I will second that I wish they had given us the option for a tate mode that could ignore all the side shit.
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I would generally agree, though I know the story is an integral part of the game, or at least that’s how MOSS probably approached it. Since the right-side panel is all story-specific, it makes sense that they wouldn’t want to give you the ability to eliminate it, since you can mute the v/o audio, and move the story from the top of the screen to the right-side panel. I do find the left side panels helpful, because of the various things it informs you about. It’s not easy to look at it very often, but in the short lulls between segments, or in brief periods where there are no enemies, a quick glance can help you gauge how you’re doing. There are ways to do that in a tate format, though.
There are definitely ways, and most games that support tate are filling a modern widescreen display. So you end up with black bars at the top and bottom, and they could have put that stuff there. They also could have had it unlock after you beat the game once, kind of like ok I got the story now let me ignore it and play the game how I want.
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I can’t even tell you how jealous of Last Gamer I am here.
I have a bunch of these, but missed out on about half of them. Though I think most of them aren’t region free I kind of wish I bought them anyway.
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Got shipping confirmation that my ESPRade LE was picked up from customs today in Japan, can’t wait to get it.
Mine shipped as well and claims it’ll be here tomorrow but we’re going away for the weekend so I called to have DHL delay it. We’ll see if it happens. They’re website seems to be having major problems. I can track it on DHL.co.jp’s site, but on DHL.com it won’t let me.
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I got mine yesterday and had a bit of a play. It’s another great port as you’d expect. The game itself is great fun and a visual treat! Does anyone know whether you get more/less/same amount of powerups from kills with primary vs power shot? I know about the scoring approach from http://www.world-of-arcades.net/Cave/Esprade/items_scores.htm, but couldn’t tell what if anything affected how many powerups you get from firing.
At first it seemed a little slow on the movement side, especially when you hold primary shot (the character slowing down seems to be a frequent thing in Cave games!). I changed the shot button to autofire (press square in the controller settings I think), now I can move at full speed while firing fast, and that felt a lot better to me and i have no qualms about “cheating” given my skill level 
I’ve only tried Arcade and Super Easy so far. Super Easy is probably too easy like the other games, but with Custom you can adjust it pretty finely so i’ll try and find something that’s a challenge but not impossible soon! Arcade difficulty will take some serious dedication, tbh i was having a harder time than i did with Ketsui.
I’ve also G-translated some of the menus… Might not be perfect but I think it’s ok:
Main Settings Screen:
- Whether the game has Alice Master/New Visuals/Sounds
- Game Difficulty
- Extend Settings: The one without value is “no extend”
- No. of Players/Lives
- Auto Barrier: Off/On using 1/4 gauge
- Hitbox size: Normal, Slightly Smaller, Smaller, Significantly Smaller
- Circle Max Setting: The values are initial followed by increment. This relates to how many powerups you need to collect before you start getting Barrier refill items.
- Stage Order: Choose a fixed order for the stages. http://www.world-of-arcades.net/Cave/Esprade/Secrets.htm mentions the way order is normally decided
System Settings:
- Lag reduction
- Replay auto registration
- Auto start (auto start last selected game mode without going through titles/menus)
- Play side setting at startup
Other Settings:
- Power Shot Full Auto: When on, shoot in small increments by holding down the power shot button
- Sound Effects during demo
- Allow continues
- Automatic skip at startup: Skips the notation, if set to off, any button will skip.
- Ending skip: When on, ending can be skipped with any button
- Multiplier counter display: Shows the multiplier on the screen without having to use the cheat code
- Quick restart setting: Before/After machine select
- Boss health state change: On shows when a state change occurs in the gauge at top of screen.
- Reproduce sound of arcade board
- Time limit for player select: 9s/99s
- Show the player’s hitbox
- System voice setting: Auto, Male voice, Female voice, Yusuke Sagami, J-B5th, Iori Mimasaka, Alice Master, Satoru Oumi, Mrs. Gara
- Reset voice volume: Low, Medium, Loud, Very Loud
It says this does something like “Set the system voice when reset is on *Doesn’t change in arcade mode”. Not entirely sure what “reset is on” means.
Screen Settings:
- Screen Rotation
- Simple Preset
- Screen Size Type: Fit/Dot by dot/Manual
- Screen Size Setting
- Smoothing Setting
- Scanline Setting
- Wallpaper Setting
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Tracking DHL shipments is next to impossible. Every time I order from Strictly Limited the package just dissapears into the ether until it arrives.
I signed up for their service kind of like UPS’ thing and it’s actually in my State already and thankfully it says they’re holding it for deliver as I talked to them about. So so far so good. I can’t wait to play it though been hungry for a home port of this game for forever.
Supposedly English PSN trophies have been found, hopefully that means a quick US release. I double dip on it for PS4 if that’s the case (my copy that is coming is the Switch one). The fact that those were found was the only thing keeping me from buying it on the Japanese PSN store yesterday.
