Want justice, have bookpost

[roadrunnertwice]

Everything's extremely fucked up at the moment, and I'm heartsick and volcanicly angry on behalf of my old home of Minneapolis.

"IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT" IS FAKE

MIGRATION IS A HUMAN RIGHT

DISBAND ICE

HAND OVER THE MURDERERS AND ABDUCTORS TO THE PEOPLE'S JUSTICE

THAT INCLUDES NOEM AND TRUMP

That's about all I've got on that. But, I guess I've also got some babbling about games and stuff stacked up in the queue, so let's post that.

Naomi Novik — A Deadly Education, The Last Graduate, and The Golden Enclaves (re-reads)

Jan 7, Jan 8, Jan 8

My friend Isaac got around to reading these and was loudly enthusing about them; that reminded me how much I loved em, and then I had to blast through a re-read.

Isaac pointed out a recurring thematic motif I hadn't quite pinpointed on my first read: some idealistic sentiment that began as cynical propaganda, but which ends up becoming real for a later generation that absorbed the sentiment before learning the original motive.

Bonus Level: Several More STGs

Get in loser, we're dodging bullets.

I’ve switched to mostly playing these games with a leverless fighting game controller, a Snackbox Micro that I originally got for playing Street Fighter; it’s sort of the Dvorak keyboard of video games, so of course it appeals to my contrary and impractical ass. Anyway, once you recompile your whole brain to cope with “thumb means up,” it lets you get much cleaner and more reliable directional movements when navigating heavy bullet traffic. I think it's really helped me level up my practice! Now I'm almost always dying because routing or judging or reacting is hard, rather than because I made the right call but my diagonal got interpreted as a horizontal and I rammed a bullet that shouldn't have even been involved.

Here's some of the stuff I've been playing off and on lately.

Eschatos

(Availability: Steam and Switch.)

This wasn’t on my radar, but the System Erasure guys called it out in an interview as a major influence on ZeroRanger, and it was on sale.

This rules, and I can see why they found it so inspiring! The design feels very solid, yet very exposed and straightforward. I’ve been playing it a ton and I’ve already learned a lot from it.

It’s a non-bullet-hell shooter with three weapons (one of which can shield your front) and no bomb. There's several modes; I've been playing the basic one, where your power level is static and the score multiplier is based on taking out whole enemy waves without missing anyone, but there's also an "advanced" mode that adds a power-up mechanic, and a time-attack mode where you have to score better to extend your time limit.

The graphics are basic and workmanlike 3D, mostly geometric widget motifs instead of “ship-like” designs, and most of the animation is wobbles or rotations. But it gets a lot done with a little! In particular, it has an extremely stable sense of place, and uses frequent camera angle changes and environment shifts to establish mnemonic landmarks and show you what’s coming next.

Here's a few practical things I learned from this game:

• Abstract geometric ship shapes are good and fine, actually. No one objects to a flying saucer or a rude piece of chex mix. Looking clear and distinct is more important than looking representational. (Both is good, but the latter isn't mandatory.)
• Minibosses don't always have to be fancy or take a long time; almost any big unique enemy can be exciting and function as a useful landmark.
• Throwing out a ton of big unique enemies in a row is a good way to make the impending boss look desperate and angry, which is great motivation for the player.
• If there's a bit of variation on when or where a pickup drops, it can provoke the player into doing something risky.
• Choosing HP levels for small fry is actually all about constraining the player's movement rhythm and viable flight patterns.
• Sometimes it's okay to make the bullets go really fucking fast. You don't wanna just do it out of the blue, but if it's telegraphed a bit then the player can probably handle it.
• You've got a fair amount of leeway and a whole bunch of tools available for balancing a bullet-destroying weapon. Give it an irregular shape, limit its availability with a meter or cooldown, make it good for speed-killing so the player is tempted to spend their meter on offense and risk being caught out empty, give it variable effectiveness on scarier bullet types, etc. ZeroRanger put pretty stringent limits on the melee and charge weapons, and for most bullet types they just push and delay instead of destroying; I was treating that as the gold standard, but Eschatos just lets it rip on bullet destruction with the shield, and it still comes out feeling very balanced.

Judgement Silversword

(Availability: Steam, Switch (I think the Switch version just comes free with Eschatos), and... Wonderswan.)

This was an early game by the Eschatos folks, originally made for the Wonderswan of all things. These games very clearly form a single design lineage; Silversword is sort of a more basic version of Eschatos (down to the three weapon types, even), and it’s still great fun.

The Steam version also includes a sequel called Cardinal Sins, which I’ve only played a bit of, but it’s real interesting; it’s the exact same gameplay parts, but it gives you different orthogonal goals in each level.

Devil Blade Reboot

(Availability: Steam)

This game looks and sounds so fucking sick. Here's the outrageous trailer.

It’s another non-bullet-hell design, focused on very organized and predictable enemy waves; you’re looking to link together reliable routes for each distinct wave shape, while optimizing how close you can stay to the enemies without being shot (since proximity is crucial for score multiplier).

This doesn’t quite grab me by the mastery-hungry part of my brain the way some other shmups have, but it’s real enjoyable to play casually. It's just put together in a way that makes you feel extremely badass even when you're sucking at it. If you don't really want to follow me into this hole but you do like to indulge in some 2D explosions from time to time, this is probably the one to go for.

Hellsinker

(Availability: Steam, BOOTH, or I guess rare 2007 CD-ROM?)

An apparently legendary and influential doujin STG with some VERY strange design ideas.

