Messages

91

Off Topic / Re: Does this ruin your childhood and make you sad?

« on: July 17, 2017, 09:34:58 pm »

A kids cartoon is not that deep; I'll keep munching on meat anyways.

92

General / Re: Anybody Else Ever Fall in and out of Love with Collecting?

« on: July 14, 2017, 03:15:55 pm »

You are more likely to get in trouble for distributing carts full of ROM's, or buying from a company that engages in such practices. I've never heard of anyone getting in trouble for downloading ROM's, especially in the last 10 years.

They're not gonna go after someone who downloads 25 year old arcade ROM's, simply bc there are no legal means to buy the product ( w/o huge markup on the secondary market) and there's hardly much of a benefit to do so compared to people who illegally download music or movies.

Except they do. Like I posted further up the thread, I know a guy personally that it happened to. It's just rare, and the people that it happens to are made an example of. And it wasn't Nintendo, it was the FCC.

A few years back, you could probably say that of old games and not having access to said games. But nowadays, retro gaming is a big business between Nintendo Virtual Console, Steam, GoG, PlayStation Network, compilation discs, even XBox Original games coming soon. Companies are indeed losing money when you download old games in 2017.

It was never explained in detail how this guy got nailed. The vast majority of cases ( 99.9% of people downloading) will get ignored bc it is not worth the FCC's or RIAA's time unless its a big enough operation ( like redistributing flash carts in a business) that gets their attention.

Besides, companies are more focused now on selling their products than worrying about people downloading ROM's. It is simply not profitable for them to invest significant money and effort into stopping it when their efforts cause more people to pirate them in the first place.

 In addition, it is the only way that I can play certain games such as F/A (27 years old arcade only release) that will absolutely never get any additional releases on modern platforms ( this happens to many games still). Game companies only care about certain old releases that they can milk; its up to other people to preserve the rest ( which ofc means you break our poorly constructed ip laws due to the confusing parameters of fair use).

93

General / Re: Anybody Else Ever Fall in and out of Love with Collecting?

« on: July 14, 2017, 01:49:25 pm »

The fact of the matter is that REALLY, Nintendo is the only company that tries to pursue these matters.  Usually a simple cease and desist.  Sony usually only does it for distribution of the BIOS for the hardware, but I don't know if they still do that.  I know for a while GBA games were really hard to find because Nintendo was constantly having sites shutdown or threatened to be shut down.

Nah, PS2 BIOS have been pretty easy to find in the last 5 years or so. In Nintendo's case, they screwed up with their 3DS system basically allowing homebrew users to access the whole system, and get any eshop game for free as long as you don't update Nintendo's firmware on your system. The Wii U and Wii have similar situations, but are harder to utilize since you have to do some more hunting for ISO's, but it doesn't seem too difficult from my experience.

94

General / Re: Anybody Else Ever Fall in and out of Love with Collecting?

« on: July 14, 2017, 01:14:57 pm »

You are more likely to get in trouble for distributing carts full of ROM's, or buying from a company that engages in such practices. I've never heard of anyone getting in trouble for downloading ROM's, especially in the last 10 years.

They're not gonna go after someone who downloads 25 year old arcade ROM's, simply bc there are no legal means to buy the product ( w/o huge markup on the secondary market) and there's hardly much of a benefit to do so compared to people who illegally download music or movies.

95

General / Re: Anybody Else Ever Fall in and out of Love with Collecting?

« on: July 14, 2017, 03:42:14 am »

^  Well that's a first. I'm assuming he went way beyond what most people would do to actually get that much punishment. Usually someone who's distributing flash carts gets slapped with punishment, not regular people who download a rom off the internet.

96

General / Re: Anybody Else Ever Fall in and out of Love with Collecting?

« on: July 13, 2017, 10:44:31 pm »

I collect to share eventually. I used to use emulators and ROMS. but I found out that the free ones can be viral and also ROM's are becoming more and more illegal in my country these days.

What does that even mean?! It's pretty easy to find emu stuff w/o getting viruses, and much easier to play what you want if you don't have the money to spare for some of these games. The government does not care enough about ROM's to go after people for "improper usage".

97

General / Re: VGC's Anonymous/"General" Topic:

« on: July 13, 2017, 02:39:21 pm »

Probably the ones who give "advice" or try to act like the big expert about a particular subset of games.

