@Karasu yeah I’m definitely bracing for m2 to eat my wallet next year
@TracyDMcGrath I’ll need to make myself a “My wallet got eaten by M2 and all I got was this incredible collection of sensitively presented classic STG games” t-shirt
As happy as I am to see this new collection (and the Mega Drive Mini 2), I do wonder what that means for all the other games I presumed would be coming from them this year: Aleste Branch, another Toaplan compilation, etc.
The first lot of Psikyo shooters have come out on PS4. Anyone tried them?
@Karasu Deeply felt. The amount of times I have been on the eShop page ready to drop 4950 yen on ESP Ra.de
@Chopemon they seem to be the same as the steam and switch ports, so I’d anticipate them being laggy and feature light.
For how much I talk about disliking these ports, I still play them a ton and have a lot of fun with them, but good luck getting past stage 4 of a psikyo game with that much lag. The games are hard enough as is.
At a glance, they basically look to be the Steam versions but on PS4. IIRC a lot of the Switch lag is caused by forced v-sync so I don't know that the PS version will necessarily be any more responsive; the amount of lag varies from game to game, too.
They're also coming to Xbox, if that's of interest to anyone.
That's good to know, thanks. Are the PS2 versions of Psikyo games the same re: lag?
@Chopemon the dreamcast versions are the preferred console ports afaik, but they all run best in MAME
Awesome, thanks!
In way less expensive STG news, Zero Wing just hit the Switch Online Genesis app
@tokucowboy ooooh that‘s the first thing that’s really tempted me to consider it
@tokucowboy how good of a version of Zero Wing is the Genesis one?
@TracyDMcGrath I do love that it seems Nintendo is offering some of the best Sega emulation out there (and here we are, back to M2 once again). They also added Assault Suit Leynos/Target Earth today, which I’d call shmup-adjacent
@whatsarobot I’ve never played the arcade version, so there are surely folks in this thread who could tell you more. I really like the Mega Drive version, though – as I understand, it’s a feature-complete version that’s generally easier than the arcade (slower bullet speeds and less enemies in some places, but nowhere near as slow as the PC Engine version). The Mega Drive version also adds the cutscenes, of course, which is where you get the memes from
@tokucowboy i legit forgot about All Your Base. wow.
well this is a very nice surprise for me to come home and play tonight!
@whatsarobot I had a similar reaction when I saw people talking about these games online, lol - I saw a bunch of people really excited about this announcement, people who are not usually so excited about these kinds of games, and at first I was like cool! I guess people are coming around on playing this kind of stuff - only to realize they were thinking about something very different than I was
For some reason clearing Zero Wing at like 2AM last night made me think, “I want to play Layer Section for a minute,” and here's a tiny personal observation: the CRT filter in that new release might be among my favorite CRT filters. Just something I wanted to appreciate
Date set for the Ray’z arcade compilation, looks like preorder bonus is R-GEAR???
https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/07/taito-and-m2-bringing-shmup-collection-rayz-arcade-chronology-to-switch
Classic $75 release
OK, BUT you can get Aero Fighters 2 for $3.99, so that‘s going on in cheap shmup land. I never thought I’d be frying over a jungle till I saw that deal
Reading up on Kotori Yoshimura -- finding out some of the insanely forward-thinking games she developed and that she was likely the first openly trans Japanese game developer -- got me in a Tecno Soft mood for my long indoor weekend, so I went through the Thunder Forces (aware that she departed the series after the first one, it just put me down a Tecno Soft rabbit hole, and that's what I had access to). I finally cleared Thunder Force II for the first time in what has to be one of the few ways to make it palatable in 2022 (the other way I guess is to be in prison and solely dedicate yourself to clearing Thunder Force II): liberal rewinding. The way movement is programmed in the overhead segments is really something to behold at times; you get into that unbelievably synergistic place where you cannot believe that you, a human, have made the necessary split-second inputs -- feeling out those eight directions and specific momentum -- to weave through what should surely be impossible. And the final stage/boss is quite a spectacle, which makes it a shame that relatively few people likely ever saw that
Moving on to surely a lukewarm take: I might grab Thunder Force IV if, for some reason, I needed to succinctly show someone why I think STGs are cool, or why I think the Sega Genesis is cool in the least amount of time possible