-08:00

10.5) Seattle Seahawks def. New Orleans Saints, 41-36

Do you believe in miracles!!?!?! The Seattle Seahawks, 7-9 in the regular season to win their division, the worst record by a division winner in NFL history, beat the defending Super Bowl champion New Orleans Saints, 41-36! I grew up in Seattle and have been a Seahawks fan since the early 1980's (rabid fan in the last ten years) and this must be the biggest upset win in Seahawks history. I was going bananas last night watching the game with Linda, cheering the 'Hawks all the way, absolutely going crazy on Marshawn Lynch's 67-yard TD run where he broke 8 tackles to score what would be the winning touchdown, yelling at the TV at the top of my lungs when they stopped the Saints 2-point conversion which would have made it a 3-point game and cheering the final score, 41-36, delirious with excitement.

An unbelievable game, a fantastic victory for my 'Hawks and a stellar way to begin the Pete Carroll legacy.

2010 Best of the Rest

2011-01-06T10:20:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year again to espouse the things I love that aren't video games, though it seems that a few games always seem to make it in - but not this year! It's been a great year and I'm very happy, especially now that the #1 thing on my list has come to pass...

10) Patagonia Synchilla

I'm a big fan of technical clothing like North Face, Helly Hanson and Patagonia and the Synchilla is a pullover I practically live in in the winter months in Chicago. It's a thick and baggy microfiber fleece with a snap-up funnel-neck collar that couldn't be more comfortable. One chest snap pocket and no frills. Just warm, comfortable goodness.

9) ClementJ642, takarifreak - Youtube LP'ers

Over the last year, I have still been watching as many LP's and superplays as usual and have added two to my list of subscriptions on Youtube - ClementJ642, who plays tons of Mega Man games and takarifreak, who plays Lego Star Wars and old King's Quest games. Both are great commentators and a lot of fun to listen to. It also helps that takarifreak, Luchajin and NintendoCapriSun all kind of hang together on the net, so there is some cross over.

8) 601 Oscuro/Blue Havana

I'm a big cigar smoker and have been for quite sometime, a hobby that I started with my father just before the big cigar boom in the late 1990's. I tend to be a pretty chill person and love watching a movie, drinking an Americano and smoking a strong cigar at Blue Havana, my favorite smoking spot for the last few years, just off the corner of Belmont and Clark. The 601 Oscuro has become my go-to smoke - very full bodied, an excellent draw with flavors of cedar, leather, dark chocolate, black pepper and earth and for about $8, its a steal.

7) Budgie – Entire Recording Catalog

Budgie are one of the first very loud rock bands from the early 1970's that were at the forefront of what was later called Heavy Metal. Metallica names them as a primary influence and cover a number of their songs, including Breadfan and Crash Course in Brain Surgery. They have been a band I have liked for a long time but this year marks the year I have really absorbed their entire catalog and love just about every song. Like many early heavy bands, they have a blues-influenced rock thing going on, but unlike bands like Cream and Mountain, they have a suitably rough production which serves to amplify the power of their sound with psychedelic and prog leanings ala Rush. Pick up Bandolier or Squawk or their first s/t record to see what one of the best bands ever sound like.

6) Clarks x Stussy XXX collab Wallabees

My mother and sister live in Seattle, which was where I grew up and it's easily my favorite place on Earth. I try and get out there to visit a few times a year and this past November, I went over to do a joint birthday/thanksgiving trip. While I was there, I stopped by Goods, the Seattle streetwear shop, with my mom and spied these next door at the Stussy boutique. After trying them on, my mom insisted on picking them up for me and we even had a bit of a card battle at the counter with each of us trying to hand the cashier our cards as I didn't want her to foot the bill alone! She won - she always does - and I have an exceptional pair of Wally's - my favorite shoe by a long margin. They are a Japanese market Stussy X Clarks collab marking the 30th anniversary of Stussy as a brand and the quality is completely bananas. The leather is handbag quality - super soft and supple, the sides are made of cordura nylon and even the soles are of a different material than standard - stiffer and less sticky than the normal Clarks crepe sole. I have mad love for these kicks!

5) 1990 BMW E30 325is custom

My buddy Seth mentioned one day very casually that he was thinking of selling off his 1990 E30 which I didn't even know he had and I stopped dead - how much? He showed me pics and told me a bit of the story. It's a 1990 E30 325is that had been restored by its previous owner for $20g's and was custom painted Sepang bronze metallic with a two-tone black and cardinal red interior. The restoration included new suspension, new oil pan, skid plate, custom paint, a crazy loud stereo with a custom-boxed subwoofer in the trunk, smoked-out Hella taillights, M-Tech front and rear bumpers, smoked-out outside Hella headlights and an M-Tech spoiler - which was the first thing to go. Not a spoiler fan. There's no cracks on the dashboard, all the electrics work, including the sunroof and both windows. The engine was stock and in fantastic shape. We ended up working out a deal and I love this car. It's super fun to have a second car, especially one as iconic as the boxy and beautiful E30. It's small and chuckable and super fun to drive. It's closer to a Lotus Elan with its great handling than a modern car with its many electronic assists and the build quality is excellent, even for a 20-year-old car.

The first time I took it out of the garage and out for a ride, I pulled up to a stop sign and a group of guys turned and I got a wow- nice ride man - from them and smiled and took off with the distinctive burble of the tailpipes echoing down the block.

4) Kuma's Corner/Pike Street Fish Fry

In Chicago its Kuma's Corner and in Seattle, its Pike Street Fish Fry - my two favorite eateries. Kuma's - if you haven't been - is a metal burger bar that has won just about every award a burger resturant can get and has been on the Food Network and Travel channel multiple times. The burgers are ridiculously good and all named after hard rock/heavy metal bands like Black Sabbath, Clutch, Thin Lizzy, Mastodon and Sleep - the peirrenial monthly special in November, celebrating one of my favortie bands with a Thanksgiving dinner all on a turkey burger to die for.
Pike Street Fish Fry has to be the best fish and chips I have ever had - and that's saying alot as I love fish and chips! I discovered them last I was in Seattle, right down the block from Elliot Bay Bookstore and right next to Neumo's. I ate there like four days out of the ten I was there and the fried oysters, cod and shrimp were all amazing. The breading is crazy good. The fries are those twice fried hand cut joints and damn if I'm not getting hungry just writing about this place.

3) Green Matamp GT 120/Gibson Les Paul Standard/Gibson ES335/Gibson Firebrand SG ebony

Having played in bands in and around Chicago on and off for the last 20 years, I have had a suprisingly small amount of really good gear. For the most part, I played my 1968 Gibson Melody Maker SG, heavily modified and a killer guitar for punk rock - but not all the great for anything else. This year, my passion for playing music has been rekindled and like anything worth doing, its better to over do it.

First off, I needed a new guitar, so I tracked down a 1980 Gibson Firebrand SG on craisglist locally and pounced on it for $500. It's got a neck repair, but its well done and any luthier familiar with Gibson necks will tell you they are way stronger repaired than not. Its got really hot pickups, somewhere between P90's and Classic '57 humbuckers that absolutely smoke.

I then began to hunt down what would be my ultimate amp. I'm a big amp guy and have owned countless amps over the years, including a Sound City 120, numerous silver and blackfaced Fenders, an Ampeg V-4 and my last amp, a Vox Climax - a 1980 120 watt version of the AC30 with a five-band EQ.

Rather than get more of what I had had before, I decided to look for something different, something that would compliment the riff-based rock I was so interested in. I started to get interested in Orange amps, something I had never really looked at back when I was playing much more often. Now, back in the day, a good 10-15 years ago, Oranges sold for about half of what a comperable Marshall sold for used. Since then, the brand has been revitalized and there is a lot of love for the older Oranges, especially the early models favored by Jimmy Page and Peter Green. After doing a lot of research, I picked up an 2003 Orange AD30R, which I liked, but didn't really give me the deep, deep tone vintage Oranges were known for. Then I learned about the Green Matamp.

Matamp made the original Oranges, only stopping when Orange got too big for them to keep up and Orange went off on its own. In fact, early Orange amps were branded as 'Orange Matamp.' Matamp shut its doors in the 1980's as interest in tube amps waned and later was bought and reborn in the early 1990's. They started making Orange reissues for Gibson and their own line of amps - the Green Matamp, a nod to the "orange", but based off the Matamp GT120, a 1970's amp that utilized the same early Orange Matamp circuits. In fact, all of the 1990's Greens were built out of original 1970's Matamp GT120 parts they still had on the shelves! The amps were of varying quality, but undeniably amazing sounding. Sleep used a number of them on their recording of the seminal "Dopesmoker" album - one of my top ten favorite records of all time and you can even spy a few of them in the video for "Dragonaut". Needless to say, I had to find one. Problem was, they only ever brought 55 to this country and prices are amazingly insane - anywhere from $3-4,000.

Whether fate intervened or not, I will dare not say, but just after starting what I thought was going to be a long and expensive search, one happened to pop up on eBay, a super early, non-serialized GT120 Master Volume. It was in mint shape, kept in a road case and used sparringly by a recording musician since it was purchased new at Matamp in the 1990's. Reserve was set at about 2g's - well out of the range of what I had at the time, but I needed to get this amp!

I immediately set about selling off a ton of gear, including both Cinelli's that appreared on last years Best of the Rest list and contacted the seller, letting him know that I was very, very interested, but short of cash - thought I was working on it! He told me if it didn't sell at auction, we could talk about it, but I thought my chances of getting it were very low. I still hustled to get the cash he was asking for.

For whatever reason, it failed to go at auction. I couldn't believe it. I hit him up immediately after it ended and asked what cash price he was willing to settle on. he said, "$1,750 - and I'll throw in the A&S road case, if you can do cash in a week's time." I couldn't believe it. It was waaaaaay cheaper than I thought I would ever find one for and in my reach! I pulled the cash together and drove down from Chicago and him out from Kentucky and we met up in a gas station in the middle of nowhere and did the deal. It has to be the most amazing sounding amps I have ever owned. The clarity of the notes, the fuzzy overdrive and the tremendous low-end are undeniably amazing. You can set this thing to get mod-style The Jam AC30 brightness to super-deep, tone rich Dopesmoker. It's by far the most versitile amp I have ever owned and it will never, ever leave my possession.

Not content with just the SG, I wanted to find a Les Paul, such an iconic guitar and used by just about everyone, so the hunt began. I ended up finding a beautiful 2006 Gibson Les Paul Standard on Craigslist in Indianapolis and drove down and worked the deal on a trade for some bike parts. It's a killer sounding guitar that impresses me so, so much. It's a non-chambered beast and the tone with the Green is stupidly awesome. Zeppelin on the treble and Sleep/Budgie on the rhythm channels - it's all that and more.

Years ago my mom and girlfriend at the time bought me a 1970's Gretsch Country Gentleman - a beautiful guitar, but one I never bonded with - it just never felt comfortable and the tone was more country than rock for my tastes. So I decided to flip it and get a Gibson ES335 - the mother of all semi-hollow bodies, used from everyone from jazz/blues guitarists to Alex Lifeson of Rush, Creedance Clearwater Revival's John Fogerty and many more. I sold the CG on eBay to a collector from Spain and bought this super clean and barely played black 2002 Gibson ES335. The tones you can get with this thing are amazing and quite varied but tend to be deeper than the Les Paul and less punchy than the SG, more mellow, although with some tweaking you can get the treble channel to brighten up considerably. It's known more for its sustain and warmth and sliding low-E power chords on it is one of the great guitar sounds ever.

