Dodonpachi high score #1 & #2

Started playing this again for the first time in years. It's amazing how far my skill set for shmups has come as I have only dropped about seven or eight credits into the game in the last two days and made it to 1-5 this morning. A couple dumb mistakes cost me two lives with full bomb counters, so I could have gone farther.

I'm kind of just playing to see if I get back into it, trying it out to see if it grabs me and for the moment, it has.

My old high score was something like 14 or 15 mil and it took me a long time playing to achieve that back in the day and it took me all of five plays this afternoon to beat it.

I've been playing it using a Sega Saturn HORI Fighting Stick I got from someone on the shmups board and it works pretty well, though, I was much more fluid when I played it on Dave_K's cab this past weekend.



Started playing again this evening and got a bit higher score, but the main reason I am posting it is that I got a perfect chain of the first part of stage 1 for the first time - 187 hit. Felt so good.

Dogyuun high score #2

I think this is one of Toaplan's best efforts. I really like the music, I really like the atmosphere, I like the graphics and I am enjoying the hell out of the gameplay.

I finally got through the third boss without dying and noticed that there is rank in the game! It can get pretty tough - enemies shoot faster and faster bullets the longer you go without dying. Once I did die, it went back to normal. It's pretty much the same as the rank in V-V.

Made it all the way to the boss of stage 4 and tanked it to set a new high score of 1,111,970.

Dogyuun high score #1

I keep moving from game to game this week, but I needed a change from Batsugun and Twin Cobra.

When I got this a few months back, I played it a few times, but got hooked on V-V for a while and didn't put moch more time into it, so this is the first time I have really played it for score.

This has to be one of Toaplan's best. Not only is the music fantastic, the graphics are by none other than Joker Jun and really look fantastic. There's a number of places where the parallax scrolling uncovers things in the background and your eyes are drawn to the beautifully detailed sprite buildings and futuristic citys that roll beneath your ship.

So, I figured this is as good a score as any for the first night of serious play. There is apparently 4 loops (!) and 8 stages per loop, so its a pretty long game, but fantastic nonetheless.

My best credit for the night got me a final score of 1,039,350, dying at the stage 3 boss. I ended up credit feeding a few runs to learn his patterns, so I might be hitting the fourth stage soon with any luck.

Batsugun Special Version high score #9

Played a credit on this this evening and killed my old high score, making it to stage 8 and couldn't really milk the second round of tanks too well. Got to practice the second loop some more.

Added over 5 mill to my score, so a pretty good one credit run.

Twin Cobra high score #2

Made it past stage 5 and it just gets brutal. I think my game ran to the seventh stage, but at that point, I was in the zone, just blasting along, tapping the hell out of the A button, so I have no idea how many more stages I made it past. Died off after losing my power-ups and just caved in, setting a new high score of 783,490 at area 125.

I have to say, it's pretty addictive for a really old school game.

New PCB & high score: Twin Cobra - Toaplan

Found it on the cheap over at klov and had to get it. Toaplan just hit their stride when they made this in 1987 - the same year they dropped Hishou Zame (Flying Shark, Sky Shark) - and it has to be one of their all-time best.

The graphics and OST are exceptional for 1987 they and really shine on the 29" monitor in my Astro City. The sound effects themselves are awesome, with very addictive explosions and shot sounds.

The gameplay is so fluid after a time that you totally zone out and get totally sucked into the game. Some sections are pretty intense and require some deft movements and the satisfaction from clearing them really drive you to keep playing.

I started playing when I got home from work and made it through stage 3 pretty quickly on one credit, never having done that before in mame. I kept pounding away, even burning some chicken I was cooking because I ended up playing a credit when I should have been watching the stove.



On my last run, I made it pretty far into stage 5 and then made a few costly errors and couldn't recover. I destroyed my old high score of ~280K to set a new high of 639,950.

Super fun game and easily had on klov for under $50 (mine was $35 shipped) - a steal for burgeoning Toaplan fans.

Ketsui - Kizuna Jigoku Tachi review - Cave-STG

My Ketsui review hits Cave-STG!

A little while back, I wrote this review for EOJ over at Cave-STG and why I didn't provide a link here earlier is anyone's guess. Here's the link:

http://www.cave-stg.com/reviews/ketsui.html

I'm a huge fan of the game, consider it to be one of the greatest shmups of all-time and quite possibly one of the finest video games ever produced, so it was a little hard distancing myself from that to try and be objective, if only slightly so.

Kudos to EOJ at Cave-STG for letting me do the review of such a treasured Cave classic.