Steven Pendleton

Not much here. Still have not been able to make any progress in Memodama. What a ridiculous game. Arcade Space Harrier - 3 Saturn Tokimeki Memorial Taisen Pazurudama - 37 G/MD Zero Wing - 18

It was only loud when it was installing games. When you're playing games or using it as a BD player it's pretty quiet.

Steven - 529,760 - 1-5 - Retro-Bit I died at that one spot on stage 5 where I always die and couldn't recover this time. I am terrible at this game. I have asked Al for editing permission so I can add a poll to the OP so everyone can vote for next game. I will abstain unless there is a tie, in which case I'll vote. Choices are Koutetsu Teikoku or Battle Mania. While I am here, here is the Pipiru Seijin secret that you'll want to get some good scores. This is on the super glitchy PC release of the arcade version. You are not supposed to be able to see the locations of the ones at the top of the screen, but because it doesn't work properly, they are not hidden by the HUD and you can see them. The sound is also super broken in general, as well, but that's not really relevant, so... If you want to take a risk, you can suicide after picking up the last one, which will send you back to a point where you can pick up 4 of them. I don't recommend this unless you know you can recover against the boss with only a single red powerup, but if you get a 10UP before reaching this point and know you are okay recovering against the boss, it would be beneficial to abuse the hell out of it if you know you don't need those extends for the rest of the game.

Disc drive

Mine generally is too, unless I try dumping BDs or CDs. Then it gets pretty insane. My disc drive is from like 2009, though, so it's pretty old, but it still works fine.

Yeah, Chaotix is complete trash outside of the awesome music, and I guess the graphics are pretty okay, although I have always disliked the way Knuckles looks in this game. It has no other redeeming aspects at all unless you count the ability to sell it for money. Edit: no, that's a lie, actually; Vector's idle animation is excellent. All of his animations are, really.

My "other" storage has gotten rather large for some reason. I've seen that it might have something to do with the number PS4 games installed, which in my case is a lot. The disc drive in this thing is relatively loud when installing games; I thought something was wrong with it at first and I was like "WTF? I literally just took it out of the box a few minutes ago and it's already louder than my ancient PS4?". Not the loudest I've heard, though; both the drive in my PC and one of my Dreamcasts are significantly louder. My PC's is terrifyingly loud. I finally got around to trying my ultimate benchmark test game on this thing: the original Blue Reflection. That game runs absolutely terribly on PS4 at really random times. Like there will be almost nothing on the screen and it will run at like 10~15FPS (yes, it really is that bad in some spots) and then with all sorts of stuff going on it runs okay, so it's really strange. The PS5 just doesn't give a fuck at all, though; 60FPS everywhere as far as I have seen. It's super cool but simultaneously super unnerving to see this game running so well, but it's too bad the game is garbage and more of an unfinished proof of concept than anything else. I still can't believe they dared to push this thing out the door in this state and still charge 8500 yen for it. I find it very interesting to see what this thing can do with PS4 games with unlocked framerates; I actually rather enjoy seeing it do this, but I am almost out of PS4 games to test at this point, and some of the things that I would have liked to see run at higher framerates are unfortunately locked at 30. The only thing that I have not done is to play BDs on it. Everyone generally says that the PS3 was better at that than the PS4, so I wonder how this thing will compare.

Can I get permission to edit the first post here? I just realized that I should have added a poll to this before I made it.

Yeah those things are nasty. They actually function somewhat differently in the arcade version, where you can destroy their turrets. Here you have to destroy the whole thing at once, so they are arguably harder here than on the arcade version, but recovering against them in the 1P versions is a pain. No. That game lacks sufficient STG-ness. You can try it in regular HSC, but I am doing things that are STG-only. We could do Musha Aleste, but I'd have to disqualify myself because I have an XE-1AP. Tatsujin is maybe coming later in the year. August or something like that, I think, but I'd have to check, and it's together with V-V for that month. Maybe I'll make it a poll to decide, because why not. That would be cool and simple. The international versions are known to be easier than the Japanese version, so I am not sure how to handle that yet. I'll actually be playing that on the Mega Drive Mini 2 since it has great emulation (for once) and it gives you a new option to play non-broken music.