I play just about every night and have begun taking guitar lessons for the first time at Dr Fretgood here in Chicago and I'm learning everything I possibly can.

2) Sleep- Return of the Marajuanaut Tour 2010 - live at Logan Square Auditorium

It should come as no surprise to anyone who read through all the Sleep refrences in the last post that this is a show I would not miss for the world. Sleep, one of the first and certainly one of the best stoner-rock bands broke up in 1995 after London Records refused to put out Dopesmoker, which only surfaced years later through a friends label. They reformed in 2009 to play one show at the ATP festival in London and in 2010, decided to tour the US after much clammoring from fans and promoters. I bought two tickets as soon as they went on sale. The show was unbelieveable - a powerful and moving experience, a once-in-a-lifetime moment of power and sound that almost overwhelmed me. I took some video of the show with Linda's Flip camera, which is what's shown here. I bought the poster, two tour shirts, three patches and almost the amp that Al is using on stage at the show. I may still, but we'll see...

SLEEP: Marijuanaut’s Return US Tour 2010
9/03/2010 All Tomorrow’s Parties – Monticello, NY
9/04/2010 FYE Fest – Los Angeles, CA
9/05/2010 Gothic Theatre – Englewood, CO
9/06/2010 Brooklyn Masonic Temple – New York, NY w/ Doomriders, Unearthly Trance
9/07/2010 Starlight Ballroom – Philadelphia, PA w/ A Storm Of Light
9/08/2010 Brooklyn Masonic Temple – New York, NY w/ A Storm Of Light, Lichens
9/09/2010 Logan Square Auditorium – Chicago, IL w/ Lichens
9/10/2010 Mohawk – Austin, TX w/ Sub Oslo w/ Sub Oslo
9/11/2010 Roseland Theater/Music Fest NW – Portland, OR w/ Scott Kelly, YOB
9/12/2010 Regency Ballroom – San Francisco, CA w/ Thrones
9/13/2010 Regency Ballroom – San Francisco, CA

1) Linda - Engagement

Linda and I met about 18 years ago at a punk show when I was singing for a local punk band and she came to see us play. She wrote me a letter, I wrote back, she was 13, I was 16. She saw us play a bunch and I left the band a few years later. Fast forward to 2004 - I was a freelance writer and she was a personal trainer. I was walking up Milwaukee Ave to go to the now-defunct Filter coffee shop and she was heading south, doing some shopping on a rare afternoon off on a Friday. She recognized me and stopped me on the street, right outside where Filter use to be, on the corner of North, Damen and Milwaukee. She introduced herself, though I didn't remember her, we talked for a little bit and she gave me her card with her cell phone number and took off, looking amazingly good in tight workout clothes. There was definitely something there, though I didn't think it was much more than a chance to date a beautiful girl. I waited until Monday to call, we went out to a free jazz night on Monday, she took me to an African Dance recital on Wednesday and by Friday night, we were fully in love.

We designed the ring with my friend Slice, a renowned metalsmith here in Chicago and I told Linda it would be a while for the ring to get done and a while for me to be able to afford it - which were both little white lies. The next day, I met Slice, paid him in full and he told me three weeks until the ring was done.

I got the ring on a Saturday morning and met Linda in Wicker Park, where we walked up the street towards Milwaukee and North Ave where we first met with some story about waning to go shopping up the block a bit. I stopped her where we met and gave her a short, prepared but honest speech and got down on one knee on Milwaukee Ave, in the middle of the day, surrounded by passers-by and asked her to marry me. She said yes. I couldn't be happier.

Same! Same! Same! - (ARC) high score #1

2011-01-05T16:14:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the amazing guys over at Southtown Homebrew, I have been able to convert gunbird18's Fire Shark pcb to the very rare 1-player Japanese version, Same! Same! Same! - with his blessing of course!

The US version, Fire Shark, has no side fields and makes for a tough and slightly boring game compared to Same! Same! Same!. While I do enjoy Fire Shark, Same! Same! Same! is much, much better.

There are now side fields and different firing patterns for some of the bosses. The game plays more maniacally and is a fast, rewarding shmup. None of the music changes, but the feel of the game is very, very different.

I have been at it for the last few days and set this high score at 443,450 at area 4-9. It's harder than Fire Shark, but more enjoyable. I can see why the original Japanese Same! Same! Same! 1-player boards command 5-60,000 Japanese Yen (roughly 650 USD).

For those of you with Fire Shark pcb's - hit up Southtown for the roms. They'll run you $20 a set.

New cab: Ghosts 'n Goblins - Capcom, 1985

2010-12-13T19:27:00.000-08:00

Picked up a completely mint, totally restored Ghosts 'n Goblins today and I'm so stoked! Just like when I picked up a Tempest years back, I had to drive throughout the remnants of the big storm that ran through the midwest just a day ago, dropping 5-10 inches with 35-50 mile an hour winds and lot and lots of ice. Which certainly made the 5 miles on completely iced country roads off of 94 to my destination pretty hairy - especially on the return trip, having to do it in the dark! But it was well worth it and the game is in better shape than I could have ever imagined.

I found a posting on craigslist about a week and a half ago for it on the Madison, WI site for $200, which is pretty low for a machine that looked this nice. It's a game I have always wanted to add to my small arcade and one I have always wanted to 1cc. For the price, I expected a player - beat up, functional, but rough, much like my old Marble Madness cab. I offered $125 as the monitor had some screen burn (which actually is barely noticeable when playing it, the camera flash makes it look a lot worse than it really is) and the seller accepted. But when I arrived, I couldn't believe just how perfect the machine was. The CP was new, the actual panel beneath looked brand new - no rust at all -, the bezel had NO marks on the plexi and the marquee was just as clean.

Turns out, the guy who owned it before the current owner I bought it from totally restored it. The insides were so clean that you could have done heart surgery off them. The only oddity is that the previous owner covered the cab sides and kickplate with thick and strangely classy, certainly vintage wood grain. Think Frogger. It looks great with the edges of the thick panels beveled professionally. The original blue vinyl is under it, but I'm going to leave it as is. The stuff is super durable and actually looks fantastic. The cp graphics actually looks great with it with the tree branches on the cp bleeding into the wood grain very naturally.

The pictures here are the sellers as we disassembled it to move it up the seller's stairs and into the Element. It sits in my garage now, right next to the vs. cab, awaiting the apartment. Both will be installed upstairs before the meet in February and I cannot wait.

Makaimura/Ghosts 'n Goblins - arcade

2010-12-11T14:44:00.000-08:00

Regular readers of the blog know that I tackled Castlevania 1cc'ing the vs. arcade and the NES console port as it was one of my most feared games of my past. Well, top of that list would be Ghosts and Goblins, a ridiculously hard and unforgiving arcade game by Capcom.

It was amazingly popular in Japan and it was ported to just about every system, including the NES/Famicom, Sharp X68000, Commodore 64 and Amiga, Gameboy Color, Playstation , Sega Saturn, Wonderswan, and the PSP.

It's a beautiful game, even today, with exceptionally well-drawn sprites and a very distinct soundtrack. The opening of the game, where your girl gets stolen away from you by a devil is still very cool and the music during the opening so distinct, that I can recall the piano-synth-organ sound at almost anytime.

Aside from being an excellently drawn and sounding game, it's brutally hard. Crazy, brutally hard. The kind of hard that breaks controllers and keeps you pissed for a while. It's nearly a total memorizer - sequences of events/enemies that need to be totally memorized in order to overcome them. I say almost because there is a fluidity to the gameplay, but one that requires perfect, split-second decisions.

I have just started playing this after loading mame on my Macbook as my Mame box is totally dead. It's a game I never could get far in as a kid, but one that I loved to play, just like Castlevania. And just like Castlevania, it's a game that I really want to 1cc.

I have been playing for a few days, about ten to fifteen credits a day, sometimes credit feeding to see just how far I can get and learn the more advanced patterns in the game. I can now get to the third stage without too much trouble, but the third stage absolutely kicks my butt every time.

I would love nothing more than to pour hours into this on the arcade and have a deal pending for one, which will hopefully be mine before the 2011 Chicagoland Winter Carnival coming up in February, the 18th through the 20th.

Sky Shark - Toaplan - high score #2

2010-11-05T06:02:00.000-07:00

So, I found another older score I should have posted to at the very least link to the Sky Shark link on the side of the page - where I made the loop and then some (died at the final boss in loop two). I set a high score then of 1,180,770 at area 199.

It's no secret that I love this game and I did play afew credits the other night after taking a beating on Fire Shark and damn - it's so good.

The Twin Galaxies high score is something like 3mil, which I have no doubt I could get after maybe a weekend of play as bullets get faster in subsequent loops, but good core patterns will stay the same. You just need to move tighter and quicker. It would be fun to have that record, but I have a feeling it would feel like an empty accomplishment due to the fact that there are a number of players who could and have beaten that score but never cared to submit to TG.

Either way, it would be fun to see if I could do it - so who knows? Maybe just go for the counter-stop?

Fire Shark - Toaplan - high score #1

2010-10-31T17:29:00.000-07:00

A while back, gunbird18 loaned me his Fire Shark pcb, a stellar and brutally difficult Toaplan title and the sequel to Sky Shark. It's super fun, but demanding and you do have to do a lot of memorizing, more so than Sky Shark.

It does not have side-fields, which is unusual for a Toaplan title, so what is on screen is all there is. Which somehow sounds like it's easier to deal with but trust me - it isn't. The enemies, popcorn or large are all very tricky and the first few time you play this game you will take a shot or to to the face when you thought you would be within distance to seal bullets from the enemy ships.

The music is very cool and it has a bit of the same feel of Sky Shark, but not as good. I only think of the stage one music when I think of this game and I cannot even remember what the later stages sound like, but maybe that's because the game gets silly hard really quick.

The difficultly lies in two places in this game - the usual shot-dodging and anticipation mechanic of most Toaplan titles and dodging unwanted power-ups. Yup - dodging power-ups.

At first, you'd think that you'd want to snag a few and change shot types, but you really only want to stick with the standard blue spread shot, a carry over from Sky Shark or the red fire laser, which is stellar for bosses. The green shot sucks and should be avoided at all costs. The problem lies in that the power ups bounce around the screen from top to bottom, side to side in an almost random pattern. Unlike Twin Cobra where the power ups stay in the middle of the screen for the most part.

The other downer is that there are a lot of power ups that appear throughout the game and in some places, there may be 5-6 item carriers and the screen quickly becomes filled with a ton of power ups. Ugh.

Besides that, the game is awesome. The ship controls like the Sky Shark ship and you get the same satisfaction of killing scads of popcorn enemies when you use the spread shot and taking down bosses are sweet tapping fests that feel like real accomplishments when you take them out.

I set this high score after bringing the pcb out again after a number of months on my first credit, finally making it past the 4th stage which had been giving me trouble earlier.

Big thanks to gunbird18 for the long term loaner!

DDP high score #6: 48,704,340 - 1-All

2010-10-29T13:01:00.000-07:00

So, I kinda missed updating this blog with this score as it was a while back, shortly after the Mid-Missouri Shmup Meet at 48,704,340, with C-S and a (low) max hit of 303. I think at the time I was so close to the second loop, I didn't think to update the blog with this score.