The complexity of this game is off the charts; there are a ton of per-character abilities, and they all do different things depending on your current resource state and how long you hold the button, or how fast you tap it, or what other buttons you’re holding down. The abilities are also very strange spatially; with skill you can command the whole screen and lay traps for enemies, but there’s a lot of mental stack management you gotta do in order to get there. In particular, playing Deadliar feels like controlling both sides of a two player game at the same time, and playing Fossil Maiden feels like controlling a twin-stick shooter with one of your sticks missing.

There’s also a ton of complexity in just progressing through the game; there are a ton of alternate routes, the lore is cryptic and bizarre (and creepy things happen to the title screen when you pass certain checkpoints), and the score system tracks three independent values (spirits/kills/tokens) instead of giving you a normal total, so even just checking your score requires you to pick a route from several alternatives. There's a scripted event that happens at a varying point somewhere between a quarter to three-quarters through the game, in which you temporarily die and have to go to hell and play Touhou for a while.

I gave this a solid workout and was briefly obsessed with it, but I’ve set it aside for the time being; it was just a little too frustrating to be in my current rotation, and it was too hard to tell what I needed to do to improve at it. Still, I’m very glad I played it; the ideas were so cool, and the sense of style was out of this world.

There are a few gnomic declarations from this that now live here rent-free; special commendation to “an awesome prayer is conflict with us; keep your dignity.”

Flame Zapper Kotsujin

(Availability: PC98 abandonware, gotta emulate)

This was the other really unexpected game that System Erasure called out as an influence in that interview. It’s a PC98 game, so while it’s abandonware that’s pretty easy to find a disk image of, the way to get it running isn’t especially obvious. (The “Neko project 21” emulator seems to cope with it best; dosbos-x can theoretically do PC98, but it’s not its core competency and I couldn’t get it to do decent frame rates and non-skipping sound at the same time.)

This is pretty fun! Mostly I love it for its soundtrack, which there’s an excellent rip of, but also it just has some solid and straightforward shoot-and-dodge action. I feel like it shows the value of not overthinking enemy layouts and bullet patterns; if you just throw a bunch of straightforward shit at the player with enough energy and passion, you can get solid results.

Progear

(Availability: Steam, PS4, Switch, or arcade rom)

An older (“first generation?”) CAVE bullet hell, one of their rare side-scrolling shooters. You can get this in the “Capcom arcade stadium” thing for like two bucks.

I really like the environment and machine art for this one, it’s doing a sort of Ghibli-flavored early 20th century warfare thing combined with a little bit of Metal Slug. The scoring system is based on alternating your firing modes and timing enemy explosions to cancel bullets and spawn a multiplier-building resource; it's messy to explain, but feels natural once you start to get it.

I like this, it’s an especially good space-out game when I’m traveling and have my Switch with me. I can get some distance into the fourth stage on one credit, but that’s in the Japanese rom; weirdly, the North American one has the difficulty ratcheted up a couple notches. (The collection lets you use both.)

GigaWing

(Availability: Steam, PS4, Switch, or arcade rom, or...?)

Also available in the Capcom arcade stadium thing. I think this had a faithful Dreamcast port back in the day.

This one is weird; it’s all built around a reflect ability with a cooldown. I’m absolutely no fucking good at it, haha. It looks gorgeous, though.

Aaaaaand the regulars

In addition to this new stuff, I've continued to play:

• Ketsui — I can sometimes beat stage 4! If I start from a save state that stipulates that I never died in the first three stages (lol). Cinderella Amber is a truly magnificent boss, and the level of proactive aggression that stage 4 demands is really something else.

• Blue Revolver — I got a Val laser hyper clear! At 149 mil and change, that beats my old Mae missiles top score, and I think I can see about 8 million still sitting on the table where I can reach it, so I’m gonna try and claw a little further up the boards with that loadout. (Update since writing that: I already pushed it to 160 million on a non-clear, which puts me at uhhhhh #20 on the global leaderboard for hyper any-hz/any-ship+weapon. The developer is #24. Yikes?? Parallel mode still kicks my ass tho.)

  Also, I made a somewhat annoying discovery. I've been playing all this time at 60hz with vsync turned on, because screen tearing looks so nasty and my screen is capped at 60 anyway, but a couple other games I've played are locked to vsync off to shave off that little bit of extra lag, and I got curious about how much it mattered. So, I turned it off for a couple Val runs just to see. Unfortunately, I very much can perceive the lag difference, and it noticeably improved my capabilities against the fourth and fifth bosses. So now I have to keep it off, I guess. (Switching to 120hz helps reduce the visual glitchiness; I don’t get the smooth motion that a faster display would yield, but it means the temporal gap on a torn frame is smaller.)

• Touhou 10 — I got most of the normal clears, now chipping away at hard mode and the extra stage. Touhou kind of goes on forever if you want it to, with more than 20 official games and a universe of polished fan games; I don’t really plan to make that my whole personality, but it’s apparently a viable option.
• Cho Ren Sha — The old-school power loss still kicks my ass; I’m more accustomed to the CAVE approach, where power loss on death is actually a stagger mechanic and you can get all your shit back in exchange for worse positioning.
• Oh wait did I ever mention that I went back to ZeroRanger a while back to finally notch that 1cc? Well, I did: type-C with backshot/charge/drill. A full run of this game is a serious marathon (about 45m), and there are a few spots that can still put the fear in me even after all that training: loop trains, Grapefruit, Despair. I might go back at some point and try to do a “story 1cc,” where you start from a fresh save and get through the TLB in one run, but for the time being I’m playing other stuff.