STGT '11 Team Thread - Contest over, we finished 14th!

The tournament starts soon, the team is signed up, and so it's time to throw up the official team discussion thread! This will serve as our tactical melting pot, wherein I will MAKE IT MY MISSION IN LIFE to help everyone with whatever difficulties they have, be they technical or with that bastard of a boss on stage 3.

Firstly, the players!

[B][COLOR="Red"]Team CAVE DESTROY represent:[/COLOR][/B]

[COLOR="DarkOrange"]Name                  Team Position[/COLOR]
DoubleThink           DESTROY-in-Chief
Yakkers               Orange traffic DESTROY
VoidMage_Lowell       Are you certain that's a DESTROY?
[STRIKE]Omega                 In Soviet DESTROY[/STRIKE]
JetHawk95             DJ DESTROY [High Speed Remix]
Noxid                 King of DESTROY 2.0
Crankenstein          Not technically a DESTROY
Lace                  DESTROY is a way of life

Official team banner, courtesy of Noxid and his inability to create anything bad:

Official team chatroom: #curlybrace should suffice, but either way I've decided that I'm going to stream myself playing sometimes to help show off tactics and planning. My connection sucks far too much to use a 'proper' streaming program, so instead I've made a tinychat room where I'll point my webcam at my own monitor. First world problems


Official team themesong:

Spoiler

Thematically appropriate and painfully 90's!
If we finish inside the top 10, I will dance to this live on camera
Note that I may end up doing this regardless


Again, I suggest reading the Shmups Forum rules, particularly the line about signature size if you want to put the team banner there. I won't go into too much tactical depth immediately, but here are some quick tourney tips garnered from my experience:
-Get in early! Spending a bit of extra time on the first day learning the scoring tricks and early stages will pay off both in terms of score and confidence (this can be a bit hard, because it starts very late at night for the American timezones, so if you value sleeping more please do that first). Likewise, submit some early scores to help get the team up on the board and help gauge our position! You needn't submit a new score every time you improve it, but about three times a week is a healthy start.
-We are a team! It's the top 3 scores that count each week, so you needn't burn yourself out if you dislike one. Conversely, if you really enjoy a game, that might be the week for you to dig in and make your move!
-Don't be discouraged! The first week is always the most competitive, and a result that looks okay the night before can easily get swamped down a dozen places overnight. Remember, it's consistency over the course of the tournament that matters, and it gets easier every week; I'd say a 50th in week 1 is worth about a 35th in week 3. If our top 3 are are in the top 60 during week 1, I'll be all smiles

Le'z do eet

 

Re: STGT '11 Team Thread - Prepare for the DESTROY

Good luck.

 

Re: STGT '11 Team Thread - Prepare for the DESTROY

oh yeah. time to kick shmup ass and chew bubblegum. and im all out of bubblegum.

and when it comes to streaming id love to stream at a different time so we can both show off our mistakes and our strategies.

уничтожить! (thats russian for destroy)

 

Re: STGT '11 Team Thread - Prepare for the DESTROY

Whoa, this sound like serious buisness
And, uhhhh yeah, good luck.

 

Excitement is contagious
I'm looking forward to this.

 

Re: STGT '11 Team Thread - Prepare for the DESTROY

Bring me back a giant virtual trophy, DoubleThink!

 

Re: STGT '11 Team Thread - Prepare for the DESTROY

Reading the op all I could think of was Destroyman from "No More Heros"

 

Re: STGT '11 Team Thread - Prepare for the DESTROY

Week 1 starts in 17 hours~

 

Re: STGT '11 Team Thread - Prepare for the DESTROY

cant wait.

 

Re: STGT '11 Team Thread - Prepare for the DESTROY

There can be only one.

 

Re: STGT '11 Team Thread - Prepare for the DESTROY

I proudly accept my assigned team position, WOOO.
I'm totally ready for this, can't wait to be sitting around playing shmups all day and actually have it be for a reason.

 

Re: STGT '11 Team Thread - Prepare for the DESTROY

Okay, the first week's thread got posted early. Looks like we're playing Googoog'joob Parodius. MAME doesn't seem to want to run it, so I downloaded the SNES port instead. I also don't know whether we're supposed to turn checkpoints on or not, but for now I'm keeping them off (set the Revival option to "On"), because checkpoint milking is stupid. What an excellent start!

I won't be 'streaming' today, because I need to go out and buy a new mouse/get some idea of what the hell I'm doing first. Apparently there's a hidden stage, and scoring appears to involve chaining the gold bells (shoot them to change their colour) but I don't know the specifics. I also suggest re-mapping the keys. W/e, let's dig in.

 

Re: STGT '11 Team Thread - Week 1: Gokujou Parodius

yeah im not going to be able to play. i know why now its because of last minute problems.

 

Re: STGT '11 Team Thread - Week 1: Gokujou Parodius

For all five weeks?

EDIT:

No SNES scores.

Oh ffs

EDIT 2:

Plus, you will need the Konami System GX bios to play the game.

So you need the Gokujou Parodius game file and that bios in your 'directories' folder and it works. Remember to set up the game controls the way you want them (also turn on autofire), and check out the regular MAME controls as well; F3 is reset, F10 is speedup, F12 is screenshot, F7 is save state and Shift+F7 is load state. F11 is runtime info; the game (I think) has natural slowdown, but if you see the game speed fall below 100% you may want to try a different version of MAME.

EDIT 3:
If a bell of any colour falls off screen, your gold bell chain will reset; however, if some of the bells are a different colour it doesn't matter, so don't fuss too much over turning them all gold. At 10000 a pop, these make up a huge portion of scoring potential, but thankfully a dropped chain can be brought back to the maximum value very quickly. You still may want to watch out for the fabled green bells, because they make it impossible to pick up the other ones. There's a discussion on how to get the hidden moai stage over here.

