Dragon Warrior II - NES - 1990, review

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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.