I did think enough of it to update the thread on shmups with the score though. I only caught it as I was taking over the DDP high score thread over on Cave-STG and knew my score hadn't been right there for a while.

I'm in the process of wiping and reformatting my MAME box as it kinda crapped out on me and then getting back to this bad boy. One of the few games - along with Sky Shark and Castlevania - that I can play anytime and enjoy it.

Dodonpachi DFK for X360

2010-10-26T06:45:00.000-07:00

Looks fantastic and I am really sorry that I do not own an XBox yet! Ketsui, Mushi Futari, Deathsmiles, Guwange and now DFK. Yup, it's about time to own one...

I have never been a big fan of console ports, but this system is really making me change my mind! After playing Ketsui at gunbird18's meet a while back, I was impressed by how true to the pcb it was. And seeing as how I can't just go out and buy DFK, Deathsmiles and Mushi Futari, never mind shelling out a healthy chunk for Ketsui, I might be tempted to pick up a 360 and go with the flow. Cave certainly seems to be very interested in pushing the colsole port format. Some have even said that it looks like they are using the arcade to test for the home market.

In any case, it's hard to argue that a $200 system and $60-$80 games are a bad choice when pcb's are easily double or triple the cost of the system + game in any instance.

Ys Books 1 & 2 - PCE Duo-R - Review

2010-09-06T08:44:00.000-07:00

There are so many great RPG's out there and quite a few I have never played but very much wanted to, namely the Legend of Mana series and Ys. Ys definitely has its fans and after the DS remake of the game, I felt I needed to hunt down a copy and give it a shot. I zipped over to People Play Games on Clark and grabbed a copy, feeling pretty lucky the actually had one there!

I cleaned off the PCE and fired it up when I got home, eager to see what the hullabaloo was about. First of all, because its a CD game, the audio is of stellar quality, but also some of the best RPG music I have heard in a long time. Fantastic.

The game itself is almost like a cross between Dragon Warrior and Zelda - Dragon Warrior for its level-grinding and Zelda for its action-based gameplay. In Ys, you don't have random battles or cut scenes for the actual batttles - you just run into enemies the appear on the field. Yup - you just run into them. Which at first, I thought was kinda lame, but after playing for a while, really, really started to enjoy. It makes level grinding waaaaaaay easier and really speeds up the game. Especially since you have no magic to use in the first game.

The game follows the whole overworld/dungeon mechanic with the last level being a giant tower that is much longer than any other dungeon in the game. I did find it kinda funny that I maxed my gold out halfway through the tower where I could never seem to have enough to buy the stuff you need early in the game, but whatever.

The inventory screens are simple to navigate and you don't have to do the sell something to get a stronger weapon mechanic - you can keep all of the weapons you buy or find in the entire game and never run out of room. The items in the game are also easy to find uses for - there are no cryptic puzzles or adventure-game style item matching components in the game.

The story itself is good and simple and there are areas of the game with voice overs and very nicely drawn anime-style sprites to represent the characters talking to you, which adds a kind of dreamy quality to the game as for most of the game you are blasting through enemies and running from place to place on kinda of a rampant tear and they are the few moments where you get to sit and chill for a moment.

I beat the first Book of Ys in about a day and a half, maybe 8-10 hours of game time and its excellent. Lots of fun and something I will definitely play through again. I have started on Ys Book II and I'm about four or five hours into it and it's also excellent. They didn't really mess with the formula too much, adding magic spells, which you can shoot, which is very cool. The two games tie into each other back-to-back, so that in the first game when you finish collecting all the Books of Ys and kill Dark Fact, you start the second game needing to replace the Books on the statues that correspond with on a floating continent. Very cool and a lot of fun for sure.

Akai Katana - Cave - 2010 - Preview

2010-08-19T06:43:00.001-07:00

For those of you that haven't seen it yet, here is a 15 minute long video of Cave's newest effort Aki Katana.

The almost decace old Military-style of graphics come back, with no lolis in sight. It's a horizontal prospective, much like Progear with graphics similar to that and Ketsui. The scoring system still seems a bit tought to pick up - at least from this video. It looks like a bullet deflecting/absorbing into gold kinda thing. Could be pretty addictive. I'm just stoked on the graphics! The bullet spreads are similiar to Futari and Guwange, a pretty cool mix, with some of the organic-ness of Ketsui.

I'm pretty excited to see more videos of this, but reports from Japan say most op's are waiting for the 1.5 or BL version as seems customary with Cave's newer efforts.

Mega Man 3 - NES and update

2010-08-13T07:33:00.001-07:00

Damn - a month and a half between posts. That's waaaaaay too long! It's not that I haven't been gaming, but I have been doing a lot of stuff in my free time - namely playing guitar and riding - and just haven't updated.

Gaming wise, I have been playing Mega Man 3 - the stellar NES title that introduced so many things to the Mega Man franchise like Rush and Protoman. It's not harder than Mega Man 2, but I find myself struggling with it from time to time as I really want it to have a Castlevania-like fluidity and Mega Man has a very stop-and-shoot mechanic that can wear on you as you kill something, run forward a few steps, pause and kill something else. Not that it always is like that, but unless you want a swarm of enemies or want to run into a storm of bullets, you'd be wise to move slowly.

Along with Mega Man, I have been playing Twin Hawk and damn if I can't break 150k. There is a two-tank boss that absolutely owns me everytime and I really just have to keep practicing it. It's a pretty fun but also pretty brutal. I certainly wish I had an autofire pcb.

Along with those few games, I have been playing a ton of guitar and am trying to get two bands off the ground right now - which is mostly have been so slow to update. It'll be the first time in quite a few years I have played in a band. I spent most of my teen years and college years in different punk bands and had a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to playing out again and having that energy that a loud amp and a live show can provide.

I'll be back to updating more frequently in the next few weeks - especially after I borrow Golvellius from Andi and get some Master Syetem goodness in the house.

New PCB: Twin Hawk - Toaplan - 1989

2010-07-01T05:57:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, KLOV member Braido shot me a pm about his Twin Hawk ocb, saying he found an earlier WTB post I made on KLOV. He asked if I'd like to buy it and to shoot him an offer. Unfortunately, I was saving every penny I had for a new amplifier and had to pas, sorry, but I could link your sales post over to shmups. He offered to just sent it to me anyway and I excitedly and politely accepted!

It arrived while I was in Seattle and it was waiting for me on my desk at work when I got back. As soon as I got home, I fired it up and went to town. It's an old school Toaplan style game, even for 1989, much like Hishouzame/Sky Shark, but with a twist. Your bombs are actually a swarm of planes that cover the bottom of the screen and fire up at the same rate you do. They can take enemy fire and go down, but if you stay near the top of the screen they tend not to get hit. If you tap the b button once, the planes appear at the bottom, but if you tap it twice before they get into formation, a bomb drops right in front of your ship of pretty impressive power. You can also tap the bomb button once after the planes have formed up and they will all dive bomb into the nearest objects.

The game required some new types of strategy besides the shoot, dodge and bomb standard for older Toaplan titles. It seems that the most effective way to play is to stay in the top 1/3 of the screen and take out large enemies very quickly and allow the drones to take out all of the popcorn enemies.

I set this first high score at 198,700 at area 33 after the third mid-boss/boss and I have trouble with him ever since. It's a pretty tough game but massively enjoyable and it has a very unique mellow, soundtrack, which I quite enjoy. I played the first night for about three hours, trading off playing time for time with my new amp - a gorgeous Orange AD30R and my new guitar - an ebony black 1981 Gibson Firebrand SG.

Big, big thanks to Braido for the pcb!

Dragon Warrior II - NES - 1990, review

2010-05-30T18:54:00.001-07:00

I needed a bit of a break from shmups for the time being and the past few weekends, I have been spending time playing Dragon Warrior II, the excellent sequel to the original hit. Though, I'm not so sure how much of a hit it actually was as the first game was given away free with subscriptions of Nintendo Power. I think almost everyone I knew back in the day had a copy banging around somewhere.

The first Dragon Warrior pitted a singular hero against the world and required lots of leveling up to progress. Having to kill slimes for an hour or so before you could even make it to the second town was not exactly the most fun thing in the world, espoecially as Final Fantasy gave you much more story, a party of characters to work with and required much less leveling.

Dragon Warrior II fixed some of the weak points of the first game, giving you a party of three characters to work with, a stellar story (though it also revolves around killing a singular bad guy, in the case, Hargon) and good in-game mechanics, like very, very fast moving text in battles and an intuitive menu system.

The game is a lot of fun and still enjoyable after 20 years, though I had never played the original NES version, only the Gameboy port. It is a bit cryptic and confusing at times, requiring you to take notes when NPC's give you vague hints. You have to make sure you follow up on them as a lot of the key items in the game are found in fairly innocuous places. If you don't really want to take notes, there's a lot of good FAQ's out and they will most definitely save you some time.

I'm enjoying the hell out of the game and very close to the end with only the final battle sequence to go through. I'm sure I'll be back to the DP series soon, but first, Hargon is calling.

Ketsui review - translated into French!

2010-05-26T07:16:00.000-07:00

I got an Pm from Hydeux on Shmups a few weeks ago who represents a French shmup site (http://shmup-em-all.vraiforum.com/index.php) who wanted to translate my Ketsui review over at Cave-STG into French and post it on their site. Needless to say, I was pretty flattered.

I gave them the go ahead and it is now posted on their site. I can't read French, but the site looks pretty cool. Pretty neat to see your work translated!

Here's the link to the review for my bilingual readers:
http://shmup-em-all.vraiforum.com/t444-Ketsui-tout-sur-toutes-les-versions.htm#p10497

Flicky - Sega - 1984, review, high score #1

2010-05-12T06:23:00.001-07:00

Things just weren't coming together right on Tuesday. I got beat down on DDP, Galaga '88 and Tatsujin even before Andi made it over. It was just one of those nights where you do everything wrong and swear the controller is malfunctioning. I actually think it was, too.

Andi came over, we jammed on a few games, didn't really kick too much ass (though Andi did really get into Gigawing) and decided to end the night on an old Sega title, Flicky.

Flicky is an arcade platformer where you are a bird catching chicks and dropping them off through a door without getting killed or your chicks get taken from you by the two cats roaming the levels. You get incrementally more points from returning multiple chicks and if you finish a stage quick enough, you get bonus points. There are also bonus stages and you get a hefty bonus by catching the birds without dropping one.

The play control is excellent, with your bird (who I would assume is Flicky) able to hover for very brief periods of time and who can run much like Mario in the early SMB titles. Its a game where once you get the hang of the controls, you start to really click with the game, diving in and out of tough spots and making use of all the mechanics in the game. Andi and I both got really into it and traded high scores until I dropped this 185,950 - right after Andi left for the night.

Mid-Missouri Shmup Meet 2010

2010-05-04T17:11:00.000-07:00

We left on a Friday afternoon, Andi, Dave and I all taking off from work a bit early for the road, which really didn't help at all as we caught crazy traffic leaving Chicago, taking 2 hours to go 15 miles. Ouch.

But, luckily, we all are good friends and can actually all converse together, so we just bullshitted, played some hip-hop and made time fly as quickly as possible.

We got there at about 11:30 and loaded in in seconds and got right down to playing and we really didn't stop until we left at 1 on Sunday afternoon.

The surprise of the meet for me was just how much I enjoyed playing pinball. gunbird18 has a Pinbot and a Bride of Pinbot in his house and both were played constantly all weekend. There's something about such an organic game that can be fun from time to time. I ended up playing so much, my arm and hands hurt from repetitively hitting the flippers. It was even hard to type when I got home. Awesome.

