Nutmeg
Arcane
I'm put off a bit by the gay overtones in Ketsui and the tranny stuff in Espaluda. Might be a bit immature of me but whatever.
In other news, got the Axelay 1CC on Normal, and then made it to 2-2 where I played way too aggressively and needlessly ran into too many enemies. I've gotten to 2-4 before from a 2CC of the first loop yielding less lives at the start of the 2nd. My understanding is the 2nd loop is just the "hard" difficulty, so I look forward to revisiting the game on that setting. From what I've seen so far, it's much more busy and there's a lot more slow down. There's some new Boss patterns too you don't see on normal, maybe because certain boss attacks can now force you into defensive positions you did not previously need to assume (on normal, I mean).
I guess I'm getting to the point where these "easy" 1CCs do indeed feel quite easy. That being said, they're less psychologically taxing than setting a 1CC goal for more demanding games, so I don't feel like I've quite outgrown them yet.
Some more thoughts on the game:
Stage 1 feels very calculated on the part of the game designers. For one, they decided as the opener it should be one of three vertical stages with a visually unique cylindrically scrolling background, which I assume would have had a certain wow factor at the time, and still looks pretty damn cool if using a CRT shader and presumably a real CRT too. Two, the first few enemy formations are geared around the round vulcan, probably the most important tactical weapon in the game. Struggling with these formations teaches the player that they can shoot in a circle, and that they can tap rhythmically to maintain an angle of fire. The stage also loops on the horizontal axis, a Konami signature. It's a bit hard to decipher the decision to make Stage 1 the only stage that does so, especially because unlike say Gradius Moai stages, it's not something that the player will do naturally trying to avoid obstacles or enemies, staying centered suffices here, but rather something they might notice messing around on subsequent runs. If scoring weren't broken, it could be a fun means of wracking up more points, so maybe this was the intent - something for players to aim for after they've already mastered surviving the stage. The first part of Stage 6 also loops, but vertically, as it's a horizontally scrolling stage.
That said, stage 1 IMO is not an ideal opening stage. First of all, it also introduces you to the fact that hitboxes don't distort along with the graphics. Now that's both a good thing, and a bad thing. It's a good thing cause once you get used to it, it's simple and easy to deal with. It's a bad thing because you expect the hitboxes to match the graphics. Like if the floating island laser battery is only 20 pixels tall or whatever cause it's distorted, you don't expect the hitbox to be 40 pixels tall cause it isn't, doubly so cause you can't actually see hitboxes, just the graphics. The other part of Stage 1 that I found annoying is that part where you need to take a hard left and hard right through the narrow passageway between floating islands. It's very easy, but if you don't know that you shouldn't try to adjust your ship under any circumstances (the exploding mines suggest maybe you should) during the passage you'll lose a life. Paired with the fact that in Stage 1 you'll also learn the formula 1 obstacle collision = 4 bullets swallowed, you'll learn to steer well clear of anything chunky looking and it all kind of feels a bit kusogeish.
Anyway I remember when I first made it past Stage 1, Stage 2 was like a revelation. Everything was much tighter and as a result more tense. It's also quite a well designed obstacle course where you have to time your movement through moving platforms and find good angles of attack under cover. The round vulcan really shines again here, but also the new bombs you get, which make short work of the boss (and without which said boss can be quite a test of patience).
Stage 3 also taught me something, which is that you need to crank the autofire up in the options otherwise you might not be able to destroy the pipes (?) blocking your way.
Anyway once I'd had a bit of experience with all 3 of the game's vertical stages, I grew quite fond of them. For one, all their bosses are amazing. Mid bosses less so, but stage bosses definitely. They have manageable RNG (although I still don't understand how to dodge Stage 5 boss' fire breath so I just hope he doesn't use it too many times) that both keep you moving and focused. At the same time, the bosses' patterns don't pose high execution requirements and they dish out quite a bit of score, often giving you the extend, as so happens, in case you got a particularly difficult fight. Also, the bosses are just really quite spectacular. Stage 1's robot spider maybe the least, but Stage 3's shape shifter (I find its 2nd form especially pleasing) and Stage 5's fire giant are incredible. Finally, just like their bosses, these vertical stages are quite varied with what they ask from the player and the kind of patterns they throw at you. Nothing feels especially "puzzly", at least on normal and hard (keep in mind I can't speak for Stage 5 on hard yet), but you have to have a some strategy, e.g. knowing to switch to a certain weapon, or to hold a particular position. There are some gotchas with getting hit from behind by straggling enemies or obstacles you thought you'd already cleared, but even those I grew to appreciate as a another fount of play complexity.