There is one guy I know who thinks that he should be a revered figure of the stg community because he played a bullet hell that has very little interest or competition( due to this version only being offered as a pre-order bonus for the base game's release on the 360).
 Due to this he makes numerous comments about other games in the genre are not good & easy( due to one crappy list), and the only ones worth playing are the modern bullet hells bc according to him, pre rendered and flashy 3d is the only thing that matters :p.

Due to this, its no surprise that nobody places any meaning on his opinions anymore.

98

Classic Video Games / Re: Survival Horror On The Super Nintendo or Super Famicom?

« on: July 12, 2017, 04:32:12 am »

Doom is a fps, not a survival horror game lol.

If you wanna talk about actual survival horror games, the main two that pop in my head are the original Clock Tower and Laplace no Ma ( Laplace's Demon). Both of these have english translation patches, and from what I've seen and played, Clock Tower is pretty damn good.

99

Classic Video Games / Re: Shmups on a budget

« on: July 11, 2017, 08:38:34 pm »

1945: Strikers on PS1 is a fantastic shoot-em up that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

This.

Or get Mobile Light Force and Shooter Space Shot for far less and still have some money left to get Shooter Starfighter Sanvein. Even after all that, you'll still have some change left.

Mobile Light Force isn't worth the money due to the horrendous screen wobble and reduced screen size among other missing features. Just play it in MAME or get the Saturn Gunbird port instead.

100

General / Re: 52 Game Challenge 2017

« on: July 11, 2017, 02:12:33 am »

That is just madness lol. Yeah, it just felt incredibly imbalanced and was not that much fun on expert. I don't doubt that it's possible to 1cc on expert (probably at least five people on youtube that have done it), but it would be quite the undertaking. On the loops I almost do doubt that it is possible.

There is one guy in the west named saucy who got to loop 4 stage 4 on expert with a 17 mil score, but he's an exceptional player compared to many of us in the stg community. I've seen some ridiculous scores from japanese players on twitter, including one who supposedly got to 100 mil on the dx ps1 port: https://twitter.com/boredom_79/status/870975088476037121.
There are also high scoring replays on niconico, which is pretty much japanese youtube.

101

General / Re: 52 Game Challenge 2017

« on: July 10, 2017, 04:09:58 pm »

Two more to go, however I can see this being the year where I play the most games I ever have.

50. Raiden DX (Arcade): While I haven't thoroughly played the original Raiden in a very long time, I am all but certain that I would like it more than this supposed updated version. The graphics have been updated no doubt, however this game suffers most in the gameplay department. The game desperately wants to be a bullet hell shooter like Dodonpachi, but doesn't realize it isn't. First off the ship speed and hit box size is not conducive of you being able to avoid enemy projectiles, especially during the looped sections of the game. This results in a game that feels terribly imbalanced and not really that much fun to play. It's a shame because this is probably the first Raiden game I've played that I flat out did not like. (7/9/17)

This review really confuses me as someone who has 1cc'd both Training and Novice modes.
Which mode did ya play?
I'm also not sure how the game is trying to be like Dodonpachi, even though it came out three years before DDP, with less dense but faster bullet patterns and more aggressive zakos. While the ship speed is pretty slow compared to most newer games, having lots of cluster bombs ( especially in Training) and a general idea of stage routes will help you get survival clears.

Now I haven't played much of Expert course, but that one is considered to be more difficult, with a difficulty similar to Raiden II, especially for a 1cc. I will also say that it was dumb that the purple colgate laser is pretty bad compared to Raiden II, so the spread is 90% used except for a few specific spots.

I did play it on expert which might be my problem. I will replay it tonight on Novice and see if my opinion of it improves. If you haven't tried expert you should, you'll see what I'm talking about.

Yeah, the whole thing about DX was players in arcades back in the day complained about II's difficulty level, so DX was created w/ training and novice modes to address those concerns and make additional profit. The Expert course difficulty-wise seems similar to Raiden II; I feel like it is doable on my skill level but it would take awhile considering i've 1cc'd raiden i, but haven't played much of ii or dx expert course.
My girly could pass on some tips considering she's 1cc'd raiden ii and beat mushihimesama maniac mode on her 2nd credit!!!