Fire Shark was the surprise game that gunbird18 bought for the meet, finding one locally on craigslist of all places. It was not s much of hit as I was hoping it might be, but I did enjoy the hell out of it and luckily got a chance to borrow it from Todd.

What was a hit was Game Paradise's Time Attack mode, which must have been on one of the cabs for 6+ hours. Caldwert killed it with most every character and it was impressive.

The scoring contest was the 2-Minute Mode of Soldier Blade and Dave took home the title, beating out a bunch of people who, just like my previous meets, really dig the Caravan titles, making it a pretty impressive run.

I had a blast playing DDP as I have been working on it for the better part of a month. I did get a chance to 1CC it right before the scoring contest, raising my high score to 45 mil+. I made it to the last boss with two extra lives and a few bombs. I basically had a bombfest on the last boss and came up short for the loop, but that will hopefully be along in a future post...

As always, it was good to see everyone and play together and good to meet new people.

A HUGE thanks to Todd, aka gunbird18 for having Dave, Andi and I over for the weekend.

New PCB: DoDonpachi Dai Ou Jou, Cave 2002

2010-04-24T07:31:00.001-07:00

Dave and Andi both came by for our regular/semi-regular gaming night and toward the end, we plugged in the DOJ pcb I have been borrowing from Dave for about 6-8 months. We played a handful of credits and I got stoked to play some more, excited for the week to come.

Dave, on the other hand, decided he really didn't like the game enough to keep it, so we worked out a trade and viola! New pcb.

There's so much about this game that I love - the music by Manabu Namiki is one of his top three best OST's (the other two being Garegga and Ketsui), the graphics and feel of the stages is vintage Cave and the play control and system are just brilliant. The chaining is a bit tedious at times to get a big score, but I'm nowhere near working on the harder stuff.

I remember the first time I saw footage of this game and was actually scared to play it - it looked so hard and punishing that I thought my anger toward not being able to play it well would override my enjoyment of just playing it and it would be a dud. It turns out to be quite the opposite. I love playing it and I love the difficulty. Games stay short and just making it to stage four feels like quite an accomplishment. I'm very glad I now have this in the pcb line up.

I haven't yet set a high score of sorts, even a crappy one, but I have been working on chaining the first level and think I will post something once I get that down fairly well.

DoDonpachi 1CC + high score #5

2010-04-19T17:37:00.000-07:00

Oh yeah! 1CC! Been working on it for three days and finaly took down the last boss for the 1CC. Holy crap, that feels good.

I ran out to get Chipotle right after and, man, the air smelled cleaner, the block looked nicer, I just wanted to tell people I was passing that I 1CC'd DDP!

The score isn't too troubling at 41,587,830 for the scoreboards and I really haven't worked on chaining the stages like I should, concentrating on the 1CC more than anything, but damn - this feels good.

I'm interested to try the game at the Missouri meet over at gunbird18's place on a cab. Hopefully someone will bring it.

For now, I'm gonna eat my well-earned dinner and smile for probably most of the night.

DoDonpachi high score #4

2010-04-17T12:27:00.000-07:00

Working for the clear today and haven't made it yet, but did manage to set a new high score at 34,595,940 toward the end of stage 6.

Got to the last boss of stage 6 four times this morning on 6 credits and failed to take him out. Most every time, I had an early death or wasted lots of bombs trying to learn some of the tougher patterns and ended up getting to him with only two or three bombs, but no lives. On this run, I actually didn't make it to him, but I did chain all of stage 1 with the chain breaker at the midboss and chained a good portion of stage 2, which I still have trouble with.

Each run I've been taking starts as a distance run and as soon as I make a mistake (read: die) I starting playing more aggressive to learn how to best work stages 5 and 6. I can usually do fairly well on the later stages, but consistency is my problem. I usually make a few mistakes in each run and I just need to keep practicing those later stages to make the 1CC.

Donpachi (ARC) review, high score #1

2010-04-08T08:42:00.001-07:00

I have honestly never clicked with this game until recently. I was always dissapointed in it, what essentially was right after the masterpiese of Batsugun. Donpachi is slow, plodding, and chaining more than 40+ is really, really hard, so don't get your hopes up of stage long chains like in DDP, DOJ and DFK.

But it's not all about chaining - it's about memorization and skill and for some reason, after Andi mentioned he passed the first loop, I was intrigued to try myself and I have been switching off from this to DFK - the first and last in the series of five DP games.

I still maintain it's not one of the greatest of Cave's efforts, but it does have its bright points. Being able to make it just halfway through stage 4 feels like quite an acomplishment and the powered-up type-3 ship is a lot of fun to play with.

It does have a lot of tough, enemy-coming-up-from-behind moments where you will end up using bombs - luckily for the player, there are plenty of them in the game.

The announcer is terrible, but in a good, laughable kind of way. The OST is awful, but the sound effects are excellent, especially when you are tearing through popcorn enemies.

It also drops the rank when you bomb, which is pretty awesome. I try and bomb at least twice in each level and it makes the game much more managable.

Set this first high score at 4,393,710 at stage 4 when Dave was over Tuesday for some STG goodness.

Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu high score #2

2010-04-02T08:01:00.000-07:00

I played about 50 credits last night, working on getting consistent in activating the Ura bosses, which is not easy to do! I'm also working on chaining the stages once driving up the counter, which is not nearly as hard as previous DP titles.

It's a pretty easy technique to scoring, which follows this basic pattern: 1) Use a hyper at the beginning of the stage to drive up the hit counter. 2) Kill stuff the second half of the stage to get crazy points. Your multiplier from your hit counter will only kick in if your hyper meter is full, so you need to fill that as soon as possible after that counter gets jacked up. Bees give you big boosts to your hyper gauge and it also charges while cancelling bullets in Boost mode, but not Normal mode, which just increases your hit counter more rapidly. You end up flicking back and forth from Normal to Boost to Hyper, to laser to rapid fire pretty often, making it inperative to learn and get comfortable with the button layout. More than once I have dropped an awesome hit counter from hitting the wrong button. Mostly when I get excited - like heading into the second stage Ura boss and needing to hyper right off the bat to continue the chain.

The game is pretty forgiving and amazingly awesome. I haven't been into a game this much in a long time. I really hope to lay down an actual good score (5x what I have here) soon and I'm using this high score post as more of an update on my progress more than anything.

Omega Fighter - UPL review, high score #1

2010-03-29T15:49:00.000-07:00

I'm typically not much of a UPL fan, but for some reason, I couldnt stop playing this today. In fact, I spent most of the afternoon playing, trying for the clear. I think I got to the last section of stage 5, heading inside the ship to destroy the mother computer or something.

There's something about the dated graphics, the pretty good for its time soundtrack and the Ketsui-like aggressive play style. In fact, the game heavily rewards aggressiveness, giving you a multiplier based on how far you are from an enemy when you destroy it.

You have a choice of two different shot types - the spread shot and the laser shot. The spread jiust gets wider, taking up a good half of the screen on full-power while the laser gets more powerful with each pick up - and shrinks - vertically. If you haven't played this game before, take a second to think about this. Not only does your shot get more powerful, but it gets shorter, forcing you to run up on enemies to take them out, giving you a higher and higher multiplier when you do. You can power it up so much that the beam only will extend out from your ship about one ship length. That's very short.

I found its best to collect about four or five power ups, giving you about a four ship length beam and go to town.

You don't have a typical bomb, but you do have a slow-down button, which can make all of the enemies on the screen move slow with slow shots while you remain the same. Each slow bomb is collected by picking up small satellite power-ups, which also act as shields and disappear when they take a hit. After you play for a while, you won't use these so much to get through the stages, but to slow down time to get right up on big enemies and get a 10x multiplier (the max).

The stages are all based around a mothership and destroying each of its sections - the tail, left side, nose cones, right side and the central core, which is a few sections long. The first two stages are tough, but not too bad while stages three and on are brutally hard and require some good movement.

I really, really like this game and pushed myself for the clear today, but only made it to the third part of stage five inside the ship for a first high score of 2,567,190 - which is pretty good considering my high score before that credit was just under 1 mil.

Most of you who read this blog know I'm mired in the old school and this game is now right up there with my favorite classics.

Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu 1.5 pcb - review, high score #1

2010-03-23T18:01:00.000-07:00

Rarely do I get a chance to play something which totally stuns me. The only games that have knocked me off my feet similarly would be playing Star Wars in the arcade in 1983, the first time I played Super Mario Bros in 1987, and more recently, after five credits of Ketsui over at Dave's house when I got the pcb in the mail during lunch at work.

DFK already has a hold on me so tightly that I am thinking of selling off my prized Cinelli Supercorsa pista to try and cop a pcb! Not only is the game fun and graphically beautiful, but the scoring system, chaining and music are all top notch.

The first few credits I played I just blindly choose a ship, shot type and went to town. I made it halfway through stage five on my first credit - then I noticed brentsg had set the pcb to difficulty 1 with the max ship stock (5). I reset the system to default settings and started playing ship C, power type and just fell in love. The lack of bombs is a little disconcerting at first and you hate the autobomb right off the bat, but the truly amazing thing is that you can play this game anyway you want.

Each ship type has good and bad, just like previous DDP titles, each shot type - bomb, power and strong - have their benefits. Unlike older DDP titles, the chaining is fluid and fun and becomes addictive like any good scoring system. It requires less memorization and allows for more seat-of-the-pants chaining, which helps you to learn and enjoy the game right off the bat.

I have enjoyed learning this game more than any other STG in recent memory, including Ketsui.

I set this high score at 968,405,432 after playing it this afternoon, trying to play for distance more than score and died off about a third of the way through stage 4.

It is an easier game than previous DDP titles, but more fun as well. I really do hope the port this to the 360. It'd certainly give me a reason to buy one!

Recca VHS superplay

2010-03-23T06:23:00.001-07:00

As i am a huge fan of this game, I have wanted to see this superplay VHS for quite some time. I know that there was one copy in someone's hands on shmups but the chances of getting it were slim.

So I practially jumped at the chance to get a DVD copy from cstarflare on Cave-STG (Yagawa game - Cave employee). Not only is the copy totally flawless, but he mailed it without charge. Awesome!

The superplay is without fanfare and hoopla, no intro screen, just the game's title screen as if you had just popped in the cart. The player plays through Normal Mode in a no-miss 1CC, then plays through the Harder mode you unlock by beating normal mode as a no-miss, 1CC, which is followed by the Score Attack mode. He hits the mil in 3:47 - very impressive, never once dropping his medal chain.

There are a ton of good strats on the DVD and some pretty impressive playing. It's a super daunting game, but oh-so beautiful in its 8-bit near-bullet hell glory.

Vimana high score #1

2010-03-14T17:05:00.000-07:00

Vimana always feels like a lost Toaplan title to me - a game that fell by the wayside while other games like Out Zone, Batsugun and Hishou Zame took center stage. It's not the greatest game in the stable for sure, but not the worst either. It's simple and fun and kinda broken with autofire which makes it enjoyable for a time.

I have played this on and off for the last three nights, having spent a few weeks kinda plodding around with shooters like Raiden and Battle Garegga, trying new things, but not really gaining any progress.

Which makes looping Vimana all the more enjoyable. I finally hit the loop and made it a good way throught the second loop before caving in at 2,049,050 at area 187.