Yes, these are entry-level games. That's why I chose them. Hard games come later; Kyuukyoku Tiger is up in December and it might be the single most difficult game on the system in any genre.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/vita/alpha/17-q Well, unless you REALLY need physical. In that case I don't think there are any, and yes, I did check the Japanese game list to see if there is anything that can be romanized with a Q.

loooooooooooooool I tried Astro's Playroom. This is a tech demo, but it's really nice and I like it. This is what I want to see from console games: something that takes advantage of the unique controller and unique hardware to get an experience that I can't get on PC. I like game hardware, which is why I have like 45 game consoles (yes, I counted last year. I have a lot of them), but I really do want to see them have exclusive games that can only be done on that specific hardware. Please make more games like this, game developers of Earth.

lol that thumbnail. If only I could do that... it would only solve about 40% of the weirdness I am experiencing, though. Well, I guess I technically can do exactly that by reassigning the buttons in the system settings, but then I'd have to do it on a per-game basis and it still might be awkward depending on what the game's controls are if I can't do in-game button remapping. Yeah, I have I think 2 NA region Switch games that use B as confirm, too. It's really weird. I am not really sure why they are like that, but it's really strange to see that on the Switch. There are a few Dreamcast games like Sakura Taisen where you can choose your button mappings for almost every function in the game, including confirm and cancel, in the options menu, which is highly unusual for a console game. In that game I think you can even set them to L and R if you wanted to. I think even the original Saturn version does this, but Saturn and Japanese Mega Drive have their own weird thing going on where sometimes A is confirm and sometimes C is and sometimes both are.

It's also used to pick up the 5 Pipiru Seijin on stage 4, which give you a ton of points. They are hidden, but I know where all of them are. I'll record it here when I can and put it up. I'll actually be using the arcade version on PC since it has a training mode that will allow me to go directly to the stage, but the locations are identical. The MD version is very accurate to the arcade version in most ways, aside from significantly lower enemy aggression (especially the bosses; go check out the difference in how much the stage 1 boss shoots!), much lower enemy HP, way lower extend settings (70,000/200,000 every on MD and 200,000/500,000 every for arcade), and the loss of the secret teleport on stage 5 that lets you skip stages 6 and 7. I wish they'd left that in on MD, but it's gone. The screen scrolls vertically a little bit and graphics are significantly toned down, but all of the enemy placement is identical as far as I remember and the music got a big upgrade over the arcade version; it's one of the best soundtracks on the system.

You had the bomb. That's why. When you pick something up with the tractor beam, you press it again and it fires it forward as an attack. If you have the bomb it will shoot the bomb out and it will detonate, but it's best to hold onto it as a shield. It will blow up automatically if it takes 3 hits, but it destroys enemy shots, which can save you, so it's best to hold onto it for as long as you can.

Well, you have A and C as shot and B is the tractor beam, although depending on what version of the game you are playing it might be called something different. The Japanese arcade version calls it PRISNOR BEAM (yeah, PRISNOR BEAM. I love those Toaplan guys so much, and they are all super nice and cool people IRL, but English was something that they always struggled with), and I think there is another version that calls it either the SEIZOR BEAM or the SEIZER BEAM, but I forget which. Anyway, the tractor beam is moderately helpful in a few spots to catch enemies to use as a shield if you don't have a bomb in your possession, but it's pretty useless. The arcade version was never supposed to get released, you know; it was a training project for new recruits to learn how to make games, but they decided to release it anyway for some reason. Notably, Zero Wing is I believe the first game that Tomizawa Toshiaki worked on nope, looks like Horror Story slightly earlier He did the BGM for stages 2, 6, and 8, and he later did the awesome soundtrack for Toaplan's obscure 1991 game Vimana and then moved over to CAVE when Toaplan went bankrupt. You can tell it's him because he has that cool disco style, unlike Uemura-san's classic rock + classic metal + Japanese folk music + a little bit of disco and Yuge-san's classic piano style, and you can easily tell the three of them apart if you know what to listen for. Not sure what he is up to now and I have not met him myself, but he's going to be in the Toaplan documentary.

As long as you beat the high score, it will save that score as long as you don't turn the power off. Even if you use a continue, it will set your score to 0, but the high score will be preserved over on the right. Unfortunately one of the games that I REALLY wanted to play was Xeno Crisis, which has score on Dreamcast and I think on Neo Geo, but not here, so I had to leave that one out. Might be interesting to play on Dreamcast for score, but that game is pretty difficult, and no matter how much I play it I never seem to get better at it lol.

Probably once my friend leaves (next week, I think) and I get a break from work to get stuff done, so probably Monday. Won't be too long, but I do work on Saturdays all day long and stuff, so Monday is my goal.

I am deliberately choosing the easiest games on the system. The actual hard games are coming later.

Yeah it's really annoying. Vita and PSP both have some games that use the system's confirm button, as well, like Muramasa; playing my US copy on my Japanese Vita has the text prompts read X as confirm, but it's actually O. Then sometimes you'll get games that have X as confirm in the menu and then when you go to save your game suddenly O is the confirm button because it uses the system's confirm button because it considers the save thing to be part of the system menu, except in some games where it doesn't, so you have to learn each game separately. I checked the majority of the games that I have installed on the PS5 and it looks like about 1/3~1/2 of them still use O to confirm and the rest are X. ACA seems to use X universally, half of the M2 ShotTriggers games use X but the other half use O, Mary Skelter 2 uses O but Mary Skelter Finale uses X... it's a mess. Oh well.

