Very nice, hell of a deal!
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Nice, glad I snapped up my Switch copy a few years ago, I think it was only $25 new at Best Buy when it released.
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Preparing for this week’s Sunday night, practiced a bit of Espgaluda II. Don’t think I’ll ever clear this one as the final boss is very hard, but I’m sure I can at least reach it now, have to train some more.
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What does everyone think of the new Arrange Mode in Cotton Reboot? I find it cool and all, with a great scoring rush that’s never less than fun to pull off. But it doesn’t really feel like Cotton in the sense that it almost reminds me of Deathsmiles - doubly so when playing on hard and bullets and flying everywhere. The frequency of fever mode rushes makes the levels almost blend together as well.
But it’s great that it happened and I still really enjoy it. I’m more worried about Cotton Rock ‘n Roll, since Success may well be running this series to the ground like they did Umihara Kawase. They seem to be throwing all sorts of random stuff into Rock ‘n Roll which makes it sound like an unnecessary sequel to me…hope I’m proven wrong!
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I stuck with R Type Final 2 and ended up falling in love with it. Some of the levels err too heavily on the side of rote memorisation but the game gives you plenty of tactical considerations (ships, strategies etc) that retrying rarely gets tiresome - provided you’ve unlocked enough to experiment with in the first place!
After I went to the hanger and bought a bunch of ships I was having a lot more fun with it.
To me surprise it seems Granzella licensed R Types 1 and 2 to Tozai Games and R Types on PlayStation even got delisted from Japanese PS1 Archives as a result, despite there being a bunch of other Irem stuff on there. R Types Dimensions doesn’t look very good so I did the next best thing and bought two PS1 games I’ve been meaning to play for -ages-:
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Was curious if Cotton Reboot also features the actual arcade game or is that just a sprite skin laid over the current games?
No arcade game but the X68000 version which has some graphical upgrades and remixed enemy attack patterns, at least compared to my SuperLite PS1 version which is based on Arcade.
The X68000 version does look amazing but they could have done better, theres distracting pixel crawl over the entire image due to a lack of interpolation and there’s no scanlines filter. But it does still look very good which is testament to the quality of the original art!
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Good to know, thanks for the info. That’s really cool they included a variation of the X68000 version.
And congrats on getting Delta and R-TYPES. I’ll never forget buying both when they launched way back in spring/summer 1999, two of my most played PS1 shooters ever.
I’m completely smitten with ZeroRanger… just played it for the first time this morning, and oh my god it’s good.
It’s put together so well and the amount of polish they put into it is just incredible!
I even got inspired by it and put my PC monitor into tate mode for the first time.
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ZeroRanger is something pretty special. I never got very far in the main Green Orange mode, but I managed a 1CC of White Vanilla, albeit still losing to the TLB. But it’s quite the ride.
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I’ve been away for quite awhile. Just super busy this summer. I have a lot of catching up to do with all you folks.
The Kyukyoku Tiger package is absolutely going to get ordered by me. I just don’t know which one I should get? Switch or PS4? I’d prefer Switch given it will likely have TATE mode and FlipGrip usage, but is the Switch up to it? Always a concern…
I feel like this one may not make it to the US either. Anyone think it will get a Limited Run release?
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Its a possibility LRG brings it, they did bring Battle Garegga after all. Who knows though, this collection seems more niche. I’m planning on getting the Switch version, but I’ll just grab the import as I dont want to wait.
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Since I got some minor chassis issues worked out on the Impress, figured I’d play some Progear tonight. Missed the item extend, I think I’d made it to stage 5 if get that. Maybe I can clear a loop if I keep at it.
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Such a great game, had my Progear CPS2 phoenix’d back in 2006 after the battery died.
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This weekend I played some Espgaluda II, Progear and tonight some Blazing Star on Wii. Didn’t make major progress on any of those lol.
