curst wrote:

CrackerBarrel wrote:

So far I can get through levels 1, 3, and 4 but for some reason 2 always kicks my ass. I also haven't figured out a sane use for the slow-down button. The Endless modes are fun and an adrenaline rush, but the scripted levels are really fun to watch. The barrage and enemy combinations become more and more devious as you go. At some point you learn that you can sit in one spot and waste ten or so enemies in a row as they all spawn in one place. This evolves to ten enemies here, then ten there slightly overlapping. This evolves to ten enemies here, then ten bigger enemies there, slightly overlapping again, with the the stream of the original ten small enemies turning to a stream of larger enemies while your still dealing with the second stream of medium enemies. There's also a medium boss that has vertically oscilatting barrage pattern of thick projectiles. It basically forces you to line up directly beaneath it then it launches a barrage of projectiles that shoot off on a tangent, then turn 90 degrees to home in on you when there's little space to move.

Again I think this game is really smart and elegant and above all fun. As I write this it's sort of playing on the back of my eyes.

I don't know why I chose Boccioni. Futurism came to mind first and for some reason I couldn't think of Matta's name, but I could see his paintings.

The game is good, and j00 sux0r. I've beaten every level but Eight and naturally the endless ones (what a great idea).

You mention not figuring out how to use the slowdown button - all I can say is that it lets me navigate the more ridiculous phalanxes of projectiles far more easily. Indeed, I can't imagine how you beat the levels you say you did without relying on it heavily. Using it, you can sit there in the middle of the huge seas of green bonus-point squares collecting tons of points (racking up the extra ships, which doesn't hurt), and then you just move a tiny bit at a time when you need to dodge projectiles. Plus, if I move around when not using the slowdown key, I seem to have a much harder time collecting the bonus points - the green squares seem to 'slip away' from me.

Also, one trick I use for shooters in general (it also helped me *hugely* with Cho Ren Sha 68K) is that I never watch where my ship is shooting, but rather stare almost directly at my ship at all times, maybe staring just a little bit above it. This gives me a pretty clear idea of where I can and can't go. I simply don't worry about whether or not I'm actually hitting any enemies. Maybe that's intuitive for most people, but I find I have to actively concentrate on doing this, otherwise I find my vision always shifting towards the enemy directly, which does me no good when I have to carefully squeeze through a waterfall of lasers and missiles. When I played CRS68K before using this 'tactic', I couldn't get past the fourth level without Continuing... now I can make it to stage 2-2, and my high score leaped from around 1.5 million to around 4.7 million. I just tend to survive much, much longer.

Oh yeah, and the best score I got here was somewhere around 2.5 million on stage 10. Anyone have any idea if that's good or not? I always wonder, because for a while I was bragging about being able to beat TechnoSylph (a super-pretty and actually rather spiffy little shooter Mischief Maker linked to back on OMM) even though I couldn't begin to read the instructions for the game, so I thought I had figured out all the game's mechanics. Then I visited the author's website and holy fucking shit... my l33+ 225,000 high score was dwarfed by the thirty or so motherfuckers who had racked up over 800,000 points! (I still have *NO* fucking idea how anyone could pull that off without cheating.)