Glad to hear they were able to hold it. It’s good to hear there are English trophies. I would triple dip to make future releases viable.
Yeah it worked out well, we pulled in the driveway and maybe 15 minutes later it got delivered. Man the game is so damn good. I wish I could pinpoint why, but this is my favorite shmup. Even with its weird scoring mechanic, something just keeps bringing me back to this game, and I am so damn happy to finally have a home release of this, and one I can play on the go too!
I am having to fight the urge to say fuck it and buy it digitally on the Japanese PSN store too, really trying to hold out on that to just buy a hopefully eventual US release. I don’t know how long that will last though as I really want to show M2 support for finally giving this a home on a console.
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I’m still really impressed with Esprade, the novelty of the new bells and whistles added to the shot triggers release hasn’t worn off at all. M2 has made it extremely easy to jump in at your favourite parts to each stage, be it for fun or practice. I’m finding the M2 gadget that measures up to 16x combos from your heavy shots on large enemies to be very helpful.
I can see the Inori no Heya mode being great for teaching beginners the ropes, even if its structure is rather rote (it’s like a mobage in how you earn tickets to spend on a raffle to get more items for your room). Still, the amount of work that went into making it happen is much appreciated. Just wish it were playable in Tate mode!
Since putting my monitor in Tate mode for Esprade I ended up doing a shmups tour on the Switch: Been playing Alfa System’s Sisters Royale (which is getting a global release next month on PS4 and Switch!), Galaga and its sequel, Psikyo stuff, Psyvariar and a lot of Sega Ages Fantasy Zone. Never played Fantasy Zone until now yet despite its age the game still feels quite unique in its design. The final boss makes my blood boil though, especially when the stakes are high in time trial mode.
M2’s vintage filter continues to impress. I’ve since ordered Sega 3D Classics 2 on 3DS for Fantasy Zone 2’s system16 remake.
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Got my ESPRade LE today, will be opening and playing it later tonight when I have more time. Man, I just realized I’ve been waiting about 20 years for this game to get a home port after seeing a spread for it in an old issue of Gamefan. Only other place I’ve been able to play it was occasionally on a friend’s MAME cab.
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Played ESPRade on my plasma with scanlines, looks and plays really nice. I’m going to try it on my Hori Stand and Flip Grip in a bit for some TATE goodness. Only issue I’m having is I can’t activate the Alice mode or any other option on the first Game Setting screen. If I try to turn on Alice mode or choose any other setting on that initial screen it seems to give me an error message with “2019,” anyone else getting this? Other option screens work fine though. Also someone on the shmups forum is claiming this game has noticeable input lag vs PS4? Seems to play fine so far for me.
Edit: Also notice you get a looooong loading screen when you first boot into the game. Hopefully they fix that at some point.
Edit: Here is a pic of the error I get when I try to change anything on the main Game Setting menu:
Edit:
Ok, so apparently to unlock Alice (and apparently other stuff like number of lives, ect) you have to do a one credit run on any of the difficulty modes so I’m currently trying to 1cc on Supereasy, seems weird to lock some of the options behind that.
Edit: Ok so after doing a one credit run on super easy (and upping my lives to five using custom mode 
) I finally unlocked Alice. And to answer my earlier question you can’t adjust difficulty/life settings nor play as Alice in vanilla arcade mode.
Phhhewww I threw this on this morning after breakfast and may have just had my best run in a shmup ever. I wanted to unlock that stuff like you did so I put on super easy mode and just had an ALMOST no death run. I managed to not die until the very last boss, that I think is a secret one you have to do something to unlock. I think with some practice I could do a no death run of this on Super Easy, and maybe a 1 cc on Easy. Man I fucking love this game. It was like I hit a zone of all those hours back in the day playing this on mame, for literally hours on end.
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I’m jealous of that limited edition! I didn’t want the solus game so I ended up getting a digital copy, but I love this release so much that I wish I had the game card now. But the convenience of digital sure is nice when you’re switching between arcade games.
I’ve been improving faster than I had hoped, my last one-credit run got me to the first section of stage 5. I thought I’d messed things up when I lost a couple of lives during the stage 3 boss fight, but then I hit 4m points and grabbed the hidden life at the start of stage 4 to be back to three lives. Too bad I lost them on the stage 4 boss, which I hadn’t attempted before.
Still, I’m chuffed to have made the top fifty…for now…
I also started Sega Ages Space Harrier - the joystick controls are legitimately good. If you hold a single Switch Joy-con with two hands - like at the arcade - you get a surprisingly nuanced method of control. Whenever I died I didn’t feel like it was the fault of the gyro controls, and I’m about equally as good with it as I am with the analogue stick (so far I can only manage about 10m points and stage 10 on the default three continues…)
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Nicely done on breaking the top 50! Woot!
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Played it in TATE last night on my Hori stand, game also plays great on Flip Grip of course. I honestly have little issue playing shmups with the Joycon analog stick.
That’s awesome, nice work! Got some Sunday Night Shmup representation on the leaderboards. 