I don't expect to come back to this one anytime soon, but for those of you who haven't given it a shot, load it up in mame, turn on autofire and go for it.

Good Parenting Award: gunbird18

2010-03-01T10:21:00.001-08:00

Regular reader and friend gunbird18 sent me this pic of his two kids - Nathan and Hayley - playing some DDP over the weekend and it's too adorable not to share.

Keep 'em at it gunbird18 - we need some Western shmup record holders!

Muchi Muchi Pork - high score #1

2010-02-21T07:36:00.000-08:00

brentsg let me borrow his copy of MMP for a while and I have been playing it on and off for about two weeks. It's almost a perfect melding of a Cave title with its scoring mechanics (ala big bonuses like Futari) and the stage layout and feel of a Yagawa game.

Unlike a lot of games I like, MMP does place very heavy emphasis on its scoring mechanic and this is especially troubling during boss fights where you have no idea where their health bar is. If you don't wait for the right time to pop the boss, you lose millions. For example, if you pop the mid boss of the first stage and the end boss at the right time, you can leave the stage with 6 mil conservatively (without milking). If you don't 2-3 mill is probably a good average score.

So you tend to look for the right moments to trigger big payouts and that takes away from the game for me. It takes so long to figure out timing and places to score well that you don't pay attention to the stages or the music or the layout. Since most of the enemies are very tame through the first two stages, you can play them with almost never looking at the whole screen, just tap dodge and score.

Where MMP gets it right is the games mechanics. The beauty really comes out when you start to figure things out and put high scoring opportunities together and make it happen. So there's a relatively steep learning curve to score well - most games are like that anyway. When you do start rocking the pork gold, it's immensely fulfilling.

This isn't a crazy high score or anything, just a starting point. I'm working on stage 3 at the moment and want to work on the game without thinking of scoring well to try for the 1CC, but that's kinda hard to think about most of the time as I just want to see the screen filled with gold. So satisfying.

Taking a break with NES - The Legend of Zelda

2010-02-14T08:09:00.000-08:00

When I get tired of playing too much of a game I am working on, I like to lay back and dig up an ol' favorite to blast through tp clear the palate. The Legend of Zelda for the NES is one of my favorite games for doing that. So simple, so fun and it brings back a lot of memories.

First time I saw this game, I had trouble understanding it. I knew about RPG's, but there were no turn-based battles. No experience either. But, you crawled through dungeons, collected stuff to gain access to other stuff and had upgrades to your weapons and shield.

I think it was the first action-RPG I had ever played and I totally fell in love with it. I never bought it back in the day, but got it a few years after it had come out and played it a ton. I even made a board game with pieces of the entire game - simplified of course - though I never played it with anyone.

I played through the game this time in four days, each time, working on two or three dungeons at a time. I stopped after mapping most of nine, partially because I had stuff to do that day, but also because I have been playing MMP (thanks brentsg!) and that seems to take up most of my time.

I may go back and try the second quest as I never completed that 'cause I couldn't find one of the dungeons, but I think I am back to shmups - MMP and BG - for the time being.

Always good to take a break and get refreshed!

Battle Garegga high score #5

2010-01-16T09:24:00.001-08:00

Man, I just love this game. Just as I said in my Best of the Rest post for 2009, I have become a crazy Raizing fan. Garegga is one of the few titles where I can keep playing for two hours and not get angry or hate the game. There is so much strategy and so many possibilities, that I just love playing it.

I started in on trying to go for distance and made it to stage 5, through the platforms to the first of the four end bosses and gave up the ghost shortly there after. The score sucked, but it was the first time I ever made it to the 5th stage and faced the platforms, which I took out without a problem. I think I gained a lot (no pun intended) from watching the INH and Gamest replays of those stages and studying the patterns. I was actually pretty blown away that I made it that far.

For this run, I wanted to start scoring well and worked on keeping a medal chain and working over some of the bosses for points, though Madball still is on my to-do-later list. I made it to Satanic Surfer - the boss of stage 4 - for this run and died very stupidly on some of the crossing fire.

I think I will be sticking with Gain ABC for a while - I was playing using Miyamoto for a while, but found that I like Gain better - for the speed and scoring possibilities.

2009 Best of the Rest

2010-01-07T12:11:00.001-08:00

Just like last year, I've decided to do a best of the rest post to show all the other stuff I'm into besides video games.

Without further ado, here's last year's best stuff:

10) Nike SB 'Brain Wreck'

2009 was an incredible year for sneakers, culminating in a few really hot SB releases, including the Blue Lobsters, the Guccis and the Todd Bertraud-designed Brain Wreck. The shoe is a great combo of hot pink and gray and probably the most ostentatious shoe I have ever liked. The lining is gray and sewn to look like brain matter. Unbelieveably awesome.

9) NintendoCapriSun on youtube

Just like last year, I found a new favorite replay guy to watch on youtube - NintendoCapriSun. Aside from the awesome name, he's one of the best Let's Play-ers I have found - funny aand enjoyable. He actually sounds like he enjoys posting, which is quite different from the majority of youtube LP-ers. He plays all kinds of stuff, from RPG's to Castlevania titles (yea!), but if there's a negative, it's that he doesn't do Let's Eat.

8) Lux Delux - iPhone app

It's a game, but it's also on my iPhone and it goes with me where ever. I play this daily and I have for about 6 months. It's basicaly Risk with touch screen functionality, but also with a ton of other maps like Vietnam, Castle Lux and even one called Earth vs. Mars.

7) Jay-Z - Blueprint 3

Jay-Z always comes with some heat, but Kingdom Come seemed ok (for Jay, 10x better than all else anyway) and I thought Blueprint 3 might be a bit weak, a sign Jay was slowing down. Well, no reason to worry - it's really hot. I mean super hot. Everytrack is banging and I have been listening to this album for two months almost everyday and it still feels fresh. A true classic.

6) Vintage Ralph Lauren Polo clothing

Vintage clothing is usually not my bag, but this year I got into old Polo gear in a big way. Now, it's typically hella expensive, so it requires dedication and time to find the best deals and I have both. Plus, I'm hecka OCD, so hunting down rare stuff at good prices is really fun. I copped a bunch of gear this year, including a few Polo Bear fleeces, a 1992 Polo Sport rugby and the total gold of the year : a Polo P-Wing pullover jacket. So classic.

5) 2x Cinelli track bikes

When I started working in the bike industry about ten years agon, I had a bike messenger come in to the shop with a brand new black Cinelli Supercorsa Pista and I fell in love. It's such a clean, classic bike with simple small logos and all black. This year, I made a helluva trade with a cat in Chicago for his and rebuilt it with some new Velocity rims, a SRAM Omnium crank and some NJS Nitto ergonomic rare track bars. Shortly after getting this one, I got a chance to get one of the Cinelli x Mash collab frames designed by Benny Gold and put that together with a mish mash of gear including a SRAM Omnium crank and my older set of Open Pro/Miche's which I have been riding for 8 years now. It looks incredible and rides just awesome. Best moment came when I was at a party/ride with some friends and a guy came running up to me - "Hey, this is the bike! I saw this on Belmont and took a bunch of pictures! Wow - this is yours?" I could only smile and say "yup."

4) Raizing titles - APB, Battle Garegga, Mahou Daisakusen

2009 will mark they year Raizing took over from Cave being my favorite STG maker. I really got into all three of these games and I love the Toaplan-like mechanics of the early titles and the difficulty of the rank-based Yagawa titles. There's so much strategy in the Yagawa games that I still haven't gotten totally comfortable with them after playing them for the last two or so years seriously. It doesn't hurt that Manabu Namiki was on point with the OSTs for BG and APB.

3) Nike x Patta Air Max 1

Some shoes are instant classics - the Jordan 1's, the original Nike Air Trainer and others are a slow burn, getting better with age. This shoe is somewhere in between as I didn't really feel it when it was announced and saw pics, but it grew on me over a few weeks and right when I decided to cop it, it was sold out. A day or so later, I got an email from St. Alfred - my homeboys here in Chicago - that they were getting a restock. I hit up my friend there to hold a pair and copped them that afternoon. The mix of materials is superb with cordoroy, denim and velvety soft suede and the colorway (while a little more colorful than my normal fare) is excellent.

2) New jobby job - SRAM Corporation

Now it is a big company - 2800 employees worldwide and I have never worked for a big company, prefering small, owner run joints, but as I got older, I wanted security and benefits more than a say in the company. I had been going for a position here since the beginning of last year and my wish came true in October. The people here are awesome, the pay is great, the benefits stellar and I couldn't happier. It's also only a 15-minute ride to work in the morning as opposed to a 1 1/2 hour drive to my last job. Plus, I get a lot of free stuff and that's very, very cool.

1) Macbook & iPhone

I've been a PC user my whole life and after liking the iPod and seeing how cool the iPhone was, I decided to get a Macbook. Holy crap - it's like someone designed a computer that is actually intuitive and easy to use! It's fast, slim and sexy and I am totally in love. I dd get a free iPod Touch with it and after playing around with that for a bit, realized I had to get an iPhone, which is so awesome it's silly. My last phone was a five-year old Blackberry I used to text with that I never used for internet. This thing is like going from using a spear to using a ballistic missile. So effective, so nice.

Thanks for reading my blog this year or coming to one of my events. Much love to you all in the New Year!

Final Soldier - 1CC - Regular Game

2010-01-01T06:42:00.001-08:00

Got back from the holiday break and decided to buckle down and finish this game. Took me 1 try last night, which totally surprised me. I had tried to clear this about five or ten times and never could make it past the final boss, but took him out with relative ease this time.

I'm not sure where the difficulty of this titles lies in comparison with the other games, but it felt harder than Super Star Soldier. Just to confirm that, I played SSS about a half hour afterward and finished that off as well with a 4.7 mil score. Finished off the last boss with no lives in reserve. I think its just a bit harder than SSS overall, but with the options acting as bombs, you can squeak past some spots in Final Soldier that would give you trouble in SSS.

On The Road with Super Bomberman 3

2009-12-30T06:51:00.000-08:00

For the X-mas holidays, I traveled down to see my family in Atlanta and instead of taking along my DS or PSP or Advance SP, I just took my MacBook, a USB Sega Saturn controller and a SNES emulator.

My girl couldn't join me until laer in the week, so each morning over coffee, I would play Super Bomberman 3, a super awesome Bomberman title.

Being a huge Bomberman fan, I have been playing the later releases sparringly so as not to run of of titles to play, so this was a total treat. I used save states to make it through to the final boss in few days and as usual, he kicked my ass a number of times, even when I knew what his patterns were going to be. I'll have to practice some to finish the game off, but really, the levels are the best part of any Bomberman title, so maybe I'll let him live for now.

DoDonpachi high score #3

2009-12-09T07:43:00.001-08:00

So it's not going to trouble anyone over at shmups, but as I am playing for distance, I don't actually care about the score. Think of these as "distance high scores" or something.

Anyway, sick home for the third day running, and got tired of Mahou, tried Donpachi, remembered that I didn't like it, and started in on DoDonpachi.

Got to stage 6, the last stage in the first loop and made two careless errors taking my last two lives without getting off one bomb. 12 bombs wasted. Damn. Felt like the 1CC was coming up, but it just goes to show you nothing is certain until the credit screen. I still really like this game after years of playing it and really would like to make the 1CC of the first loop at some point. Problem is, that the first four stages are pretty easy and pretty boring, so as I tend to only play things that keep me excited, starting in after five or six credits on a game where the first 15 minutes are sleepwalking is hard to do.

