Any interest in a shooting games high score club?

[Steven Pendleton]

This is something that I have been thinking about for several months, but I do not know if there is interest for it. If there are around 3 or 4 others aside from me who are interested, please let me know and I will start it. In general, the purpose of this is to share and experience the joy of shooting. As such, we will only be playing STG and nothing else. I am planning on running this for the duration of the year, with each month dedicated to a single game. My proposed schedule for the year is as follows:

 

January - Slap Fight
February - Slap Fight MD
March - Thunder Force III or Gleylancer* or Zero Wing*
April - Koutetsu Teikoku or Battle Mania
May - Grenada
June - Kuuga or Crying
July - Twinkle Tale or Darius Extra Version
August - Aero Blasters or Darius II
September - Same! Same! Same!
October - Tatsujin or V-V
November - Eliminate Down
December - Kyuukyoku Tiger

 

In general, this list is organized with the easiest games in the early months and the hardest games at the end, starting with the super easy but stupidly awesome Slap Fight and Slap Fight MD, both games I will never get tired of replaying endlessly with their short 12 minutes loops built specifically for playing for score, and culminating in the savagely vicious Kyuukyoku Tiger, which is guaranteed to kick my ass hard and probably yours too! The idea is that as we play these games and get better, the difficulty will increase. There are a few games on here that I have never played, like Grenada, Crying, Battle Mania, and Twinkle Tale, so there are games here where I am unsure of the difficulty, but an increase in difficulty over time is my general goal.

 

Gleylancer is not a great game to play for score (neither is Thunder Force III, honestly, but it feels wrong to not have at least one Tecno Soft game here), and it has a known exploit on stage 9 that can be abused for unlimited score, so while it is here as an option for March, I am searching for a similarly easy replacement for it, such as Zero Wing, which I am hesitant to add, especially because we'd spend half of the year playing Toaplan (although that is fine by me since I play Toaplan basically daily at this point anyway).

 

The rules will be as follows: normal difficulty, or, in the case of games that do not have a normal difficulty (for example, Hellfire has only easy and hard, while Gaiares has only easy and super hard, although there may be others, like the ones on here that I have never played), whatever the game defaults to.

 

You can submit as many times/scores as you want as frequently as you want. Please just don't submit a score every second of every day or anything ridiculous like that. That would be... complicated, and also probably DDOS the forum and then Al would kill us, or at least you. Your highest score at the end of the month is your score for that game.

 

Questions you might have

 

I want to try this, but I don't know how to play shooting games!

I will teach you, and not just general techniques, but for games that I know well, like Slap Fight, a game that I have a counterstop on (and I will be sitting out of the competition in January for exactly that reason), I will teach you how to play the game efficiently for score.

 

Additionally, you can read the short free book The Full Extent of the Jam and apply everything in there. This is an excellent book written by one of the best non-Japanese players in the world, and I believe he held the DoDonPachi non-Japanese world record for years by using the techniques that he wrote about in this book.

 

Does it matter if I use an emulator or not?

Play however you want. Some games like Same! Same! Same! have difficulty that is based on the region of the system you are using, so I will have to figure that one out.

 

Does it matter if I submit screenshots or replays or not?

No. You can if you want to, but you do not have to.

 

Where is Thunder Force IV?

 

Thunder Force IV has an infinite score trick you can do at the stage 1 miniboss, giving you literal effortless unlimited score; someone, or everyone, could theoretically just chill in the top right corner of the screen at the stage 1 miniboss with a weight on the B button firing the Rail Gun for a few days until they counterstop the game on stage 1, assuming that the game does actually counterstop. While it has a fixed ROM addressing this exact issue on both the Switch Sega Ages release and the Mega Drive Mini 2, not everyone has those systems, so it's just easier this way.

 

Where is Musha Aleste?

I left Musha Aleste off intentionally because I have the XE-1AP, which may potentially give me an unfair advantage due to the game's compatibility with that controller, especially since I have no way of proving that I did or did not use the controller. After Burner II is not here for the same reason.

 

Where are the CD and 32X games?

 

I just want to focus on regular Mega Drive and Genesis cartridge games for now. Perhaps in 2024 we will do CD and/or 32X games, but among those few 32X STGs that do exist, Space Harrier and After Burner Complete support the XE-1AP, which again potentially gives me an unfair controller advantage.

I hate the game(s) you chose for (month) and I don't want to play it!

lol so don't play it then! This schedule is also just a rough outline of my idea, and I already want to remove Gleylancer, as mentioned above, so things are subject to change. Let me know if you have better ideas, but the games that I have chosen are all high-quality and enjoyable games. I hope.

 

What does the winner of each month get?

Nothing. Maybe bragging rights, but probably nothing.

 

Who chooses the games for the months with multiple possible choices?

I don't know, I'm making this up as I go...

[Razzie.P]

I'm game.  Can always use a good excuse to dive into a shooter of the month.

[Frozone212]

I can take from hosting mine for the time being, i'm game

[Steven Pendleton]

Alright, that's 2. Anyone else? January might be a bit awkward with only 2 people since I am preemptively disqualifying myself since I'll just counterstop the game again, but if nobody else shows up then I might play with a handicap of only clearing maybe 3 or 4 loops. I love the game so much that I might end up doing that anyway.

 

I still have not decided what to do with March. None of the games I suggested for that month are very good to play for score, but I will see what I can do.

[+jgkspsx]

I’m in. Maybe post this on the general classic gaming forum as well?

[Guest]

On 12/20/2022 at 11:03 AM, Steven Pendleton said:

January - Slap Fight
February - Slap Fight MD
March - Thunder Force III or Gleylancer* or Zero Wing*
April - Koutetsu Teikoku or Battle Mania
May - Grenada
June - Kuuga or Crying
July - Twinkle Tale or Darius Extra Version
August - Aero Blasters or Darius II
September - Same! Same! Same!
October - Tatsujin or V-V
November - Eliminate Down
December - Kyuukyoku Tiger

All new to me, something different to try out. Two versions of Slap Fight on back to back months? Interesting as I don't have a clue.. lol Sign me up.

[Frozone212]

what's the difference between slap fight and slap fight MD?

[+jgkspsx]

3 hours ago, Zeptari1 said:

All new to me, something different to try out. Two versions of Slap Fight on back to back months? Interesting as I don't have a clue.. lol Sign me up.

Two different modes in the same cartridge, no?

[Steven Pendleton]

That makes 4 of us~

 

4 hours ago, Frozone212 said:

what's the difference between slap fight and slap fight MD?

2 different games on the same cartridge.

[Frozone212]

oh...cool

I wonder how they managed that

[Steven Pendleton]

5 hours ago, Frozone212 said:

oh...cool

I wonder how they managed that

https://www.eurogamer.net/death-from-above-the-making-of-slap-fight-md

[zylon]

Since I've found I still own a working system, I might throw a few plays in, if I have the game. I have a Gen3, one controller, handful of carts, and a cheap 112-in1 repro. I think I have one of those cheap handheld emulator systems too.

[Steven Pendleton]

On 1/2/2023 at 11:40 PM, zylon said:

Since I've found I still own a working system, I might throw a few plays in, if I have the game. I have a Gen3, one controller, handful of carts, and a cheap 112-in1 repro. I think I have one of those cheap handheld emulator systems too.

You can use an emulator if you want. Some of these games, especially Slap Fight MD and Eliminate Down, are some of the rarest and most difficult games on the system to obtain, so while it's illegal to illegally download games and I of course recommend that nobody does that, uh... yeah, play in a way that you find most convenient.