Then I can deliver shame upon anyone who doesn't beat you
Edit: I've played the later stages now and they're all fairly easy. The bosses are another matter, but there are tricks to make them more manageable. Chin up!
DavidTiger - 320,000 - 3 Edit by DT: Just so there's no confusion, don't post scores here anymore, post them in the week thread. You're allowed to post as many improvements as you want.
I need to practice on some of the technical bonuses/find out when to use the charge shots in the city stage + snowy base stage
I'm going to stress again that if you don't expect to see me in #curlybrace I'd like to know your progress here in the thread every couple of days. Having to chase people up makes more work and saps my confidence Currently waiting on Wedge
Just a heads up, this is probably going to be my worst week, because I really hate how Psikyo's engine feels when emulated. It still has that nasty input lag I mentioned, so most of the times I die it feels like I shouldn't have because I would have been fine if I didn't have to dodge four frames earlier. I don't understand how they expect anyone to play this competitively. I'll still do everything I can, but my frustration threshold this week is going to be 10x lower.
The scoreboard still isn't up, but I can tell by looking at the thread that there are a load of current scores in the 500'000s but not too many just higher (or lower) than that, reaffirming that 600k is an important target. We're only halfway through the week, so I'm not worried at this point; the important thing is that we don't fall behind.
I'm going to stream again tomorrow at 11 (so, whatever time it says on my post, reverse the am/pm), and cover stages 5 and 6 as well as improvements for the first four. If this is going to be a consistently bad time then please speak up, because it's convenient for me atm. Still waiting on Wedge
Oh come on, you actually did it right the first time I probably wasn't specific enough. It's okay to post your score as progress but I more want to generate some discussion and know what you're all having trouble with.
Today's stream wasn't especially fruitful, so I decided to plan out some savestates and put together a slightly shorter stream covering what we went over earlier in the day only with less time-wasting (and I forgot to turn on system sound ). These will probably become a more regular feature, due to a number of viewing issues: The stream will barely load for SEBTi, Hate9 was scared away by my terrifying voice and Wedge is still avoiding this thread. I pray it's helpful, because without specific questions all I can do is freeball and hope I cover everything.
In other news, someone was nice enough to finally put together a score chart, here, so now we can all see where we sit and how much a given score improvement will move us up. Here are our current rankings by position, at the time of its making:
DavidThink: 25th
Professor Dave: 83rd
DavidTiger: 94th
Dave9: I don't even know
If I can ask for a couple more improvement submissions tomorrow, I will be a happy robot migma
I forgot to mention that voting for week 2 would start today. The problem game is Batsugun, where only one place in the entire game matters for score, but thankfully it looks like a few of the other team captains are recognising that this would be terrible. The dynamic scoreboard has also finally been posted, which keeps track of both the individual and team scores; I suggest bookmarking it for the duration of the tourney.
Week 1 has now entered into its final stretch and will end at 4am GMT on the 6th, or in 18 hours. Currently, the team is sitting a long way down, and with I would say about 50 unranked players still to submit scores it's not looking pretty. I sincerely apologise if any of you feel as though I'm harping on about this, but seeing as I don't want to have to outright beg everyone I can find to play tomorrow I'm going to try and construct one last motivational paragraph.
We are not merely Daves; we are also Pixel's finest and a team of good buddies. In order to get off to a solid start, our second and third place scores are going to need to be above or near 500k at the absolute least. If there's one week that you dig deep and try to pull out something special, make it this one, because week 1 is always the hardest competition-wise. This year, we are better prepared and have more participation than last year, and really that's the only thing I'm asking for; that we improve upon our team and (where applicable) individual results from then. I know we're more than capable of doing that. Alternately, if you feel like having me owe you one, I most definitely will if you can manage this for me.
Final tips: Never prioritise survival over scoring. If you can't dodge it, use charge shot, and if that doesn't work quickly enough then bomb. Once you get over the difficulty 'hump', you won't need to worry about things going wrong on the first two stages all the time.
