Those are some big claims. Why are you questioning the Ketsui port before we’ve seen anything? Same with Daioujou black??
Hey guys- three Great shooters that i just recently discovered.
#1- Wild west cowboys of moo mesa and #2- Mystic Warriors: These two are really cool sunset rider clones, also put out by Konami like Sunset riders, and are worth looking at.
Also #3- Adventures of Batman & robin for Sega genesis. The particular version of the game i’m referring to is genesis only by the way(SNES had a batman title of the same name but gameplay was completely different). Nice 2D graphics for a genesis title as well!
^ are those for mame ??
The company doing it has never touched a shooting game before, they mostly make dating sims, which apparently take first priority to them. Porting Cave games is not easy at all, there’s a lot to worry about getting correct, like emulating slowdown correctly (as wasn’t done with the ports of Mushi and Ibara) and not making minor errors in the scoring system or whatever.
As for Daioujou, the PS2 port is pretty much as arcade perfect as is possible to make. It would be incredibly difficult, especially starting from scratch, to make a more accurate port. Of course this is obviously Black Label so it’s different anyway, but the differences aren’t so huge that I’d take a worse 360 port of it over a better PS2 port of the original.
Sunset Riders is an awesome game
BURY ME WITH MY MONEY
Good points. Still I think Cave has a ton of pressure on them after the imperfect port of Ikaruga, and their own fuck up with the DDP DFK recall. I’m optimistic we’ll see two good ports. And if not, there’s always Ketsui DS! (lol?)
YO so today there was the Cave online festival which was Cave’s obsessive fans’ time to order a bunch of schwag from them and so I did. Picked up:
Dodonpachi Daioujou Black Label poster
Mushihimesama Futari Official DVD with Official book
DDP DOJ T shirt
Mushihimesama cell phone strap
Ibara official book
Deathsmiles coffee mug
DDP DOJ cell phone strap
Prolly should’ve picked up the Ketsui shirt while I had the chance. Ketsui’s fuckin dope…
Yup! Except for batman & robin which is for Genesis :wonder:
If you liked sunset riders, you’ll probably also like those other two.
Well Cave has nothing to do with the 360 port, they basically sold the rights to a company who wanted to do it and that’s about it. I don’t think Cave feels any pressure to push ports since they make enough money through PCB sales and selling swag to keep themselves going just fine.
The DFK recall kind of sucks, but they are doing a free upgrade anyway, so it’s not a big deal. It would be a big deal if they pulled some bullshit like charging to upgrade to the new version (like Arcana Heart did). I mean they did the same with Mushi Futari 1.0 -> 1.5, and people still think of that as one of Cave’s best.
Ketsui DS might be a fun distraction, but so far it just looks like a boss rush and the bosses aren’t nearly the most fun part of the game. Really hard to get excited about playing on a tiny ass screen with those DS controls too.
I’m personally waiting on the next Yagawa game to get announced. It should be hitting late this year but so far I don’t think any info on it has been released. I’d hope for Ibara 2, but that seems kind of unlikely at this point.
It’s a shame actually, I think Cave would have had more direct monetary interest in the 360 port had it been DLC, but Microsoft being idiots prevented this and makes them go the hard copy route. Well, hopefully 5pb will put something playable together.
Re: DFK, you know it’s weird, I have the game in my avatar and I think it’s pretty good, but lately when I’ve been in the arcade I’ve only been playing Mushihimesama black label and starting in on Ketsui and Ibara. DFK can just be too much of a headache some days after work! lol M black label is also an incredible game, definitely one of Cave’s best.
Ketsui is really fun, but also quite hard. The similarities to DOJ are quite noticeable, especially the difficulty. I can’t get past stage 3 with any consistency yet, the bullets are just everywhere lol.
I had to look up who Yagawa is. I guess it’s confirmed that he’s working on a project right now? Let’s list some Cave programmers and what they did.
Tsuneki Ikeda (IKD) - Progear no Arashi, DDP DOJ, DDP DFK, Mushihimesama, Mushi Futari, Esprade, Espgaluda, Espgaluda 2, Ketsui
Takashi Ichimura - Espgaluda
S. Yagawa - Ibara, Muchimuchi pork, Pink Sweets
Mamoru Furukawa - Ibara Black Label
Takashi Ishimura - Deathsmiles
hell fucking yeah yagawa is the man
but he needs to get his shit together and make garegga 2
Yeah, Yagawa was the main guy working on shmups at Raizing, and that’s why we started getting games like Ibara once he jumped on board with Cave. That’s great because Raizing is a very distinctly different style of shooter from Cave.
He’s been working on his next title for a while now, it was confirmed a while back (maybe back around when Deathsmiles was new?). There just hasn’t been any news yet, which is a little strange.
Unfortunately I think Raizing/8ing still owns the rights to Garegga, which sucks because there are too many good characters from that whole series. I’d probably shit my pants if Armed Police Batrider 2 got announced.
I’m still thinking about buying an Ibara PCB at some point just because it’s so dirt cheap, it’s hard to justify not buying one.
Just wanted to remind you PSP and DS owners that Space Invaders Extreme is out. It may not be a maniac shooter or a tough as nails horizontal shooter but it’s a fun score based shooter. A lot of thought went into this game’s gameplay system. I’m now just starting to scratch past the surface of what’s possible. There’s a lot to it. From chaining to chaining so that a specific bonus round is unlocked to the bosses and holding power-ups to use later. Really, DO NOT SLEEP ON IT. $20 bucks, don’t be square, go buy it. DS version is preferred for the Wi-Fi multiplayer/score boards, rumble, and the paddle controller (Import only. Expect to pay $20^).
Also wanted to say how pleased I was to own Taito Legends 2 for Raystorm (I think that’s it) and Darius Gaiden.
Looked up Armed Police Batrider on Youtube, wow that looks like a fun game. There’s actually a Garegga cabinet near my house in a totally nasty Pachinko parlor full of gregarious smoking old men who try to talk to me as I play it, but yeah. I’m not into that game at all. It’s obvious that it really originated a lot of the danmaku style bullet clouds etc. but the bullets are fucking impossible to see and it’s one of those peasoup shooters. Yuck.
I’ve just managed to locate an Ibara PCB in Osaka the other day.
If you guys are ever in Japan, you can use this wiki resource to find places in the city you’re at which have the cabs you want to play:
http://shooter.wiki.cmssquare.com/
I’ll even translate for you if you give me some notice.
So GB, what PCB’s do you own? I’d be curious about your personal rankings of some of the later danmaku shooters since you and I may be some of the only people with access to them.
Garegga is a game you pretty much have to sit down with at home to get the hang of. It’s very difficult and it takes some practice before you can easily see those obnoxious brown bullets. It’s also one of the deepest and best shooters ever though, once you figure out all the mechanics of bombing, suiciding, rank control, and so on. You can actually modify the PCB to make the bullets brighter colored too, which some people do.
Batrider is a lot like Garegga but a lot more beginner friendly and a lot more colorful overall. It has similar depth, but my main problem with it is that it has a lot of metagaming going on with stage and character selection. For example, if you do certain things in stages and then beat the boss with a certain character still alive, you can unlock secret bosses. In that way, it is a lot more anal about when you die than Garegga or Ibara. There are also secrets in every stage… some stages have a huge number, like Highway has up to 4 hidden bosses, a hidden full bomb, and a hidden 1-up.
Anyway, right now I have ESP Galuda 2 and Ketsui. I had Futari 1.5 for a while but I sold it to buy Ketsui.
Ketsui is really good. Not hard to see why so many people think it’s one of Cave’s best. Nice graphics, nice audio, the mechanics are fun, bosses are well designed and interesting, has a lot of unique patterns, and so on.
Galuda 2 is very good as well, one of Cave’s best looking shooters. The mechanics are good, but extremely complicated and not at all easy or strait forward. Probably one of Cave’s deepest games, but you have to put a lot of time and effort into it before you can really start to score decently at all.
Futari is kind of a mixed bag with me. I personally think most of the bosses are pretty ugly and not that interesting. Stage design is very good though, especially the backdrops. I think my biggest problem though, was that Original Mode was the only mode I really liked at all. I didn’t like Maniac’s scoring system… just felt to derivative and restrictive. Ultra was simply too hard to be enjoyable. Original was a lot of fun, but kind of annoying in that a single death would pretty much wreck any chance of a decent score, as your overall counter of course carries over between stages so dieing even in stage 3 hurts your scoring ability to the end of the game. Overall I enjoyed the game, but not really enough to warrant holding on to the PCB.
I would really like to try out Black Label some time as that looks like a lot of fun. Don’t really like the idea of bombing raping your chain though, but then I prefer games where bombing is okay to do.
I’ve also played Pink Sweets. I think it’s pretty underrated actually, it’s a lot of fun to play. The mechanics are pretty fucking crazy, but you can manage with them. Mostly the game is just REALLY hard and a lot about knowing what to do and what not to do.
Haven’t played any of the other newer ones yet. Me and a friend have both been thinking of getting Deathsmiles at some point, but I’m holding out to see the next Yagawa title first before I buy anything else expensive.
Wow, sorry for the ignorace but PCB basically means arcade cabinets right? How many do you own GB?
I’ll have to take your word on it for Garegga I guess. Besides dealing with all the weird dudes in that Pachinko parlor I just didn’t have that much fun with the game.
Was Batrider ever ported?? I guess it’s MAME’able? Sounds like a really deep, fun game. It would be great if this was revived and got a sequel.
Good choices for PCBs to own. ESP Galuda was the first Cave shooter I fell in love with, and 2 is just gorgeous. I’ve only played it a few times, but the review at insomnia.ac seems to indicate that the kakusei system can be a little too complicated for its own good. I wanna put some time in on this one as well as Ibara, but not before 1cc’ing Mushi black label and Ketsui.
Yeah Ketsui is pretty awesome. I still haven’t gotten past stage 3 boss on 1cc, mostly because I haven’t quite learned when to bomb in the game yet. So much shit going on at once on the screen, it’s overwhelming.
I’m with you on Futari’s original mode, to me it feels tuned to perfection. I would highly recommend black label to you, the fact that your options auto-lock onto bigger enemies makes it a bit easier to get through the hell of stage 3, and makes the game really fun. Man, level 5 is long! lol
Pink Sweets I’ve only seen once, and it was on the other side of the country. I’m sure there’s a cab here somewhere and I’ll get around to checking it out at some point.
Deathsmiles is an ok game, but I dunno I got to like the fourth level on one coin my first try and decided it was way too easy. I guess you can adjust difficulty for each level though? Haven’t really formed an opinion of this yet. But I did get a Deathsmiles coffee mug, haha.
I wonder when we’ll see that new Yagawa title actually. DFK just got its 1.5 which has the green helicopter in it and fixes the scoring problem, so maybe after a few months of DFK being out?
I’ve played Batrider on mame so I know it’s there, it was pretty fun though I haven’t played it in a while.
Haha yeah I’d just play it in MAME if I were you. OR, there’s a Saturn port that’s very good too. It’s kind of pricey but much cheaper than the PCB, which has now shot up in price for some reason.
No port, but you can grab the Version B MAME rom. Runs just fine, just make sure you use a version .125 or later.
Well really you should never bomb in Ketsui, but I guess that much is obvious. 
I’ve 1cc’ed the first loop of Ketsui and Original Mode in Futari 1.5. Haven’t managed to make it to a second loop in Ketsui yet though, Stage 4 and 5 are really hectic and I don’t have much luck getting through without a fair number of bombs or deaths yet.
Deathsmiles has a huge range of difficulty. It’s Cave’s easiest game if you play it on Rank 1, but it’s very difficult (harder than Futari 1.5 on Maniac) if you play it the whole way through on Rank 3.
PCB = Printed Circuit Board, meaning the game itself, not the cabinet. I have an Egret 2 cabinet though, but just ESPG2 and Ketsui right now. Working on buying some Toaplan games right now though.
I highly suggest you try and get used to the bullet colors and learn the nuances of the game. The strategy guide on shmups covers every part of it comprehensively.
I still stand firm that it’s my favorite shmup hands down and one of the most well crafted games of all time. Once the game clicks with you it’s brilliant, not to mention the top-notch soundtrack from Manabu Namiki.
Is Garrega the one with just airplanes and like you have 6 or so bits that you can arrange in a bunch of different formations? I’ve played that one too, cool stuff, though again I’m not at the level to really understand any nuances of the game.