102

General / Re: 52 Game Challenge 2017

« on: July 10, 2017, 04:26:15 am »

Two more to go, however I can see this being the year where I play the most games I ever have.

50. Raiden DX (Arcade): While I haven't thoroughly played the original Raiden in a very long time, I am all but certain that I would like it more than this supposed updated version. The graphics have been updated no doubt, however this game suffers most in the gameplay department. The game desperately wants to be a bullet hell shooter like Dodonpachi, but doesn't realize it isn't. First off the ship speed and hit box size is not conducive of you being able to avoid enemy projectiles, especially during the looped sections of the game. This results in a game that feels terribly imbalanced and not really that much fun to play. It's a shame because this is probably the first Raiden game I've played that I flat out did not like. (7/9/17)

This review really confuses me as someone who has 1cc'd both Training and Novice modes.
Which mode did ya play?
I'm also not sure how the game is trying to be like Dodonpachi, even though it came out three years before DDP, with less dense but faster bullet patterns and more aggressive zakos. While the ship speed is pretty slow compared to most newer games, having lots of cluster bombs ( especially in Training) and a general idea of stage routes will help you get survival clears.

Now I haven't played much of Expert course, but that one is considered to be more difficult, with a difficulty similar to Raiden II, especially for a 1cc. I will also say that it was dumb that the purple colgate laser is pretty bad compared to Raiden II, so the spread is 90% used except for a few specific spots.

103

Classic Video Games / Re: Shmups on a budget

« on: July 08, 2017, 03:22:04 pm »

SNES is kind of a terrible system for shooters.

I've never understood why this mentality seemed to prevail on the internet when the SNES actually has a fine library of shmups. Some fantastic ones off the top of my head:

-Aero Fighters
-Axelay
-Darius Twin
-Gradius III
-R-Type III: Third Lightning
-Raiden Trad
-STG: Strike Gunner
-Super R-Type
-Thunder Spirits
-U.N. Squadron

I feel it's just a victim of it's time. In comparison to it's contemporaries, the Sega Genesis, and ESPECIALLY the TurboGrafx-16, yeah, the list comes up a little short. But compared to most systems in general, that's a fine library of blowing things up. It's just that those other 2 systems just happened to really specialize in shmups.

For me it's mainly a matter of how slow-paced the SNES shooters are. They're beautiful to look at, but on average they're just boring compared to what we got on the MD/Genesis and TG16/PCE.

Some of the best horis on the SNES never even made it to the states such as Parodius Da, Gokujou Parodius, Twinbee, Macross: Scrambled Valkyrie. There's also Space Megaforce, which is better crafted than several other compile titles like gunhed ( blazing lasers) or musha.
Some of these have different modes or loops that keep difficulty high at a decent pace; space megaforce particularly excels at this with relatively little slowdown.

104

General / Re: Which would you rather buy? Round 4!! (Prototype Consoles) Xbox Portable?

« on: July 08, 2017, 05:02:22 am »

Neither, unless more details were revealed for these systems, or were reworked into being more marketable with reasonable price points based on the given specs.

105

Classic Video Games / Re: Shmups on a budget

« on: July 08, 2017, 04:53:45 am »

STG Primer 101

First of all, if you are comfortable with emulation, I'd recommend MAME, which supports a vast majority of 2d shmups and some 3d shmups released in arcades ( some notable exceptions being the ST-V which had an ungodly amount of input lag, and Naomi which requires another emulator named Demul and a beefy computer).

If you are looking for physical copies instead, then your best bet are checking out the Xbox 360 with Raiden IV, Raiden Fighters Aces, Deathsmiles, Mushihimesama Futari, Akai Katana,  and the PS2 w/ the two Taito Legends compilation, and Castle Shikigami 2, Gradius III/IV, Gradius V.  Steam has a lot of indie stuff nowadays as well.

 Most of the other console systems don't have too much of a robust library, has titles which are available in a better format, or are just simply too expensive.

I'd highly reccomend the emulation route if you are testing out shmups. It makes it easier to determine what kinds of stgs you want to own and are more interested in. In addition, you can always check out shows for more in-depth analysis of a game such as STGWeekly ( a weekly stg podcast thingy which I'm currently a part of!)