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.
EPT
