Has anybody here on glorious TL.net played the Touhou series before?
For those who are unaware of what Touhou is, It's a series of LIFE-CHANGING vertically-scrolling Japanese shooters. They are infamous for being some of the most challenging games of their kind, and for good reason. It was created by Team Shanghai Alice and spawned a devoted fanbase that made hella media off of the series.
This is a video of some amazing player beating the final stage in the 6th installment of the touhou series, Embodiment of Scarlet Devil. EoSD is the first "good" touhou game because it was the first released for the pc and is simply amazing, namely the characters which remain fan favorites to this day like Cirno and Sakuya. The full versions of Touhou 6-10 (edit: now on 11, Subterranean Animism, with 12 being worked on by ZUN currently) are all playable and able to be downloaded in various places of the internet, most of those places being Japanese. The games before 6 were for PC-9801, and cannot be played on the PC unless you use an emulator, but don't bother to search for them, they aren't nearly as good as the latter games. Btw, this video isnt even the hardest difficulty of the game.
This is a video of the final stage of the 8th Touhou game, Imperishable Night. Yet another mind-blowing performance by some person on YouTube... (honestly how do they do that) The reason why it fast forwards in the beginning is because it was watched in boss replay mode where it speeds through everything before the bosses, tantamount to fast forwarding through the boring parts of replays of bw gosus. This video isn't on the hardest difficulty either (technically lunatic 1cc is much harder than extra). http://youtube.com/watch?v=4Nb5Ohbt1Sg&
The reason why I asked if anybody played is for tips :D I don't even know how long I've been trying to beat EoSD on arcade difficulty without using a continue. Judging by the size of TL, there must be at least some side-scrolling shooter gurus out there, but if not, I think BW gosus (which I definitely am not) will also be very good at the games because of reaction time and all that other shit involved in being good at games.
edit: yes, the boss theme song in the first video is the original version of the song used in the insane mcdonalds video
Touhou's kind of in the extreme end of bullet hell shmups as far as I know, being characterized by:
1. Lots of bullets on screen, but more importantly 2. Bullets move really really slow 3. For just staying alive rather than scoring points, camping in one location at the bottom edge of the screen is rewarded, only moving when necessary
I mean, you know you're supposed to be bottom edge whoring when the game gives you an indicator of enemy position on the bottom edge below your character, so you don't need to look up at the rest of the screen as much. -_-;;
And I think they're on the more easy end? Well I guess Imperishable Night is enough of a handful, probably just remembering too much of Mountain of Faith (10).
I've played Touhou 6-10 a little, enough to 1 CC the easy ones like 10, but I'm no master at all and suck at shmups in general. IMHO 9.5, Shoot the Bullet, is the best of the Touhou games, although it's not a "true" installment in that sense. STB is only bosses, and besides, in most Touhou games the bosses are more interesting than the stages anyway. But what I like about STB is that it requires you to get closer (as in, find an opening and weave inside some bullet patterns) and leave the bottom edge of the screen to "hit" the enemy at all.
I guess I've played STB the most, having bothered to clear out all but about 8 stages total including the extras. At about the 40th picture I just gave up on some of the last 8 or so, no motivation to finish it, although I have taken up to 400-600 pictures to complete a few of the harder ones before. Eh, my older bro's more of a shmup player, so he's finished the game, but even he's not too amazing.
Fun games though, but I'm no shmup connoisseur. The Touhou games and maybe a Twinbee and Dragon Spirit (DS awesome btw) back in the day plus a few more shmups (e.g. Xbox 360 LA release Omega Five, port of Triggerheart Excelica, really short stuff like Every Extend and then rRootage) are my total shmup experience.
I'm not sure exactly, but this game looks very similar to "Psyvariar 2" for dreamcast. I've played that one to death, I may have to give some of these other games a go as well.
You know, saying Touhou games were made by "Team Shanghai Alice" is kind of misleading when the "team" is just Zun by himself doing all the graphics/art/coding/bullets/music.
IIRC Zun is an employee of Taito these days. Wonder what he does there.
On March 29 2008 14:10 travis wrote: ok i downloaded it and am playing it but i dont know what keys do what and the config menu is in japanese and shit i dunno it doesn't tell me
Default keys should be Z - shoot LShift - focus (makes you slower, you can see your hitbox, changes your bullet pattern) X - bomb (kill bullets on screen)
which should be natural enough. There should be English menu patches out there if you really want. Most of the menus aren't too important anyway. The most important thing is when you're selecting your character, there are different versions which have different bullet patterns. Which game did you download anyway?
Touhou is mainly about practice. Watch videos, memorize the bullet patterns, and just copy what other people do to avoid them. After you get enough experience you can start making up your own ways to avoid each spell card. Btw the Extra Stage IS the hardest stage in Imperishable Night.
If you like Touhou, you should also check out Seihou which is like a sister of the Touhou series. I wrote a little about it in my blog here and I uploaded some of the games. If anyone is interested I can re-upload the games. There's also a neat shmup documentary posted by Chill on the 2nd page.
those look pretty good, but the best sidescrolling shooter ive ever played was einhander on the ps1. (anyone played it?) it was about a war between the earth and the moon after world war 3, and some suicide fighters from the moon, or something like that.
I liked touhou games because of the music and sparkly bullet patterns. It's really impressive how one guy made it all. I never had time to get any good at it though.