I really like the game's weapon system. I found a use for all the weapons except the one that replaces the round vulcan, which is a really unique and versatile weapon. Some people might complain that the round vulcan overshadows all the others, IMO that's not necessarily true (e.g. I found I used the needle cracker just as often in the stages I equipped it), but even so, it deserves to be the most used weapon, it's just that enjoyable to use. Another especially nice thing is that the early weapons remain viable throughout. Only the final pod weapon ("Wind laser") makes the others redundant. I also like the game's power down system. Eating a bullet scuttles the weapon you were using, which both punishes the mistake, and forces you to improvise and learn the other weapons too. On the other hand, losing all your weapons and then eating a bullet results in a lost life which restores them, and thus avoids the "spiral of death" and difficult recovery issue some other games have. It's really quite a great balance.
Other people have sung the praises of Stage 6. I must concur whole-heartedly. One of the best stages I've experienced in a shmup so far. The first half is an amazing loop scrolling space battle with capital ships, and the second half is a tense crawl through an obstacle filled mechanical mothership corridor up there in quality with the last two stages of fellow SFC hori shooter Biometal, whose final boss has a similarish design philosophy. I found Axelay's one a bit less of an endurance test, although the second phase also RNG spams you to keep you moving around frantically. Shame shame shame that the manipulable mirrors of your ship that make up the final phase of this fight give score, and thus break scoring! Easy infinite milk using cluster bombs. On the plus side, it seems like it would be an easy fix, just change their score value to 0. Probably even a cheat could do this.
Anyway great game. I rate it quite highly. After the 1CC, it's still my personal favorite 16-bit original shmup, right next to Biometal. Biometal's even more unique player capabilities are even better incorporated than Axelay's (levels designed squarely around the shield slam vs levels accommodating a swiss army knife of weapons (the premier being the aforementioned round vulcan)), but Axelay has greater variety of play.
In other news, got the Axelay 1CC on Normal, and then made it to 2-2 where I played way too aggressively and needlessly ran into too many enemies. I've gotten to 2-4 before from a 2CC of the first loop yielding less lives at the start of the 2nd. My understanding is the 2nd loop is just the "hard" difficulty, so I look forward to revisiting the game on that setting. From what I've seen so far, it's much more busy and there's a lot more slow down. There's some new Boss patterns too you don't see on normal, maybe because certain boss attacks can now force you into defensive positions you did not previously need to assume (on normal, I mean).
I guess I'm getting to the point where these "easy" 1CCs do indeed feel quite easy. That being said, they're less psychologically taxing than setting a 1CC goal for more demanding games, so I don't feel like I've quite outgrown them yet.
Some more thoughts on the game:
Stage 1 feels very calculated on the part of the game designers. For one, they decided as the opener it should be one of three vertical stages with a visually unique cylindrically scrolling background, which I assume would have had a certain wow factor at the time, and still looks pretty damn cool if using a CRT shader and presumably a real CRT too. Two, the first few enemy formations are geared around the round vulcan, probably the most important tactical weapon in the game. Struggling with these formations teaches the player that they can shoot in a circle, and that they can tap rhythmically to maintain an angle of fire. The stage also loops on the horizontal axis, a Konami signature. It's a bit hard to decipher the decision to make Stage 1 the only stage that does so, especially because unlike say Gradius Moai stages, it's not something that the player will do naturally trying to avoid obstacles or enemies, staying centered suffices here, but rather something they might notice messing around on subsequent runs. If scoring weren't broken, it could be a fun means of wracking up more points, so maybe this was the intent - something for players to aim for after they've already mastered surviving the stage. The first part of Stage 6 also loops, but vertically, as it's a horizontally scrolling stage.