Also you can only have one main weapon at once.

EDIT 4:
Okay picking up gold bells is fine apart from the bit where you have to STOP SHOOTING IN ORDER TO PICK THEM UP, and it looks like purple bells might actually be more important, because they turn everything into powerups/more bells. If you want to try to get them, you might have to turn autofire off so that you don't keep constantly turning them back to gold. Oh and checkpoints are mandatory :| I might just end up playing for survival and look for one easy milking spot to abuse. This was a really shitty choice for an STGT game, especially for week 1. I'm sorry everyone.

 

Re: STGT '11 Team Thread - Week 1: Gokujou Parodius

yeah. HOWEVER. i will be able to follow you through streams and give you tips just not play.

 

Re: STGT '11 Team Thread - Week 1: Gokujou Parodius

yeah. HOWEVER. i will be able to follow you through streams and give you tips just not play.

............................

Anyway, it only took four hours of searching and downloading and testing but I finally manged to get the (correct) game to run.

Now if only I could stop dying

 

Re: STGT '11 Team Thread - Week 1: Gokujou Parodius

My my, this is a strange game, I'm having a little trouble taking it seriously.
But anyways, thanks for the info on the bells, it's always good to know each game's little quirks on scoring.

 

Re: STGT '11 Team Thread - Week 1: Gokujou Parodius

so if you need me ill be hunting down strategies for the game.

i saw some screenshots of gamefaqs. a weird game indeed even for a japanese one.

 

Re: STGT '11 Team Thread - Week 1: Gokujou Parodius

Okay team, new plan:
-Select Auto, unless you really want something else. This keeps the rank down, drops bells when you die and eliminates checkpoints. It won't make a big difference to your ship strength, in fact it takes away a lot of the distraction.
-Pick Michael, or maybe Koitsu if you want more bell control.
-The moai stage is fairly easy to activate after the second boss; just stay alive until you get there, and after damaging her a bit, move in for the kill after she completes her letter shooting pattern if the hundreds digit of your score is 8 or 9. It's not too hard as long as you learn the part where the ship goes haywire (try to destroy the spring head quickly, then hide near the bottom left) and the midboss.
-First boss: Hide in the top left corner and shoot, moving down when he goes over to the right. Try to let him stay alive for a while so you can milk the toy fountain for points (i.e. don't shoot when he's running).
-Second boss: Sit close-ish to her face. If she shoots letters, move back and destroy them; if she flips her tail, you'll avoid it. Also see above regarding scoring.
-Moai boss: Sit at either the very top or bottom left of screen when it spawns the moai rockets and destroy them as they move toward you. EDIT: When the boss uses the laser, move out of the way of any remaining rockets. Depending on where it stops after that, you can either stay put or move quickly past it to the other end of screen and repeat.
-Third boss: Watch the pattern in the background and use it to line up a safe spot for the crossed line pattern. Also if it moves but doesn't eject toothpaste, that means it's going to ram, so get out of the way. The ramming attack with toothpaste can be avoided by staying in front of the boss on the left edge.

I feel a bit better now :>

Edit again: Not-collecting every powerup you see does appear to help with rank noticeably, and it's fairly easy to get through to stage 3 powered up just enough so that Michael's shot reaches vertically. You will probably want to power up at the start of stage 3 though, or maybe even suicide at the start, because it's still bullshit.

Final edit notes:
-It's reasonably easy to just keep shooting the bells back from the last bird on the first two stages and pick them up before the boss appears, maybe grabbing some along the way if it's convenient.
-I find that on the third stage, it's important to seek out and kill the two big yellow blobs, or they will chase you from behind. The stage gives you absolutely no space to chain bells properly, so the best scoring opportunity is too keep your chain into the stage and make a dive on the two birds near the start hoping for a quick 100k.
-Be careful if you die on the third boss, because the rank down might cause it to change the angle at which it shoots the lines. Of all the fucking stupid...
-If you've died and can't shoot behind you, or don't have a bell, there's no way to deal with the wall of birds that appears except to dodge them. Oh, and the position of the falling exclamation marks appears to be random.
-Fourth boss: Start near the top left of the screen and slowly tap down and the rocket drills move in. You'll want to be in the bottom left corner when the arms start moving, but they should fall quickly, after which the boss is a joke.

I was thinking of making it up to stage 5 and taking what I got, but it looks like it could be deceptively easy, as long as you learn the enemy patterns. I'll see how I do, but I don't expect any of you to learn anything past stage 4. Please don't burn yourselves out on this week, this is a really godawful horrid start to the tourney and I'd hate for any of you to waste your efforts on it.

The Edits, They Never Stop: Oh god so does stage 6 D: I was playing it using an extra credit, so the rank might be higher normally. However, the boss shoots projectiles that are literally impossible to dodge while using Auto, so I wouldn't worry about it too much!!!!!

JAPANESE BUNNIES ON THE MOOOON

 

Re: STGT '11 Team Thread - Week 1: Gokujou Parodius

Stream is up. Please don't get on the call, because adding more people shrinks the picture size and it's already small enough as-is.

Edit + note updates:
-The extends are at 200k and 500k.
-You will score more by just milking the first boss and letting it time out.
-The dropping of the exclamation marks on stage 4 might not be random after all; it appears that the first two always fall in the same spot, while the third is aimed at you. If you sit around the bottom middle of the screen and move back in time to dodge the second one, you should be alright.
-Tactical suicides to decrease rank are definitely on the cards. If you plan where to die (or at least know where you're most likely to), you can form a plan for how to get back to decent power in time, instead of getting screwed over in a completely unsalvageable location.