That being said, I will still keep coming back to DDP and someday (hopefully soon) I will be nailing the clear.

Mahou Daisakusen/Sorcer Striker high score #1

2009-12-07T12:05:00.000-08:00

Started playing this again as I am home sick. Again. Gotta love flu season.

This has been on my wanted list for pcb's for a while now and I just started playing it for score. These runs were made with the Sorcer Striker rom set in mame to see if there are any differences and I can't tell if there are. Seems exactly the same to me, which makes sense as the region is set via jumpers on the board (EDIT: PLayed both a lot these past two days and I think there are differences, though subtle. Can't actually tell if they are just rank or differences in the rom, though).

Made it to the stage 6 boss and died twice on his early patterns to finish this run with a new high score of 1,396,060. Pretty close to the loop, may work on it some more soon.

Watching Battle Garegga master KET live II

2009-12-07T05:52:00.000-08:00

In the last few weeks, KET has been rather sporadic with his playing live and those weekends when he has played, the games are, well, kinda sucky. Not that he's bad at them - he pretty much kills anything he's playing - but that you kinda of wonder why he's bothering with them in the first place.

Fox example, two weeks ago he played Majonng for an hour straight. Solo. No shooters at all that week from what I can remember, but my brain may have been mush from watching tile matching for way too long.

Them there are other weeks where he takes on some good classic shooters and gives you something to really sink your teeth into as you sit back and watch one of the best do what's their best at. This weekend was definitely one of those.

I started up Ustream and he was playing a UPL platformer, Ninja Kid, which actually was pretty cool. Weird, but it is UPL. He moved on from that to play some Garegga, playing a low rank Golden Bat run and dying on stage 6. Very nice. From Garegga, he moved onto R-Type. He stalled at stage 7, losing his life and powerups and trying at least 25 times via continue to make it past powered down and it just wasn't to be.

I stayed with him all morning until he signed off, which is a rarity recently. Normally, he'll start off playing stuff that like to watch and taper off into some terrible game and I start surfing the web, doing laundry or cleaning my apartment until he signs off. This last week was a pure delight and a pleasure to watch. Man, I really have something for superplays!

Persona 4 - Straight from the Back Catalog

2009-11-27T09:09:00.000-08:00

I rarely get sick. For some reason, I have a pretty good immune system and seem to be able to stave off colds like brushing crumbs from my shirt.

Which is why I am blown away that I am sick again for the second time in a month.

I'm sure the new job has something to do with it. I had been working with just one other guy in the office for so long that I think my immune system just didn't have to work as hard. Doesn't hurt that that guy, Dave, was fit as an ox. Now I'm working with 78 other people around me and some are sick, some have kids who are sick and germs are just flowing everywhere.

So, I took off the Wednesday right before Thanksgiving and figured a 5-day weekend should be good to get healthy again.

It's also good for going through the back catalog of games I have - mostly RPG's - that I had bought and not had a chance to play. Last time I was this sick, I started Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne and tired of its ridiculously high difficulty rate and punishing battles and later, Earthbound which was very easy and didn't keep me going after a day of play with it.

This time I picked up Persona 4 for the PS2 and started where I left off after playing it once - 4 hours in.

It's a lot like Persona 3 - you have relationships to cultivate during the day, school to go to, studying to do and a random dungeon to blast through at night. Now, I loved Persona 3, but after 100+ hours, I kind of tired of it and I finished that almost right before this came out, so I didnt feel like more of the same at the time. Which is why it worked so good as a back catalog game.

The systems are familiar, the spells and personas as well and it took me a battle before I jumped right in and started playing.

It's a really fun game, a good, solid RPG fr the late in the tooth PS2 and a total gem for Persona fans. The story is actually better, a murder mystery of sorts with some good suspense and great characters. You can also control every character this time around, so there's no random bad decisions by your party in the middle of battle.

The music is good, better than 3 and after 10+ hours, I'm not tired of it. I'm going to be plugging away at this one for the weekend as I'm pretty much cooped up indoors, with some DDP and DOJ thrown in for good measure.

Road trip with Mark Alpiger of King of Kong

2009-11-14T08:26:00.000-08:00

When we got back, I couldn't believe just how much we got done. We visited the prolific Walter Day of Twin Galaxies, three WR holders, visited Tim McVey who was in the middle of a 30+ hour marathon attempt of Nibbler (classic game by Rock Ola) and drove 800 miles in 48 hours. A massive amount of geekiness in such a short amount of time.

Mark and I have been talking about this trip for sometime as he wanted to go and visit Walter Day of Twin Galaxies, a friend of his and keeper of many vintage arcade goodies. Mark's a bit of a video game historian with quite possibly the largest collection of historical artifacts about early competitive video gaming next to Walter's.

As Walter Day has sold Twin Galaxies and is donating a massive amount of material from TG to the arcade museum, Mark wanted to go there and talk with Uncle Walter (as he calls him) to pick up some goodies.

On Friday night, Mark drove up from Kentucky and met me at my place with quite possibly the most amount of stuff I have ever seen anyone go on a road trip with. It took us three trips from him car to unload it all and when we were done, he was surrounded on my couch with a ton of gear including an air mattress, two pillows, bedding, two bags of food, a laptop and gear bag, a box of boards, two duffel bags of clothing, a pile of CAG goodies including King of Kong posters and DVD's and camera equipment with two tripods.

I have a Crystal Castles machine, one of only two classic arcades I own (the other being a vs. Nintendo cab for non-regular readers of this blog) and Mark is the former WR holder, so I definitely wanted to get some footage of him playing and also get a few tutorials as I am dying to hit 850K.

Once we started playing, Mark noticed that I have a rare version of the CC board - the conversion board - which is a bug-fixed version with a different end screen (trapazoids instead of cubes) and a new credit screen. we took some archival footage of him playing to show the differences and the Mark took a number of runs at the game, hitting a high score of about 836K, which he wasn't too happy with. Pretty good for not playing in some time for sure, but whenever we had time, hed play a game or two to try and ramp up that high score. We actually ended up leaving late on Saturday because he wanted to get in a few more runs!

We left my place at around 10 a.m. and headed up to DeKalb, home of Star Castles arcade, a hole-in-the-wall classic arcade where we met up with Paul Zimmerman, the current Phoenix WR holder. Paul and Mark talked it up for a while while I played Castlevania on a Playchoice cab and Stocker, a rare Bally/Sente game. After about an hour and a lot of picture taking by Mark and Paul, we split to make the long drive to Walter's place.

One of the funny things about road trips is that you ened up learning a lot about the person you are in the car with. Mark was no exception. We talked a lot about the 1980's when he started competitively gaming, playing in some of the first tourneys in 1985 and on. He met the current WR holder of CC and a good friend of his, Frank Seay at one of the Twin Galaxies tourneys and from there they started learning the game and perfecting patterns until Frank hit 910k+ and hit the new WR, which was never to be beaten.

I also learned a lot about Mark's musical tastes as we played Name That Tune with music from his laptop with him choosing the songs and me having to guess. I learned that Mark really likes a number of pop hits from the 1970's to present with no exceptions for hip hop, metal or whatever. A typical string of songs would be from Green Day, ABBA, Hataway (What is Love), POD, Bob Seger, The Bangles, Eagles, Devo, and ELO. Needless to say, I didn't know a ton of them but we did have a bunch of fun.

We hit Walter's place, an 1890's Amnityville style house late in the afternoon and hung out, going through old memorabilia and found mad amounts of stuff even he didn't know he had anymore, including the waivers from the infamous 1982 Life Magazine shoot, old score books from the 1980's original tourneys and one of the only remaining t-shirts Walter made celebrating Twin Galaxies home town of Ottumwa as the video game Capital of the World.

Walter was a gracious host and a lot of fun. He asked me a lot about myself and my gaming history and made me feel right at home, standing in the center of gaming history. I even got a chance to see the office and studio Walter is filmed in in King of Kong where he one day wants to settle down and record some music.

He rents out most of the house and only lives in two rooms in it - a small kitchen and a smaller bedroom. As he's big into transendental meditation, he doesn't seem to need a bunch of gear and he's really humble for a guy who has such an important place in video gaming history. I had Mark snap a quick shot of me and Walter as we left and carried out Mark's pile of goodies, including about 1000 Twin Galaxies arcade tokens and numerous other rule books, posters and promotional goodies.

From Walter's we headed to Tim McVey's place where he was in the middle of a WR marathon attempt of Nibbler by Rock Ola, the first coin-op version of Snake. He made video gaming history in the early 1980's when he was the first to hit 1 billion points on a video game- in this case, Nibbler. His house has a bunch of memorabilia from that time, including a key to the City of Okaloosa, IA, his home town.

He also use to be a prolific BMX racer in the 1970's and 1980's and has a wall of trophies and gear from that time. There was a room full of people there, helping him out and taking him through the long hours required to best the current WR. He took the time to talk with us, do an interview with Mark while playing and also watch some of the MMA fight on the big screen HD TV which took up a good deal of the front of the room.

He started trying to recapture his record this year when some documentary filmmakers asked him to attempt it. Afer he had hit 1 billion on it in the 1980's, he had won a machine from Rock Ola as part of a promotion, but didn't really feel like playing much after the 30+ hour marathon game and it collected dust for years, finally being sold by Tim. The filmmakers decided to try and track a machine down for him and found one on eBay which just so happened to be the personal machine of one of the game's creators. They quickly snapped it up and had the two programmers sign it and gave it to Tim earlier this year.

So far he's banked four or five attempts at the new record, only to be beaten back each time by fatigue and more often, his hand which would blister and bleed before coming close to finishing.

Back in the 1980's , Tm was racing BMX and had massive calouses on his hands, so it wasn't a problem then, but now, as a 40+ year old, his hands can't take that abuse. He's tried gloves, which didn't work, and a few other things, finally getting the sound advice to cover the pads of his hands in Super Glue and wrap them in flexible athletic tape, which seemed to do th trick when we were there, 14 hours into the attempt about at almost 400 million points.

We stayed for a bit, watching and recording and took off for Greg Laue's house, the former WR holder of Star Castle - Hard Chip version and home to a well-stocked personal arcade of about 30 classics, including Donkey Kong Gauntlet II, Pac-Man, Joust, Robotron, Tron, Star Wars and Elevator Action to name just a few. I played for as long as I could while Mark had instantly hit the sack when we arrived. Greg and I talked and played and my eyes started to cross at about 2:30 a.m. after a nearly 300K game of DK by Greg.

In the morning we headed out for home and said goodbye to Iowa for the time being.Thanks to everyone along the way that opened their home to us, Greg of the comfortable couch and Mark for the stories and companionship.

Mark Alpiger of King of Kong plays DOJ

2009-11-10T19:36:00.000-08:00

This past weekend, Mark Alpiger and I got together to take a bit of a road trip, meeting up with a number of classic arcade world record holders and notables, including Walter Day of Twin Galaxies.

The first night he came into town, he stayed with me and we played a bunch of Crystal Castles, but I also got him to play a round of DOJ. Surprisingly, he's played Dodonpachi a number of times. This was his first shot at DOJ, captured on film for posterity.