I am somewhat surprised that nobody has mentioned Baraduke, which has what's-her-name that married Dig Dug.

Well, one of my friends who lives on another continent just semi-randomly showed up at my house today to stay here, so I haven't really been able to get anything done today. I'll get everything done when I can, but for now, go play Zero Wing! Yeah it's a really great game, especially once you start playing it for score. I love it a lot and so should everyone else.

Death Stranding 2 is PS5-only as of right now. I mistakenly thought the game released this year, but it doesn't. I honestly wouldn't have bought it if I had bothered to check the release date, but I figure I already have it, so I might as well use it. I am already having flashbacks to when I bought my PS4. Got it on Japanese launch day just for MGS V. About 2~3 weeks later they announced the PC version, and since I was born and raised as PC Master Race, I kept the PS4 for exclusives that never ended up existing, and the PS4 remained a dust collector/Star Trek BD player until I got into arcade shooting last year. M2 ShotTriggers is a damn good reason to have a PS4 if you like arcade shooting because that's not on PC, and ACA has much better emulation than MAME and Switch has higher input lag almost universally and is missing half of the M2 ShotTriggers games, so PS4 is the best option right now. I'm just hoping that Kojima doesn't announce a PC port in like 2 weeks like last time I bought a console for one of his games. Technically this thing does outclass my PC... barely. It basically has the raytracing version of my GPU, which I don't have. That's about it. It sure took consoles long enough to barely surpass tech that I had 8 years ago. Lol what a joke. I must say that it is pretty cool to see the PS5 brute-force its way through some of my poorly optimized PS4 games that barely ran at ~25FPS and push them all the way up to an unwavering 60FPS, though. It might have been worth it just for that! In non-Japanese countries, yes, but here everything from the PS1 to the PS4 followed the traditional Japanese O = good/confirm, X = bad/cancel. After 14 years of using Japanese PlayStations exclusively, I HATE this change and many Japanese people do as well. The worst part is that for PS4 games some of them still force the old O = confirm X = cancel, but some don't and use the opposite because some PS4 games force it to the region-specific confirm button and some base it on the console's confirm button, so now like half of my games use O and half use X and it's really stupid.

I finally got a PS5 today. I still can't believe they intentionally fucked up the confirm/cancel buttons, so now X is confirm and O is cancel, and I keep pressing the wrong buttons. This is super annoying, and I liked it more the way it's supposed to be, with O as confirm and X as cancel. but I'll probably get used to it eventually. Of course, the first game I played on it was... Kyuukyoku Tiger Yep. Dude buys PS5, uses it to play 1987 arcade game.

Got suddenly busy in real life, but here it is. This is the first game this year that was actually made by Toaplan; Slap Fight MD was outsourced to MNM, which is now Mindware, but Zero Wing was converted by Toaplan in-house. Rules Normal difficulty Player = 3 I keep forgetting to mention the extend scores, but extend scores for this game are Toaplan's typical 70,000/200,000 every. If you've played Kyuukyoku Tiger, Tatsujin, or one of Toaplan's many other arcade classics, you'll probably recognize these extend settings. Nothing other than that to note. Use auto if you want, but it doesn't really make a difference in scoring here like it does in Slap Fight (MD), so no need to note if you used it or not. I do not know if Zero Wing has regional differences in gameplay. It probably does because Toaplan, but until I can confirm we'll just take note of it and treat each score equally. Format will be as follows: NAME - SCORE - ROUND-STAGE - VERSION (Japan, PAL, or Retro-Bit) So in my case, if I played the Japanese version and game overed on loop 2 stage 8 and had a score of 3,000,000, it would be Steven - 3,000,000 - 2-8 - Japan HOW TO SET UP US THE BOMB Rule #1 of Zero Wing: get the green homing weapon Rule #2 of Zero Wing: get the green homing weapon Rule #3 of Zero Wing: get the green homing weapon Rule #4 of Zero Wing: do not lose the green homing weapon Rule #5 of Zero Wing: if you die, get the green homing weapon immediately Rule #6 of Zero Wing: don't even think about using something that isn't the green homing weapon, ever Rule #7 of Zero Wing: get the green homing weapon On stage 4 you can pick up 5 hidden Pipiru Seijin with your tractor beam, each worth 10,000 points. If you kill them, you only get I 100 points, so find them and tractor beam them! I have the locations, so I will post those soonTM. You'll want to pick those guys up because they are pretty important to scoring. You can milk them by picking up all 5, intentionally dying, and then getting sent back to the checkpoint and picking up all but the first one again, but this is risky because of the boss. Try it this you manage to get a lucky 10UP item! Nobody knows how the secret weapon spawns. I have seen it as early as the first powerup carrier on stage 2 on 2 separate occasions. As far as I know, it is just a random chance, but it is almost 100% certain that you must be at full power for it to appear, and you may need to have a bomb in your possession as well, but again, nobody actually knows except maybe the devs.