I used to play them a lot a while back, but it got boring once you started memorizing most of the patterns and could do everything without even thinking about it. Imperishable Night and Perfect Cherry Blossom were my two favorites.
Personally, one of my favourite shmups to watch is ESPGaluda II. (I'd love to play it too, if that were possible .) Some of the bullet patterns are really mesmerising to look at.
Unfortunately, afaik there's only one correct-aspect-ratio video of ESPGaluda II on Youtube, and I uploaded it =P. This is the 4th boss, played on "overheat mode" (makes the bullets turn red and go faster).
One really cool thing about the ESPGaluda series is that you can collect green gems and use them to either (a) slow the game down at hard parts, and/or (b) get higher scores. If you don't care about score, then you can make the game easier by just saving your gems and using them at the difficult parts only.
I prefer watching the overheat mode videos, though, because I get kind of bored watching the game going in and out of slowdown mode ^^;;. I'll see if I can upload more ESPGaluda II footage to Youtube later.
one of the most creative innovations to these type of scrolling shooters is IKARUGA.
The core progressive concept of it is the black and white feature of you and your enemies, which can be against you or help you. you can switch from white to black, and you absorb the same color attacks/particles for charging your power bar for a strong attack. Every enemy can be for you or against you - you just need to be the right color.
There are black enemies and white enemies. while not nearly resemblent of GTA (heh), when you destroy enemies, they blow up into either black or white particles, which you can then get hit by or absorb.
here's a video sample
settings: (all ships shoot their own color, but also emit particles when they blow up, according to difficulty settings) but as a bonus, ships take more damage if you use the opposite color against them.
easy: no ships emit particles when they blow up
normal: only ships of the same color as you emit particles (you can see you can get very strategic and action packed already)
hard: everything you shoot blows up to emit particles according to it's color
back when i liked playing shmups, ikaruga was my main game of choice i liked it more than others like touhou because of the chain and color system, making it more fun (imo) than just dodging bullets on screen ;o!
i could never figure out the 2nd part to 4-2 but aside from that i did quite well in the game! good to know it's coming to xbox live arcade :O
On March 30 2008 11:28 NathanSC wrote: Ikaruga is amazing and far from a one-dimensional shooter game.
Well of course: it's two-dimensional.
Learning to play Ikaruga (when one of my housemates had it for his Dreamcast) was such a fun experience. I remember there was one day where I practiced chapter 4 for at least 3 hours straight, and afterwards my brain was stuck in Ikaruga Mode for the next 15+ minutes. Like, I was talking on MSN and I couldn't stop categorizing things as red or as blue and keeping track of their locations and movement.
A touhou thread I read (where they were talking about "why the hell did touhou become popular?") mentioned that as far as bullet field type shooters go, Touhou is actually easier than the standard vertical scroll shooters out there. Its popularity is derived more from its graphics, appealing bullet patterns, music, and secondary fan creations such as remixes of the music (soooo many CDs out there), redrawing of the characters by far superior artists, fan novelizations, etc.
In fact tons of pple are "fans" of Touhou without having ever played the game! wtf??
I would have liked to be able to recommend a "more difficult" shooter to you but I am unfortunately a newbie in the genre. The only title that I can even think of is Mushihime.
I still have the Original High Quality version of the video when it was first released by the guy in Japan like 7 years ago. I usually don't save files that long, but this is one of them.
lol you have the japanese people who become godly at these arcade games or like tetris..(basically single player games) than you have the koreans who just go hardcore and are a huge step above the rest in multiplayer games.... SC anybody? lol
Shooters are single-player, but they've still got an element of competition in their scoreboards. Getting to put your initials on that scoreboard is one of those things that I miss now that arcades in my area are pretty much dead.
On May 07 2008 07:23 kyjori wrote: lol you have the japanese people who become godly at these arcade games or like tetris..(basically single player games) than you have the koreans who just go hardcore and are a huge step above the rest in multiplayer games.... SC anybody? lol
Guys what about Metal Slug!! Awesome game I just picked up Metal Slug Anthology for the PSP (Has 1, 2, X, 3, 4, 5, and 6) ! Here is a guy running through Metal Slug X without dying:
I finally got around to uploading a full run of ESPGaluda II to Youtube. It's about 2.5 years old, so better runs and better scoring techniques have been performed since then. Still, it's very cool to watch, particularly the boss fights.
I don't know who the player is. He plays for score in stages 1-4 and plays to survive in stages 5-6.
Game mechanics in brief:
- Only the centre of your character (where you see the little rotating gem) is vulnerable. Bullets have hitboxes that are smaller than their actual sprites, as well. - In "normal mode" (blue bullets), you collect green gems for destroying enemies. - In "kakusei mode" (purple bullets), you spend your green gems in return for slowing down all the bullets on the screen. When an enemy is destroyed, its bullets disappear and you get points for them. - "Super kakusei mode" allows you to collect even more points than kakusei mode, however the bullets do not simply disappear: they become inactive temporarily, then they fly in your direction again. - If you run out of green gems in either kakusei mode or super kakusei mode, then you go into "overheat mode" (red bullets) where your score increases constantly, but the bullets travel faster.
As far as I know, this game is still arcade-only. But, if you're fortunate enough to live in Austin, Texas, then there is a new arcade opening up soon that will have this game.
EPT
.) Some of the bullet patterns are really mesmerising to look at
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