Alzadick & Final Soldier Caravan mode high scores

2009-10-18T08:04:00.000-07:00

Couple new scores:

Alzadick - 2-Minute Mode - 559,950

Final Soldier - 5-Minute Mode - 2,123,900

Been playing the hell out of Star Soldier 2-Minute Mode as well and I have a 495K score, but cannot seem to break 500K, which is my goal. Got to get a better score there. Alo been trying to finish Final Soldier game mode and I hve got to the last boss three times inthe last two days and couldn't finish it off. As each play through is like 40 minutes, I haven't been able to practice the later levels enough to be consistent.

Personal Note:

Also, for those of you who were at the CAC 2009, I made the announcement that I got a new job and I am starting Monday at SRAM, a bicycle components manufacturer. It's a job I have been up for for a while and when they lifted their hiring freeze, I was he first one in the door. I'm very excited to say the least. Short ride to work, no more three-hour + commutes.

Chicagoland Autumn Carnival 2009 recap

2009-10-06T20:32:00.000-07:00

First off, I have to give a big thank you to gunbird18 from bringing his Egret II all the way to Chicago for the event. A second big thanks to Dave for brining his cab and a huge thank you to mrtie for helping bring the cabs up and down the stairs and bringing with his massive amounts of gear, including the 360 to jamma set up that looked like it could launch the shuttle. Hella good guys.

Prodigous amounts of soda were consumed, but they were a distant second to the amount of credits that were played this weekend with an average of 4 hours of sleep each night and non-stop gaming the rest of the time. On more then one occasion, players were trying to get into the bathroom and if it was full, going back to playing another credit to maximise their gaming time. Dedication for sure. On Saturday, the cabs were turned on even before I got my coffee made and the sounds of Ketsui rang through the apartment as the rest of the neighborhood came awake.

Andi, stuminator and croikle tore up a number of games, with croikle taking first place in the Battle Garegga scoring contest with a 7,854,120 run ending at the triple planes on the Base. Andi took top honors at the Final Soldier contest with an amazing 706,100 in what turned out to be the most hotly contested scoring contest of the weekend with a constant line for 6 hours. Caravan games are truely STG crack.

stuminator captured the top score on the super secret Midnight Scoring Contast sponsored by Mark Alpiger and CAGDC, taking home a copy of King of Kong and a never-before-seen interview disc with Steve Wiebe, done by Mark Alpiger. szycag made a great last minute charge, but couldn't topple stuminator. He did win a copy of the interview disc, which he seems really stoked about. stuminator also almost made a 1CC a few times of Dangun Feveron, dying on the last boss each time that I saw. szycag and mrtie even started recording his runs to try and get a successful run on tape. Davey also won the informal Hudson Shot Watch contest with a 119. Just crazy. Had had the rest of the field by at least 10 shots.

I had a lot of fun and got some good gaming in with a no-miss of the first loop of Sky Shark which I have been working on on and off for two weeks. Also got to within two pixels of killing off Tyranosatan in Deathsmiles, almost making a low-rank clear on a game I have about 20 credits into. Great game, have no idea what I am doing for score.

I'm really happy with the way it turned out and I'm always impressed with the way everyone held themselves - very respectful and well-mannered. At some point someone dropped a few chips on the floor and came up to me to let me know and ask where the dust pan and broom was. Very cool.

Thanks to everyone for comming and I hope to see you all at the next one - Chicagoland Winter Carnival 2010.

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Final Soldier - 2-Minute mode high score #2

2009-10-06T19:56:00.001-07:00

After watching the Chicagoland Autumn Carnival contestants tear it up and seeing Andi get a 706,100, I sat down to beat it tonight and made what looked like a totally perfect run, finishing oiff the boss with 23 seconds left, setting a new high score at 720,100.

Mushihimesama Futari 1.5 XBox 360 preview

2009-09-24T09:17:00.000-07:00

Rarely do I post something like this, but it got me pretty excited to say the least. I owned the pcb for a while - my first full kit in fact - but never really connected with it at the time and I reallly have wanted to go back and see if it clicks.

It's old news to the shmup community that this is comming (late November) to the XBox 360 in Japan, but the gameplay and graphics look so stunning as to make me want to get a JP 360 to play this on - crappy hardware and importation costs be damned.

It doesn't hurt that the Deathsmiles port is stellar on the 360 or that ESPGaluda II is also coming with DFK an almost certain 2010 title and a possibility of Guwange (!!) hitting LiveArcade.

Check out this preview and see what awesomeness Cave is unleashing on us STG-crazed gamers. Follow the link to watch it in HD as well.

Steve Wiebe on Attack of the Show

2009-09-24T07:51:00.000-07:00

So this was on a while back, but thanks to the goodness that is Hulu, you can watch it again! It's a pretty good interview for those of you who want a bit more Wiebe after The King of Kong, which I just watched again for like the tenth time.

Also - he's from Washington - got to rep my hometown - Seattle in the hizzy!

Fun Fact: Mark Alpiger, who appears quite a few times in the film is a friend and on last watching of this, he happened to call me during my screening of it, which is when we decided that Classic Arcade Gaming DC would sponsor the Midnight Scoring Competition of the Chicagoland Autumn Carnival '09.

Thunder Dragon 2 high score #1

2009-09-22T09:30:00.000-07:00

I never understood why some guys on the shmups board really dug NMK developed STG's. They always seemed sub-par and without much inspiration. Dave_K from shmups is an avid lover of all things NMK and when I saw this game listed on the 2009 STGT high score chart, I decided to give it a whirl, hoping that Dave_K's love for this little known developer was not just for the rarity of the pcb's alone.

On first playthrough, there's not much there. The music is totally forgetable, the graphics lack some sort of good visual connection and the gameplay is just average. Once you get going, its a whole 'nother story.

The game play very, very similarly to Twin Cobra and Sky Shark, but with only one shot type. There are loads of secrets in the game, like hidden sub-bosses when you destroy all of a series of enemies quick, much like Alzadick and some other caravan titles.

I got hooked and have just started to make it over a million regularly. It's not the worlds best shmup by any means, but it is a solid 7.5 out of ten and deserves a look in, especially for fans of Toaplan or early Cave titles. Dave_K's definately onto something here.

Canabalt (Flash game) high score #1

2009-09-17T08:53:00.000-07:00

I checked this out after seeing a thread on it in the "Off Topic" section of shmups and I am hopelessly addicted. It's a fun game, a platformer with one button (jump) and no directional necessary. You run and jump over buildings, through plate glass windows, avoiding quickly dropping atom bombs and boxes. It required some good twitch skills and like a lot of flash games, it starts quickly, so you keep wanting to play when you die.

The soundtrack and in game sound effects are excellent and perfectly atmospheric, driving you on your adventure across the rooftops. There's even good background animation of giant alien beings tearing up the city and at around 4-5K, a spaceship appears ominously in the background.

Each play through is a randomly generated level design and the real skil comes from hitting boxes to slow down at the right times and being able to time your jumps in and out of windows. There doesn't seem to be an end to the game, so your distance is all that really matters.

I hit 10K a few days after playing and then 11K, 13K an finally got this 17,296 score, which is pretty good, if I do say so myself.

The game is not without its faults and there are impossible jumps to be had, like running off a building to break through a window that's too low to actually get to and smacking into the side of a building instead, but you forgive those moments.

Do yourself a favor and go check this out: http://adamatomic.com/canabalt/mega/ . It's a seriously fun game and for once, I'm excited about a flash developer.

Blast Off high score #1

2009-09-16T20:39:00.001-07:00

Namco System 1 games are pretty awesome in general with so many great titles like Galaga '88, Pacmania, Marchen Maze, Dangerous Seed and may fav of them all - Blast Off.

It's a vertical scrolling shmup, similar to Dangerous Seed but with the graphics and feel of Galaga. It's so unique, however, that it pretty much blows Galaga and its brethren out of the water.

There are three different stages of each of the levels - a lead up to the space station, a fight to get into the space station and then, the fight through the space station and boss fight. The last stage sees your ship sprite blown up on screen as if the camera zoomed in. It makes the fighting feel more intimate and the close quarters are suitably claustrophobic, but very, very cool nonetheless.

Andi from the shmups forum stopped by last weekend and we played a bunch of stuff for something like 7 hours and spent a good deal of time on Blast Off. We finally made it to the 5th stage, which is where I set this first high score.

Like many good old school titles there is a simple shooting system (four different types of shots selectable with the B button, fire with A) and really fun gameplay. The OST is good, but not really amazing. It does fit the game and make the whole package a good vintage shmup worth a look in.

Twin Cobra II 1CC + high score #1 (and probably final)

2009-09-08T17:56:00.000-07:00

If you have ever read this blog, you know I'm: A) a fan of old school games and B) a fan of Toaplan. I knew that Takumi, one of the few companies to start up with ex-Toaplan employees after they shut their doors in 1994 had created a sequel to Toaplan's Twin Cobra, but I didn't get into it the first time I played it and just left it sitting to the side.

Going back through some of the titles I have on my new NEC + PC gaming system, I found Twin Cobra II and decided to give it a try and while its pretty fun, it might just be the easiest game I have ever played.

That's not to say its a bad game. It's actually pretty fun, feeling more like a Raiden title than a traditional Toaplan one, but one that feels like a good, old school shmup. The soundtrack is incredibly forgetable, with weak stage music similar to that of the Gigawing titles. The sound effects are ok, but lack that solid feeling of Toaplan's better efforts.

It took me about ten or fifteen play throughs and I 1CC'd it with an end score of 7,830,040. Pretty weak, but I'm not sure when I'll get back to playing it. Like I said, its not bad, but it lacks excitement and a good driving soundtrack. It's kind hard to die after a while and it almost seems like the game is too easy when you have a few sections memorized. You also get a crazy amount of bombs, which can double in strength once you fill your bomb counter full to five.

One of the best parts of the game is one of the sound effects when the game rotates the attract screen to the high score board - it sounds vaguely like Tron and Tron is good.

Out Zone high score #1

2009-09-07T19:30:00.001-07:00

Such a fun game. Toaplan didn't make many bad games and Out Zone is one of the very good ones. Dave and I set out to see how far we could get and after a few days of playing seriously, I made it past the halfway point and set a new high score for myself at 771,090.

For a run-and-gun / shmup hybrid, its amazingly fun and well-put together, with good stages and a good, if slightly dated sounding (for today) soundtrack. All of the the hallmarks of Toaplan are here - fun scoring system, few hidden things, good special weapons and well-thought out stage design and graphics.

It's a pcb I'd love to own (like many Toaplan titles) but I think I need to get myself an autofire pcb first. This game, like Tatsujin and Batsugun, is better with autofire by a long margin.

New machine - PC turned into emulation box

2009-08-23T10:03:00.000-07:00

After years of decrying Mac owners as left wing computer snobs, I have finally put my PC days behind me and bought a Mac. It's a MacBook to be precise and I am totally in love. It does everything my PC did, but its like someone designed a computer operating system to actually be fun and intuitive rather than laborious.

But rather than sit here and go on and on about why Mac's are awesome (which they are), I'll actually focus on what I did with the boring ol' PC.

Like a lot of STG and arcade fans, I use mame from time to time to try out games I may want to own. I'm not a big fan of using it and definitely prefer the original hardware to an emulated version, but there are instances where it totally makes sense. Especially in an apartment.

