Fire Shark high score #2 - 1,252,270

I attended my first Colorado Shmup meet at Jon eXidy's place and what an arcade!

I knew his collection was massive after years of being on KLOV and Shmups, but man, it's just awesome.

When I got there, Fire Shark and Raiden DX were in the vertical cabs and I tore into both, playing the Training course in DX and going for distance in Fire Shark. Amazingly, I remembered a lot of the game from my many runs through a few years back and just kept plowing through to eventually get to 10-1 after a good dozen credits - which totally surprised me as I made it through stage 8 and 9 without ever having played them. 

I threw in the towel after my 10-1 run, partially because I was kind of monopolizing the cab and mostly because without autofire, it's a bit tiring. 

Out Zone high score #3 - 1,703,900 area 134

Didn't expect to loop this without auto fire, but I did! Pretty impressed with myself, but really, I was just as surprised to make the loop. Cannot wait to try the second loop with autofire!

New PCB (kinda) - Out Zone (Toaplan, 1990)

I never did a new PCB post for this even though I got it a while back, so here's a belated one!

Out Zone is a game I absolutely love, one of the best run and gun Shmups ever and one of my favorite Toaplan games. Prices on this PCB have steadily gone up and much like Donpachi and Dodonpachi, which could be had on the cheap five years ago (still remember a Fujita price list where DP was 8900 yen and DDP was 12500 yen), it's started to climb in price as the majority of PCB's are ending up in collectors hands. 

The game is an excellent combination of old school Shmup and great run and gun with good shot types and great power ups. It's a blast zipping through each level and does not really take long to get good at. You have a ten-count bomb stock and can blast through most levels with some creative bombing and speed. 

The graphics and music are excellent for the era and get me stoked whenever I hear them! 

Autofire is pretty much a must for this one, as your hand and arm will get super sore if you are not a tapping madman. As it is, I played a few credits today waiting for my autofire PCB to come back from Zespy and made it pretty far - 6th stage I think and te first time I got there! I practice the last stage a bunch, but it looks like there are a TON of mandatory bombing spots. 

Still, I bested my old high score by quite a bit and when my autofire PCB gets here, I'll be tackling this one looking for the loop.

 

New PCB: Guwange (Cave, 1999 - orig. and Blue Label)

Finally! After years of thinking about getting one and one aborted attempt (seller changed his mind) I finally scored one of Cave's most moody and striking - not to mention difficult - games. 

It's like an intense version of Out Zone with forced scrolling, a Shmup, but with your character walking on the ground and with actual physical obstacles to contend with. 

To be completely honest, I never really clicked with it until I got the PCB and even now, I'm not so sure. I definitely like it - the art and soundtrack are stellar and the game play is very demanding and enjoyable. The feeling of carrying a chain through a few levels is great, the feeling of losing it, terrible. And maybe that's why it's such a hard game to jell with. Small mistakes can have harsh punishments and that fun, visceral interactiveness turns to bitterness very quickly. That being said, it's still crazy good. 

Blue Label is pretty easy and I immediately put the original roms back in. It's very cool to be able to play a Blue Label version of a Cave game, but it just didn't grab me. It actually turned me off of the game for a bit, making me go back to Thunder Dragon 2 for a while until I started driving myself crazy trying to learn  stages 6 and 7. 

So, I popped this back in with the original roms and went for it. Few days in and I'm scoring in the 2 mil range, but progression is basically stalled at stage 4, so I have a lot of learning to do there!

Thunder Dragon 2/Big Bang high score #5

Well, I didn't get far with my new pcb before I picked this up again and cannot get it out of the cab. Progress is coming fast, with stage 4 and 5 going down easy. Didn't lose a life until the stage 6 boss and then tanked both extra lives trying to learn the bullet patterns - where I should have just bombed instead. Seems like there are few bosses in this game that you can actually dodge their shots.

Not a huge push past my old high score, but notable if only for the fact that after two days of having it in the cab, I started to break the 2mil mark - a feat which I considered monumental last time I played.

I have really come around on this game - I consider it an essential part of my collection - very old school, great BGM/OST, super fun and one I would absolutely love to 1cc - but that final boss is b-ru-t-a-l.

Battle Garegga - and getting down and dirty with my shmupping

It's not like I haven't played any games in the past year - in fact, I played through Persona 4 and Shin Megami Tensei - Digital Devil Saga (Parts 1 and I'm right at the very end of 2) - but really, that stuff has always been more casual for me.

After moving here to Colorado Springs, I decided for the first time in 17 years, to put a band together. I had been playing guitar on and off and was supposed to start a band with a good friend of mine in Chicago, Shane (guitarist in Murmur and Guzzlemug) and the night of our first practice together, I found out I got the job in COS and was moving in a few weeks - which kind of put a damper on the band thing.

So, I had to scratch the itch and get somethign started here. I got on CL and found a bassist into the stoner metal x early black metal x sludge thing I was thinking of in my head (think Sleep meets Celtic Frost meets Autopsy) and we started to jam and it came together realy fast. We got a drummer pretty quick too and before I knew it, we had a good 3-4 songs with another riffs for about 5 more (all stuff I was pretty impressed with) befpore they started talking of touring, quitting their jobs and trying to make it as a band. Now, I have been down that road and even had a good amount of time living in my car to try and make it happen and I wasn't interested in trying that again, especially as I have friends in major label signed bands who have to work as dishwashers and carpenters and kitchen help when not on tour so they can eat. There's no money in music anymore, really.

We split amicably - I took the music and name and they went off to try to find another guiarist. It was a lot of fun to play again, but really, I just wanted to get loud and prove to myself I could still write good songs - which I did. I may upload some of the recorded video of us riffing at some point. Some good stuff in there.

It took me a while to get my monitor fixed, as it didn't survive the move as well as I would have hoped, but here I am, playing the shit out of Garegga again and hoping to sink my teeth into a new PCB in the stable shortly...

It's good to be back.

Chicagoland Carnival series and life update

First off, I got a new position within the company I work for and I will be moving to Colorado Springs, CO in mid-September, so I will no longer be holding the Carnival series shmup meets here in Chicago. For those of you that have been coming to the meets for the past few years, thanks. They have been a ton of fun for me to hold and having the last two at Logan Hardware were seriously awesome. I'll miss hanging and playing with you all.

I'm also getting married at the end of August and finishing up preperations for that as the month goes on. The candy cabs are packed away, the pcb's are packed away, so there will probably not be a significant gaming update until I get moved into my new place. I'll try and drop a video of something as the month continues.

It's kind of an end of an era for me as I prepare to move. I have been in Chicago for the last 22 years and a lot of my teenage years. I'm looking forward to my new life in COS very much and excited to get back to some beautiful mountains, like in Seattle where I grew up.