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Played some Alien Soldier on Virtual Console, which gave me the idea for this username. I keep getting killed by Madam Barbar D:

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Any Americans have Raiden IV on 360 yet? Gamestop's system says it was released yesterday, but none of their stores around here have copies.

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It plays amazingly close to the original Raidens, with similarly modest presentation. All the original weapons are back largely unchanged, with a new 3-way noodly laser that sways with your movement (it's pretty useless though). Despite the obvious Cave/Treasure influence, it's not at all a bullet-hell, the game prefers making the bullets really fast instead of chucking huge quantities of them at you. Which is just as hard, if not moreso.

They added a scoring system that gives you bonuses based on how quick you kill enemies once they appear onscreen, but since it's not a multiplier, it's not as horribly skewed as Thunderforce V's "quick shot" system. It also encourages you to use the powerful blue laser more, which makes you vulnerable to the tiny sniper enemies that roll in down the sides: do you take risks and get in close to big targets with the focused weapon, or do you hang back with the giant toothpaste laser and obliterate everything at a less rewarding pace?

I've never played a shmup before with such an apparent difficulty spike. Once you get into Stage 3, you'll be seeing close to double the bullets and enemies you were before. And there's even a loop, with a secret final boss at the very end! The game also has one of those "play two ships at once with one controller" modes that seem to be in vogue these days, which is good stupid fun for fifteen minutes.

There's two DLC ships, which they had the audacity to charge 80 space bucks a pop for, especially when their downloads are just 40 KB unlock codes. The Raiden mkII is ridiculously strong when fully powered up (which takes 8 items), but moves as sluggish as it did in III, and its drop-bombs don't instantly cancel bullets. The Fairy is fast but weak, with a strange bubble attack that crawls across the screen. Neither are of much value in "serious" play.

The music is rockin' psuedo-chiptunes reminiscent of Virtual On, with a few classic remixes in the same style. The Gamestop Limited Edition included the OST, which I am listening to right now. Anyway, it's a definite must-purchase if you're an American 360 owner and give a shit about scrolling shooters to some degree. Only major annoyance: you can't completely turn off the intrusive screen borders.

BROTIP: After getting a missile powerup, don't fire for several seconds. When your ship glows with electricity, fire, and you'll shoot off a barrage of whatever missile you're holding, every successful hit of which gives 500 points. This is never mentioned in the game or manual.

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Tried playing through Xexex on MAME. It comes across as a wonky hybrid of Gradius and R-Type that doesn't include enough elements of either to feel especially interesting, but visually it's a brillant tour-de-force of early nineties graphic design (ignoring the garish Chuck-E-Cheese ball pit stage), and on a technical level it looks three years ahead of its time! Also, blue-haired eroge cutscenes. Too bad it was totally eclipsed by SFII, which also came out in 1991.

If anyone else wants to give it a go, make sure you're playing the Japanese ROM, since most of the weapons were removed for the international versions, probably as a stupid way to increase difficulty. It's also available on that PSP Salamander compilation.

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What the hell guys the vehicle segments of Gears 2 were AMAZING.

There is no denying that Twisted Metal + Good Controls, Panzer Bro-goon, and Mechwarrior With Monsters make for quality snippets of action gaming.

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Damn. God Hand had its fair share of QTEs, but they were entirely unscripted, required actual skill to perform correctly, and involved lots of cathartic button mashing.

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I consider a QTE to be any verb that displays a large representation of a controller button on the screen when it can be performed and results in an action not otherwise possible with the constraints of the player's moveset. Not just something in cutscenes.

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I can appreciate SFIV as its own thing, mostly because I have no nostalgic memories of SFII and consider it totally unplayable by modern standards.

That, and the lack of functional online capabilities for 3S.

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Yeah, the reason I consider SFII (including ST) "unplayable" isn't because it's unbalanced, it's because it feels so sluggish, jerky, and weightless; even with the speed settings cranked up, compared to the Alpha or SFIII games. They hadn't had time to perfect how fighting game characters are supposed to move.

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Goddamn it, I am going to get through Dragon Quarter's endgame boss gauntlet even if I have to Give Up again.

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At least it isn't needlessly divided up into four separate "buttons."

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The Dualshock sticks are perfect for 360-degree movement and utterly horrid for 8-way.

The stick on the Saturn's 3D controller is a strange and wonderful beast. Can't say the same about the Dreamcast's though.

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Damn, Monster Hunter (PSP) is absorbing. After fifteen hours playtime in three days, I'm almost done with the main three-star quests.