I have become enamored with Donkey Kong 3 and the original Donkey Kong recently and have been searching out a dedicated machine for the better part of a month to no avail. Finding one really isn't the problem, though as I have run out of room in the gaming area. As it is right now, I have to move the CC to the basement or possibly in the partition off the kitchen (where we currently have our bikes) when I move the vs. cab in and getting another cab would mean even more moving around of junk to try and find space we really don't have.

So, I put two and two together and came up with mame.

My old PC was ok, not really top of the line or anything, but it runs mame fine - a perfect place to play DK 3 and the like on. I wiped the hard drive and set it up on my NEC XM29 and it sparkles. Super fun and easy to use, I'm really enjoying it. That is, except for the vertical tearing and lack of sound in some roms and the myriad of other problems with mame, but nonetheless, being able t play DK 3 in my gaming room without making any changes is pretty cool.

New PCB: vs. The Goonies

2009-08-17T12:18:00.000-07:00

The kit arrived today from oregonarcade from KLOV and it's pretty sweet. I actually have the game for Famicom, but this is one of the few vs. games I wanted to have. When it popped up for $60 shipped, how could I say no?

If you have played The Goonies II for NES and wondered where The Goonies I was in the states - it was in the arcade. It was also released for the Famicom in Japan and for some reason, even though they brought it here in the arcade, they never brought it out for the NES. It's a pretty fun game as far as platformers go with a ton of secret items that make the game more fun. In fact, half the fun of the game is searching for the items!

I hooked it up and got it running in the vs. cab and I'm really stoked I own this. I'll have to get some more tim in on it and make some maps for the later levels which get rather confusing. The time limit is pretty strict so you really have to move.

I'm going to be on the lookout for other vs. games and a Donkey Kong 3 machine (which I have a line on) but first, I have a second Astro City purchase to wrap up...

vs. Castlevania - no-hit Grim Reaper stage run (stages 13-15) on youtube.com by me

2009-08-12T08:59:00.000-07:00

Did this run as kinda of a tester to see what the resolution of Linda's camera was like when shooting the vs. arcade on my tripod. I ended up having a junky, but no-hit run of the Grim Reaper stage (stages 13-15) and had some good moves in it, so I cropped it out of the full length video and put it up on youtube.

The actualy run of the game had me making a few mistakes on the last set of stages and some really stupid deaths, so I didn't bother with the whole thing.

And, yeah, that's Dave talking to me in the beginning.

Chicagoland Autumn Carnival 2009 - Oct. 2nd through the 4th

2009-08-10T20:16:00.000-07:00

Time for another Chicagoland meet!

The old thread at shmups forums has been updated and the commentary on the October meet starts at page 4. Just like last time, there will be cabs - this time hopefully 4 - console games, my vs. Castlevania, plenty of beer and refreshments and a whole lot of time to get some shmupping on.

http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=24367

New cab: vs. Castlevania (woohoo!)

2009-08-04T09:16:00.000-07:00

I'm so stoked on the cab, I can't even begin to tell you. I have been after a vs. cab in which to house my vs. Castlevania pcb for a little over a year and even started looking at vs. cabs 5-10 hours away, just so I could get it up and running.

A little while after I almost pulled the trigger on getting a vs. The Goonies in Iowa (about ten hours round trip), I found this vs. cab on Craigslist Milwaukee about an hour and a half away and pounced on it like a fat man on a free cupcake.

It started life as a Donkey Kong and became a vs. Golf and now lives on as a vs. Castlevania. It was in amazingly good shape and had very few problems: the marquee light was burnt out, two microswitches missing from the controls, few cigarette burned buttons, cracked t-molding. All are easily fixable and I did fix a number of them last night when I spent four hours stripping the parts out of the cab, cleaning it and reassembling it. Those of you who know me rather well, know I can be a bit anal. I even rebuilt the buttons for the cp - ones which I will be replacing shortly.

The monitor is in excellent shape, the cab has no water damage whatsoever, both coin mechs work, all the trim bits are in the cab, the bezel is in near mint condition and the side art is 95% there.

I started to take it apart and wanted to make sure the board fired up and popped it into the cab and viola - it fired up right away. The speaker sounds great and actually throws out some bad ass bass that makes the game sound even more awesome (if that's even possible).

Last night, I played about a dozen games as I was cleaning and making trips back and forth to Home Depot to replace hardware and other bits and loved every second of it. Playing with a joystick is awesome and allows you even greater control over Simon.

I played one game this morning after getting to work and 1cc'd it with Dave watching, only dying once on Dracula, who can kill you in three hits. Brutal.

I do have a vs. The Goonies kit on the way for it and vs. Golf is actually one of my secret favorite NES games, so that will definately get some play time as well.

Thanks to Linda who contributed to the vs. cab fund for my b-day present, Jason (shackleford) for the vs. Castlevania pcb and Scott over at Hyperspace Arcade Entertainment (http://www.hyperspacearcade.com/) for the mint NOS marquee.

Playing Castlevania III on the road, some changes soon to come to the gameroom...

2009-07-31T17:02:00.000-07:00

In much the same way I have a hook up for my PS2 when I am on the road, I realized that I could very easily bring my NES with me on the road, which is exactly what I did this week.

The best part is that I don't need a connector as its the old coaxial hook up. Easy peasy. I brought along The Goonies, The Goonies II, Bionic Commando (I swear, I will learn to like this game), Castlevania and Castlevania III as I am attempting to play through it again to work up to the 1CC.

There is one thing you should not do when on the road though and that's throw the controller in the room. Most hotel rooms are small, mine being no exception. After a pretty tricky section and subsequent cheap hit in III, I lost my last life in a pretty egregious manner and started to whip my controller forward and realized there was a very large mirror in the way.

I forced my hand downward just in time and released the controller against the ground, which hit the nearly empty dresser and made a very loud ka-thunk. I waitied for the sound of someone comming and sheepishly sat there - but nothing happened. I felt like a baby, but hey, Castlevania can get the blood up and the Italian in me is very demonstrative.

I have been working the early levels repeatedly and now I am starting on level 7 and above to playthrough the lead up to Dracula's castle. The opening stage of the castle is sooooooo cool - Vampier Killer playing just like the first part of the original Castlevania - that it makes me smile.

My downtime this week has been split between the NES, running and the internet, where I have recently bought quite a few new additions to the collection that I am VERY excited about.

The first actually started last week when I found a Nintendo vs. Golf cab for sale about an hour and a half from me and worked it out with the seller to come by and get it this Monday. Now I have a home for my vs. Castlevania boardset! Yeah!

Shortly there after, I saw a posting from oregonarcade on KLOV selling a vs. The Goonies kit and snatched that up, along with a few black vs. kit cases.

I also grabbed a NOS marquee from Scott over at Hyperspace arcade for the vs. Castlevania and lastly, contacted a guy about getting his Donkey Kong 3 arcade, a game I really love and probably the only other Nintendo cab I could see owning. Pretty busy weekend for sure!

Classic Game Boy titles and hidden gems

2009-07-20T05:30:00.000-07:00

It's amazing what was possible on the Game Boy. I remember thinking when I was a kid that a portable Nintendo would be just about the awesomest thing ever and I wanted a Game Boy like nothing before. Luckily, I did get it for my birthday the year it came out and got a few games shortly there after, like Super Mario Land, Castlevania Adventure and of course, Tetris.

I hadn't picked up a game for the original Game Boy for ages, having moved on to the Advance and then the DS and left all those black and white (or black and green) games behind. But recently, I started to feel nostalgic for SML and decided to get a few other gems for the system while I was at it.

SML is an excellent addition to the Mario universe - if only an easy one. I beat it time and time again as a kid and loved every minute of it. The music is so good in the whole game that when I think of SMB music, this is the game I think of. The levels are strange for sure (Mario in Egypt anyone?) but the game play is classic Mario and really, really fun. The graphics are a bit smaller and the game is very short, but it's a very fun quick game for sure. I did beat the game on my first playthrough after 20 years, but I still love it.

In the cavalcade of GB fun, I also picked up a copy of Metroid II, which I have been interested to play for quite some time. Metroid II is kind of a typical Game Boy game: larger sprites to match their graphic design to their console counterparts and tinny music, but the game is much more than just these two weaknesses. The game play is actually fairly linear where you are only able to access sections of the world after beating other sections. There is no map but one isn't needed. You just keep pushing forward. It's pretty enjoyable overall.

SML 2 followed shortly there after and what an improvement over SML! The sprites are more inline with other Mario titles of the 8-bit era and the worlds feel like they fit into the Mario universe better. There are alot of good moments in the game. It is much longer and really is a more realized world that does justice to that era of Mario titles.

Castlevania Adventure is not one of the best titles on the GB - Simon moves slower than a sloth and the game is ridiculously hard. Back in the day, I could only get a level or two in. But with Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge, all those problems are fixed and the game, while my time with it is limited, is one of the best Game Boy titles.

There are also the Dragon Warrior titles (1-3), two of which - 1 & 2 - are included on one cart. They are slightly easier than their console counterparts and awesome RPG's for such a small system.

But the absolute creme of the crop has to be The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. It's so close to a console feel on a pportable system that its hard to believe its about 20 years old. The game is super fun with an awesome story and remains one of the best Zelda games period. No kidding.

The game takes place on an island and there are a number of typical Zelda game play elements - getting weapons/items to solve dungeon problems, collecting things after beating the bosses to lead up to the end encounter (in this case, it's musical instruments) and a fun, sprawling, open world adventure complete with all your classic Zelda favorites.

I have been playing it non-stop for a week and I forgot just how good the game is. It's massively engaging and has a great story, which I won't spoil here, but it does keep you wanting to see what's next, which is really all you could ask.

I only hope Nintendo realeases some of the classics on DSi-ware - but you can always get out your Super Game Boy, or your GB Advance SP, or even the original black and white GB, relive - and possibly discover - some great GB titles.

Same! Same! Same! (MD) high score #1

2009-07-08T09:47:00.000-07:00

The Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) is not one of my favorite consoles, but you can't completely turn your back on a console that has a unique-to-the-platform Castlevania title in Bloodlines and a ton of shooters. I actually own a Mega Drive and a Genesis, so for not really liking the console, I seem to have all the bases of it covered.

What I do like, however, is a change of pace from time to time and console shooters, at least back in the day, usually offer an easier challenge than their arcade counterparts. This is most certainly the case for the Toaplan titles that ended up on the MD/Genesis and everyone in a while I track on down for a buck or two on the internet and go to town.

Same! Same! Same! (Fire Shark in the US) is the sequel to Hishou Zame (Sky Shark in the US) and is a pretty decent title. It doesn't quite compare to Hishou Zame, with kinda bland sound, strange power-ups for your weapon and the need to actually dodge weapon change icons for a long time on screen lest you lose the needed red fire shot or blue spread at a critical stage of the game. The same thing happens in Twin Cobra (can't spell the Japanese equivelent off the top of my head), but the power ups dissappear off the bottom of the screen fairly quickly. In Same! they seem to hang around for an age and it gets annoying pretty quickly, but you do eventually have to accept it.

I busted out my copy, which is actually a Fire Shark cart, but when plugged into my MD, it comes up as Same!, which is pretty cool. I believe the same thing happens for Tatsujin/Truxton and Twin Hawk/Daisenpuu.

I played through the first loop of the game on my second or third play through on the default settings - which are marked as 'easy' - and then gave it a few more runs through to get to this high score at 4,487,740, ending the run in the second loop at stage 18. Not bad and a pretty fun game. It put me up pretty high on the shmups scoreboard for the MD version and I may attack it on normal and see what I can do.