Shmups Competition

Isn’t the internet just the best. Where else can you get 70 people to organise themselves into teams of about 5 people and then hold a friendly competition based on trust rather than proof?

The members of Shmups.com (one of my virtual haunts) have done just that. We are having a high score competition, the first game of which is Blazing Star.

So that’s all I’ve played for a week. I have been playing MVS with no autofire which just about everyone else has. It gets my goat up a bit because that is cheating as far as I am concerned, killing bosses quickly without have to bash the buttons as fast as your poor cramped arm will allow just seems to defeat the object.

Anyway I started from scratch and ended up with a respectable 14,860,510. Not too shabby for a week’s work. But pretty crap compared to the 40 million plus top scores! They’ve been playing it for yonks though.

I was a bit pissed off because I was sure I could break 20 million. In an earlier game I got a whole level further with about 13.5 million. So I’m sure I could have picked up a fair number of points more, the trouble is I just kept losing my concentration and couldn’t hold it together. In the 14.8 million run I made a stupid mistake on the 5th boss and got caught by one of its arms as it receded. A totally pointless end to what could have been a far better run. But hey ho, that’s the way it works sometimes.

Blazing Star is really suprising when you get into it because it looks like R-Type, however if you play for score it doesn’t work at all like R-Type, it feel smore like a Cave game with chaining and point bonuses.

It’s a great game with far more depth than first impressions might reason, if you ever get the chance give it a go.

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Factions

Managed to get my mask on Factions and I’ve put in about 150 hours with one character and about 30 with another over the last 3 months. I’ve managed to complete it as well, so the compulsion to play it has gone. I still have a few quests to do so I’ll probably finish them off and then build up my monk so that when I play the next Guild Wars I can get to do the missions more quickly. It’s a fact that trying to get into a party as a warrior is hard because there are so many of them and each party only needs a couple. With monks there are so few that you get loads of invites, so for the next game I’m being a monk for sure!

I bought New Super Marios Bros, Japanese for my DS. It’s a really good game and everything is perfect but it just seems to be lacking something, not quite sure what. There’ll be a few hours disappearing because of this game though.

I’ve got back into a shoot ’em up mood so I’m kind of aiming to have a good go at Espgaluda on my PS2. I haven’t finished DDPDOJ yet but I prefer Espgaluda. I’m going to see how far I can get after a 100 hours of solid play. I got 8 seconds from completing Ikaruga with only 30 hours play so I’m hoping a hundred will get me through the game. We’ll see though!

I still can’t beat AOE3 on hard on a land mission. The water ones aren’t so bad because the computer is dumb at organising its ships, but the land based missions I just can’t do. I’ve beat it on the odd occasion but nothing consistant. I don’t have a hope in hell in internet games if I can’t even beat it on hard. I’ll keep trying though.