SEBTi has gone away, but he said he'd try to take his laptop and find an internet connection so I've got my fingers crossed. For the rest of us, it's open season. Make me proud
Alright, Week 1 is over, and has left us sitting in 26th overall. I don't feel too bad, because we are so far out of our depth this year that even reaching the targets I had set wouldn't have made that much difference. This is easily the toughest STGT that has ever taken place, as well as the largest, and matching our position last year with the first week being a Psikyo game was always going to be a hard ask. It's now time to move onto the second week, which is a game called V-Five.
Firstly, this is a two-part ROM; to play it you will need the base ROM for a game called Grindstormer as well as the one for V-Five. In order to keep things simple, I'm just going to give them to you this week (1 and 2). The game itself has a similar powerup system to Gradius, with multiple options that require different levels of powerup items to activate. However, the powerups also behave as bonus items, which give a score at the end of each stage. The game also has checkpoints and no bombs, but compared to last week the bullet patterns are also designed to be navigated with a lot less perfection. It's also a game very few people have played before, putting us on a more even playing field.
Button 1 is fire and button 2 activates your current power level. Again, autofire is not necessary for this game, and it runs perfectly in MAME Plus. I'll not go into fine detail right now, but I suggest getting used to playing with one speed-up, because dying leaves you with one powerup level to speed up once. There are three different types of weapons:
Shot - Spread fire that can be adjusted by moving the ship up and down while not firing. Moving the options directly in front creates a powerful laser stream.
Search - Rotating options that will automatically fly out and pointblank one enemy each. I'm partial to this one, but it can make a couple of parts harder, and it's a little weak with only two options
Missile - Trailing options that can be used to cover the whole screen or focus on one position.
The ships starts with two options, and gets another two after two power increases. There's also a shield powerup to make up for the lack of bombs, but you shouldn't need it before at least stage 2. The extends are at 300k and 800k.
I'll do an introductory stream tomorrow at the usual time. Let's get this dave on the road!
EDIT: Oh right, superplay
As you can see, the perfect collection bonuses for each loop are enormous (giving a final score of over 30 million), but you guys don't need to worry about that. Even 1 million is a very good score.
The stream will begin momentarily, after which I will edit this post with more info.
Aaaand done. I think most of it is useful this time Here's a recap of what we learned:
Playing Tips
The most efficient powerup progression appears to be speed up (to the level that you want) -> power up twice (not to max) -> shield (replenish as needed). Switch to what you desire on stage 2 before the boss (search makes it easier but also longer) and then to missile for the whole of stage 3 ASAP. I haven't planned beyond that yet. Powering up to max increases the rank quite a bit, and the extra power isn't necessary with missiles. From stage 3 onward, if you're not confident, I suggest keeping your powerup bar on Shield and forgoing bonus items so that you can reactivate it the moment you lose it.
Scoring
At the end of each stage, you will receive 1000 x items x perfect multiplier as a bonus. The perfect multiplier starts at 1 increments by 1 each time you collect all the items on a stage; for example, there are 10 items on stage 1, so collecting all of them will get the perfect bonus and give 1000 x 10 x 2 = 20000 points. If you die, your item count and perfect bonus will reset. Missing gems to keep your shield will also reset it, but is much better than dying.
This game gives out a lot of "shot points", so even if you don't destroy the floating structures at the start of stage 2, it's worth it to shoot them as much as possible. Near the start of stage 3, there are a number of small planes that appear which will spit out waves of 500-point bonus tags when shot. The amount they spit out is dependent on the amount of damage they take, which is why it's important to switch to missiles before they appear, because they can milk twice the number of points out of them. The large yellow crate that appears after the rows of bonus tags on the ground also appears to be worth around 10000 points if destroyed. Later on in the stage, there are a number of places where crystals will fall and attempt to attach themselves to the ship, slowing it down but also giving points per frame, as demonstrated at around 9 minutes into the superplay above. Don't bother with these until you've beaten stage 3 at least once.