There's so much item management crap to keep track of, but it doesn't seem like much of it will be really necessary until considerably later, and I've already crafted a few good pieces of armor and some really strong dual blades.

I wish lances weren't so difficult to use--they're the most deliciously crunchy weapons in the game. I've given another copy to a friend as a Christmas gift, so hopefully we'll be able to get together for some co-op quests before break ends.

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I've had my PSP for over a week now, and been testing out lots of games and demos (mostly Monster Hunter). The first thing I downloaded off of PSN, along with some PS1 games, was Fate/Unlimited Codes.

It's a fairly standard 3D fighter that feels transplanted from the late nineties. Not surprising, considering that it's coming from Eighting, developers of Bloody Roar and more anime-licensed fighting games than I care to list here. However it's far more complex than its counterparts, with an intimidating array of movement functions, guard cancels, timed reflect moves, and multi-stage supers. The CPU isn't afraid to go combo-crazy on you either. There's tons of unlockables and crap, and the story mode's actually pretty interesting if you're a fan of Type-Moon (which I happen to be). Unfortunately, the character balancing is terrible, with Caster being able to launch endless screen-filling projectiles from afar, and both players need copies of the game for multiplayer, so there goes that.

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Having not played it, I can almost definitely say yes! It's got a new campaign chapter that's never been made available for the 360 version (in which you're forced to fight a Brumak on foot with meager weapons), there's plenty of custom maps and mods out there that it supports, and the KBM controls are supposedly very fluid and effective.

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Goddamn, fighting invisible sound-based enemies in Kenji Eno's Enemy Zero is a stressful experience.

Man, how did the FMV in that game end up so much better than in FFVII, which came out the same year? Obviously they intended it to be a much greater focus of the game, and a majority of the space on the four discs is dedicated to it, but it's not like WARP had Square's tens of millions of dollars to work with. Of course, the answer is "actual cinematography and artistic direction."

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Tulpa, D and to a lesser extent Enemy Zero were intended to be "interactive movies" in the literal sense. The reason that Laura stars in three of Eno's games, all with unrelated plots, is because she's a "digital actress" (I imagine this sounded like a neat idea in the nineties), not a character tied to any one game. It's a legitimate problem that not collecting items in the right order can lead to the game getting "confused", but the puzzles weren't meant to be creative or difficult in the first place--just an excuse to give the player something to do while watching FMV. Enemy Zero clearly divides itself into real-time and FMV-based areas to emphasize this, too. I can appreciate the game for what it's trying to accomplish, despite its Sega CD approach to adventure game design and its dated visuals (which, in this era of Pixar and Unreal Engine 3, have an appeal of their own).

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muteaid, I had Darius Burst preordered, and it still hasn't come in :(

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Okay, I admit it--my bias against FFVII's cutscenes stems primarily from the characters' existence as mutated Lego figures stuck in a limbo between semi-realistic and chibi. The SEPHY KILLS AERIS scene in particular at least tries to pull off some fancy camera angles when he's plunging down from above.

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Why is it that every Amiga game with a fantasy setting (including Agony) seems to use those distinctive "magic potion" flasks for health recovery or powerups? It's not just a Psygnosis thing, either.

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I rescued a copy of Arc's ill-fated Guilty Gear Musou RTS from the Gamestop bargain bin, and all I can say is dear god, this game is incomprehensible. The dialogue in campaign mode is animu fanfiction drivel about power levels and magic circuits, and the first thing you see in the game is two bishonen arguing around a campfire. One of the playable characters is a wizened old iguana-bird thing with a fairy familiar, floating in a sphere of water. He attacks by summoning giant stone apples engraved with the equation "e=mc²". I don't even want to begin to describe how much multilayered, abstract crap you've got to understand to even attempt to play the game properly.

The constant visual bombardment from the eyesore-sized HUD, insane amounts of bloom, and giant swaths of primary colors don't exactly help either. I suppose they were trying to recreate the flamboyant decadence of the 2D games with an added dimension, but it didn't quite work.

Of course, the Xbox Live lobbies were all empty.

I'm, uhh, gonna need some time to figure this all out. Maybe I should get used to Herzog Zwei first, which Icy's site tells me it's heavily derived from. I still genuinely want to learn how to play the thing, though! The idea of a Guilty Gear RTS is just too enticing.

Oh yeah, and Sol's units speak in hilarious robotic Engrish.

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Managed to find an online opponent (Japanese, of course) in Guilty Gear 2 and promptly got my ass kicked. Apparently, Sin's special attack that grows more powerful in the vicinity of more allied units can get strong enough to one-hit-kill anything; he exploited this fully.