Actually have wanted to get my Blazing Star fix for a while now,l but I’ve been having some monitor problems with my Neo25, Wii and RetroArch come to the rescue. Not perfect emulation mind you, but more than enough for a quick fix. Also the Wii Classic Controller Pro is great for shooting games, hell I like it more than the Saturn pad. Maybe I should try this with the SNES mini pad.
Should just put an MVS in the Impress. Looked into a Supergun solution, but every time I do that an expensive PCB comes my way 
, will post about that later this week when it arrives 
Anyways I don’t think I’ve spent much time playing Windina before, enjoying the playstyle, maybe I can beat my previous Hellhound score of 10 million in stage 5.
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been bouncing around a couple of Cave shmups but mostly focusing on Mushi original 1ccfor now. I can do up to stage 3 without any misses sometimes thanks to the very good training mode in the Switch port
tried playing Espgaluda like a typical Cave shmups and oh my God is it hard. then I realized there are a lot of mechanics I wasn’t taking advantage of. you could slow down the bullets which sounds like a godsend as they are about as fast as Mushi OG’s but twice as dense it seems. love the soundtrack too
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Looks like ESPGaluda II Switch release date will be Sept 9th:
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Been playing Zero Gunner 2 again on the Dreamcast for this week’s Sunday Night Shmup.
Speaking of Dreamcast, I got a new Hyperkin HDMI DC cable yesterday for $30 at a local used game shop, have to say so far that VGA compatible games look incredibly nice displaying games in VGA mode on my 1080p Plasma. Until now I was using s-video, part of the reason I got it was because I might be bringing my Dreamcast to a friend’s house for some old school multiplayer on Zero Gunner 2, Cannon Spike and some other titles and don’t want the games to look unbearably awful on his 4K TV. Only issue I’ve discovered so far is after tricking the system to boot Gunbird 2 into VGA mode with my trusty DC-X import disc, yikes, that game gets riddled with a ton of terrible slowdown. But that’s not an issue with the cable itself and is specific to the game based on what I’ve read. Will try a few other non-VGA games like Mars Matrix and Giga Wing 1 to see how they fare as well.
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I got myself Gun Frontier and Detana Twinbee a couple of weeks ago. I’m not sure if I’m getting old or what’s going on, but even on the easy setting, I’m getting my butt handed to me.
Twinbee in particular, so many brightly coloured things, I’m having trouble keeping track of what’s a powerups, enemy, or bullet! It’s nutty. Gonna keep on trying though, but sheesh, glad I ain’t dropping money into a machine. and the having to shoot the bells to get the boost you want, that’s brutal ha ha ha. I need some strategies!!
Gun frontier has been interesting, picked it up as I like the ship designs and it feels OK. But on the Saturn, the enemy bullets get covered up by explosion graphics and there are some terrible respawn point placement. Also seems to feel like main gun powerup doesn’t happen very often. The bomb powerup mechanic is an interesting take. I feel like the game wants you to use the bombs a bit more regularly than onw normally would. In my extremely amateur opinion.
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It wasn’t Sunday night, but I played a bunch of Raiden on Switch last night. Hamster’s stuff is always comfortable to play with their similar interface per title. It does make me wish I could combine ALL the Hamster games into one tile and one interface to start them though. They need some kind of virtual arcade so I can more easily switch from one game to another.
Anyway, I settled on A1 for the scanlines and then played a bunch of the International Version which is hard af. Took me quite awhile to even get past the first boss on one credit! I did manage to get in the top 100 on the leaderboards of the single playthrough mode. If you have it, you’ve got a score to shoot for now. 
The Japanese version definitely feels less difficult. I’m used to the International though so I will probably keep hammering on that.
It really is a classic, though. Everything about it is just so perfectly executed, from the graphics to the movement, the weapons, the EXPLOSIONS and the big ass holes in the ground from said fireballs. I just love it. Blue beam for the win, although there’s so many trash enemies sometimes I feel like I need the spread to deal with them. I’ll play more and experiment before looking up best practices. Good times.
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