Targets
The first step for all of you is to clear stage 2, or more specifically, the stage 2 boss, which will take some practice. It's fairly safe to stay at the bottom and move when the lasers come, but you will also need to dodge the red spray attack and the odd errant bullet from the drones that spawn. If you can do that, you should be able to reach the first extend at 300k during the first part of stage 3 thanks to the scoring tricks mentioned above.
As per usual, let me know if you're having any trouble so I can help.
Progress has not been good on my end. The latter half of stage 3 is painfully hard to recover from after death, and I have yet to find a way to deal with all of it consistently. The main change I've made is to switch to two speedups instead of one because I got sick of having to lead patterns perfectly. This is more reliable than I first suspected, because after a death there are rarely enough items to get anything more than another speedup. I still suggest using only one speedup on stage 1, however, because the extra item allows an extra powerup before the floating orbs on stage 2 and makes them easier to destroy.
Optimising the scoring tricks on stage 3 may prove very important due to the number of game overs likely to occur there - I'm expecting a lot of results in the 400-600k range at the week's end. The crystal trick does become quite a bit easier with two speedups, but if you die the crystals will stop appearing. Tomorrow I'll try to refine my strategies for dealing with enemies into something simpler, after which I'll run an improvement stream on Friday. In the meantime, I'd like a status update from all of you.
Okay, I'll be ready to stream tomorrow at 11, and again I'd like to see some status reports and maybe a couple of scores posted. Having a full team submission last week was great to see and a huge improvement over last year, and since there have been relatively very few scores post so far this week, we all have a chance to improve our team/individual ranking by a good margin.
My strategy so far is to use a Speed-Up, Power, Shield, and then Speed-up. You get the speed up in the first stage, extra power to destroy some of the stronger enemies in the first stage and the floating orbs in the second stage, and it ensures that you don't accidentally waste a shield by accidentally getting hit in the first stage. Also every other powerup after that should be a shield so I can live longer and worry less about being hit and then having all of your upgrades gone.
So far I was able to get around 150k so far, at 22% (second boss). Today I plan to use save states solely for practicing on the boss, and should try to keep my shield up throughout stage 2 because most of the time I get hit by silly little objects that are too easy to avoid.
Only one power increase? D: That could leave you very vulnerable, but it might be alright for stage 2 provided you can get up to power during the easy part of stage 3.
EDIT: Okay Livestream decided to eat my recording so I'll post a quick text recap now and make another empty stream video tomorrow.
-Don't try to move too fast at the stage 2 boss or other places where you need to lead bullets, this will leave you more room to work with. However, getting into place to deal with incoming enemies quickly is still a good tactic.
-If you don't destroy the box surrounded by bonus tags on stage 3, you will be able to get a 1up on stage 5, but unless you think you'll make it that far it's better to break it.
-The yellow 'fish' in stage 3 can be easily dealt with by covering the bottom of the screen with missile and sitting over to the left (because the turrets appear on the right).
-When the third boss fires its lasers, sit just to the right beneath it and move up a little way to nullify the missiles.
-The superplay shows a good way to score off the first round of crystals here; sit under the ships to lead their bullets and move out of the way when the lasers come (however, I suggest destroying the crystals after the third wave of ships because after that it becomes unsafe). There's also another place you can let them accumulate, here, but again don't ever sacrifice survival for scoring.
If anyone can remember anything else or has any tips of their own to offer then please speak up
I probably wasn't specific enough. It's okay to post your score as progress but I more want to generate some discussion and know what you're all having trouble with.
). These will probably become a more regular feature, due to a number of viewing issues: The stream will barely load for SEBTi, Hate9 was scared away by my terrifying voice and Wedge is still avoiding this thread. I pray it's helpful, because without specific questions all I can do is freeball and hope I cover everything.
Here's a recap of what we learned: