I suck and Lunatic CPU kicks ass and takes names. For those who care I’m 1p Reimu (red miko girl) cpu is 2p Scarlet (winged devil girl).
http://s11.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=15V1NTU38VLUD0UAQCUUKXEVWA
45mb avi movie. Download it before the link dies!
Fine, fine, here.
http://kalciane.tnim.org/doujinsoft/iamp/touhou-v101-sakuya-vs-suika-story-wmv9.avi
Last boss on easy mode.
Played a bit more. Starting to not suck now. Unlocked all the characters. 
Sakuya vs. Yuyuko. I lost a bunch of times before this; Yuyuko’s B attacks eat Sakuya’s orbital knives for lunch.
Sakuya vs. Remilia. Watch me get badly owned and barely win.
Remilia’s broken, I hope she gets patched down in the next version.
The game also plays about 5% faster than these vids, since my laptop isn’t buff enough to record at full speed. (The sound desynches for the same reason) It also looks a hell of a lot better in person, too; I had to compress them way down because of their length.
I now have the full version of the game.
One word describes it,
KNIVES
As for who is broken and who is not, it’s pretty hard to say. I used to think Alice was terrible, but I’ve begun seeing how her rushdowns work, so I’m starting to worry about her. I haven’t had a chance to play with most of the new characters yet though… but I’ll have to mess around and see if they have stupidly good moves, horrifying combos, lockdowns, infinites, and that like.
Honestly, the game seems to take after EFZ very well… I haven’t managed to find any horrifying glitches or stupid crap yet. I did find a lot of bizarre crossup glitches, but those aren’t anything other than silly.
Remilia is broken. Horribly, horribly broken. I’d rate her a bit under v2.000 Satsuki broken. Not only does she have seemingly easy 50% combos, her mobility, normals, and projectiles are just way too good. Basically eveything she has is good.
I guess that’s kind of expected being a secret boss character… and she probably wasn’t really beta tested much either. Still, I’m sure she’ll get the shaft in future patches.
50% is a lot for this game. Even my best Reimu combos only do ~45% at this point.
As for others… It seems like all of the normal characters are fine to me. Alice might get a boost to something to help her out (maybe less MP consumption, concidering she needs it to do anything), but for the most part they seem to all be in reletive order.
Here’s a question for you… dashing obviously gives you projectile invincibility. However, it seems possible to dash cancel into normals (hello Slayer) and retain some part of that invincibility. Now my question is, is that a result of the dash cancel, or is it that some dashing normals have that invinsibility inherent to them? It’s obvious you can blast through walls of projectiles with Reimu’s 66B, but other normals doesn’t seem to work so well.
I guess I’ll see if I can get some frame data on it anyway… shouldn’t be too hard, although I’ll have to estimate like with EFZ until I can get ahold of the newer FRAPS version (and probably a new computer to run it ;p ).
:points to av:
Basic engine writeup and ongoing impressions log.
Alice is good, but she’s very much momentum based. No good reversals and utterly horrible bullets.
Youmu is pure rush.
Sakuya is high/low mixup and zoning/spirit draining. Also, her knives seem to dominate every other bullet in the game…
Reimu is just all-around good. Can be run-away with her stupidly low-cost, high-coverage bullets or high/low with her teleports.
Marisa is mostly raw power. Broom charge trumps 75% of all bullet attacks in the game, and she’s got insanely good spell cards.
Patchouli… needs some work. Pure distance fighter, but can be very annoying.
Yuyuko I haven’t figured out, aside from her awesome priority on her normals. Otherwise she’s very, very slow.
Yukari has a bunch of good bullets, but she doesn’t really excel in anything IMO.
Suika’s just plain weird.
And Remilia is, as previously mentioned, utterly broken. Best set of normals, decent bullets, very good specials, VERY good spell cards.
It’s the individual move property. Like Marisa’s broom and Youmu’s b uppercut.
Odd, I think her spell cards are pretty average. The DP cross one is alright, same basic use as Reimu’s light pillar… but same as with Reimu, it’s incredibly easy to punish a wiffed version.
The spear is easily blocked, and you can jump over her and punish it just like in story mode. It does do a fuckload of damage… gives her like 4500~ damage off a combo connect. Reimu gets the same thing though, so I don’t think it’s that awful.
The flying super is pretty good… fast and does alright damage.
I wouldn’t concider any of those broken or anything… other than maybe the DP and spear doing a little too much damage.
As for projectiles, hers kinda suck. They aren’t awful, but she can’t blast people with them like Reimu or rush too well with them like Youmu.
Her normals are okay… fast, but that’s what she’s all about.
She also seems to air dash cancel recover pretty slow… but that wont really hinder her, as she can just do the ADC from father away to rush.
I think the real problem here is that she does too much damage proportional to how fast she can move and do stuff. Turning down her damage in general would probably be enough to balance her out… although they could go the other route and slow her down a bit. Maybe a little bit of both would do well.
I don’t see anything really all that broken in terms of combos, but post some if you know em.
IaMP’s graze engine seems to be that any maneuver which moves your character in a direction in which they would actually be moving into the incoming bullets has some graze potential. You can graze by simply air-teching, the little flip you do has graze potential.
And yeah, Remilia’s problem is that she’s faster than everyone else in the game but deals the same kind of damage. Plus she’s got that stupid 22B which lasts forever and goes halfway across the screen. And that triple airdash when everyone only has two. Considering that a lot of characters don’t have four out of the five things Remilia has going for her at one time, her extra speed and airdash seem rather unbalanced.
Well as mentioned, she does get a bit shafted in the dash cancel area. Her ADC takes forever compaired to other characters, and her ground dash can only hit high (leaves her in the air). That’s not much though. She needs to lose the damage or some mobility for sure.
Also, Yukari’s spell card in story mode where she shoots the unblockable laser beams is pretty much unbeatable. She’ll just block everything you throw at her, meanwhile there are several beam patterns which cannot be dodged other than a teleport or DP. That keeps you busy enough just dodging the attacks that there’s really little you can do to her. It’s beatable, but doing a safe method tends to take FOREVER.
In addition to that one, Yuyuko’s spell card that rains souls is absolutely retarded. Single player isn’t important to game balance, but if they are going to have such an interesting single player element, they might as well at least make it fun and not just annoying as hell.
That’s just extra stuff anyway though, just kinda annoyed that they love throwing in these obnoxious spell cards at random. I wouldn’t mind consistant difficulty across the board on harder modes, but as it is, there tends to just be a handful of obscene cards randomly put throughout the game.
The demo focuses on way too much fireballs for my taste. Any close combat character in the commercial version?
Youmu and Remilia are about it, and you still have to deal with everyone else throwing bullets. You’re not going to get much of a close-up game out of IaMP in general.
I do like how story mode SC’s emulate the assrapingly difficult curtain fire elements of modern shmups.
Yeah, but it depends. You can actually play many characters as Melee focused. Part of what makes getting close so dangerous in this game is because every attack is either High or Low… no normal hits. Because of that, you can really nail someone bad if you break their guard with melee attacks.
Youmu is a crazy ass melee character… she uses her C attacks to put pressure on while she mixes up. Plus, she ignores other feeble projectile atempts by reflecting all of it back at them.
Remilia is fast and crazy… it’s almost impossible to keep up with her she moves so fast. She has a lot of simple, strong combos too.
It also depends on who you play against. Some people/characters are content to throw projectiles at you all day… but the graze system likes to make it almost a jousting match between projectiles and rushing attacks at times.
I like to think you could probably play most characters close or far range to a degree. The spell card you pick also helps determine which you use. For example, Reimu has these cards:
Rainbow Spark: It’s a big projectile barage, great for chip damage and adding into already obnoxious formations.
Light Column: It’s a DP… totally invincible until the recovery. You can use it defensively to punish would-be close range attackers.
Fire Orb: It combos out of a hell of a lot, making it a good choice for combo fiends. With some clever work, you can combo it into itself for some big damage.
So… if you think the game has too many projectiles, you might want to steer clear. If you just like playing up close, you can certainly do that in this game.
Yeah, the story mode is pretty cool, but on Hard/Lunatic, there are those stupid spell cards that are just annoying. Yukari’s it’s just frustrating because you are doing the same thing for about 2 minutes until you win the match… Yuyuko’s… well I have no idea how to deal with that many projectiles that WONT GO AWAY.
Also, if you bomb the final boss’s final spell, it just drops out of it. Kinda lame, concidering that spell card is supposed to be so awesome. ;p
The best part about this game is that every character I try out just manages to furthor exceed my expectations on how cool they are. I’d never seen anything of Pachoulti before… wow. Just… boom.
When projectile characters collide…
http://userpages.umbc.edu/~thoda1/Patch-Reimu2.avi
Unfortunately, Reimu’s projectiles are conciderable better than Pach’s. As I’ve seen so far, playing her seems to be entirely based around getting out that bubble. Good lord that bubble is good.
Do Sakuya’s knives go through bubble? Sakuya’s knives seem to go through everything in the time I’ve played her.
Using 623B to push them back if there’s a bubble floating behind them could be fun, too.
I haven’t tried, but I would doubt it. The bubble seems to just stop projectiles, period. It goes away after time or if the other person hits it. Trust me though, that Bubble is the best thing she has.
And I prefer to push them into it with 236B myself, but whatever. 
To anyone having problems with the config.exe, I didn’t know about the c66 exe & just ran mine in compatibility mode for 98/Me, & it worked fine. It also worked in 95. Hope that helps as a possible alternate solution.
As a side note, this is the first time running something in compatibility mode has ever worked for me.
Holy crap, that does work. I’d been using a keyboard > joystick mapper this whole time. Well, guess that’s that then.