That said, stage 1 IMO is not an ideal opening stage. First of all, it also introduces you to the fact that hitboxes don't distort along with the graphics. Now that's both a good thing, and a bad thing. It's a good thing cause once you get used to it, it's simple and easy to deal with. It's a bad thing because you expect the hitboxes to match the graphics. Like if the floating island laser battery is only 20 pixels tall or whatever cause it's distorted, you don't expect the hitbox to be 40 pixels tall cause it isn't, doubly so cause you can't actually see hitboxes, just the graphics. The other part of Stage 1 that I found annoying is that part where you need to take a hard left and hard right through the narrow passageway between floating islands. It's very easy, but if you don't know that you shouldn't try to adjust your ship under any circumstances (the exploding mines suggest maybe you should) during the passage you'll lose a life. Paired with the fact that in Stage 1 you'll also learn the formula 1 obstacle collision = 4 bullets swallowed, you'll learn to steer well clear of anything chunky looking and it all kind of feels a bit kusogeish.
Anyway I remember when I first made it past Stage 1, Stage 2 was like a revelation. Everything was much tighter and as a result more tense. It's also quite a well designed obstacle course where you have to time your movement through moving platforms and find good angles of attack under cover. The round vulcan really shines again here, but also the new bombs you get, which make short work of the boss (and without which said boss can be quite a test of patience).
Stage 3 also taught me something, which is that you need to crank the autofire up in the options otherwise you might not be able to destroy the pipes (?) blocking your way.
Anyway once I'd had a bit of experience with all 3 of the game's vertical stages, I grew quite fond of them. For one, all their bosses are amazing. Mid bosses less so, but stage bosses definitely. They have manageable RNG (although I still don't understand how to dodge Stage 5 boss' fire breath so I just hope he doesn't use it too many times) that both keep you moving and focused. At the same time, the bosses' patterns don't pose high execution requirements and they dish out quite a bit of score, often giving you the extend, as so happens, in case you got a particularly difficult fight. Also, the bosses are just really quite spectacular. Stage 1's robot spider maybe the least, but Stage 3's shape shifter (I find its 2nd form especially pleasing) and Stage 5's fire giant are incredible. Finally, just like their bosses, these vertical stages are quite varied with what they ask from the player and the kind of patterns they throw at you. Nothing feels especially "puzzly", at least on normal and hard (keep in mind I can't speak for Stage 5 on hard yet), but you have to have a some strategy, e.g. knowing to switch to a certain weapon, or to hold a particular position. There are some gotchas with getting hit from behind by straggling enemies or obstacles you thought you'd already cleared, but even those I grew to appreciate as a another fount of play complexity.
I really like the game's weapon system. I found a use for all the weapons except the one that replaces the round vulcan, which is a really unique and versatile weapon. Some people might complain that the round vulcan overshadows all the others, IMO that's not necessarily true (e.g. I found I used the needle cracker just as often in the stages I equipped it), but even so, it deserves to be the most used weapon, it's just that enjoyable to use. Another especially nice thing is that the early weapons remain viable throughout. Only the final pod weapon ("Wind laser") makes the others redundant. I also like the game's power down system. Eating a bullet scuttles the weapon you were using, which both punishes the mistake, and forces you to improvise and learn the other weapons too. On the other hand, losing all your weapons and then eating a bullet results in a lost life which restores them, and thus avoids the "spiral of death" and difficult recovery issue some other games have. It's really quite a great balance.
Other people have sung the praises of Stage 6. I must concur whole-heartedly. One of the best stages I've experienced in a shmup so far. The first half is an amazing loop scrolling space battle with capital ships, and the second half is a tense crawl through an obstacle filled mechanical mothership corridor up there in quality with the last two stages of fellow SFC hori shooter Biometal, whose final boss has a similarish design philosophy. I found Axelay's one a bit less of an endurance test, although the second phase also RNG spams you to keep you moving around frantically. Shame shame shame that the manipulable mirrors of your ship that make up the final phase of this fight give score, and thus break scoring! Easy infinite milk using cluster bombs. On the plus side, it seems like it would be an easy fix, just change their score value to 0. Probably even a cheat could do this.
Anyway great game. I rate it quite highly. After the 1CC, it's still my personal favorite 16-bit original shmup, right next to Biometal. Biometal's even more unique player capabilities are even better incorporated than Axelay's (levels designed squarely around the shield slam vs levels accommodating a swiss army knife of weapons (the premier being the aforementioned round vulcan)), but Axelay has greater variety of play.
