You like yourself some shoot-ing-shoot-ing-shooting games? No idea how this event has even hung on this long, but it’s still around and it still wants you to play with it.

Shooting Game Tournament 2009 is a friendly score competition among users of shmups.com. The score validation works like in the hi-score threads. You just play the game on PCB, emulator or any console port and post your score which you don’t need to prove. ANYONE CAN JOIN!

Contestants are broken up into teams by choice or assigned.  Over a hundred people compete in teams from all over the world. There have been full teams from Italy, UK, Sweden, Brazil, Japan, Canada, France, and other countries I’m not thinking of.  People still come out of the woodwork to attend this. It’s an interesting event and one of if not the best thing going for the shmups community. The big changes this year are no voting for the upcoming game and there is no break in-between games. It’ll be six weeks of five games played on mega-illegal-fun MAME. Players submit scores by posting in a designated thread. You can choose to play as much or as little as you want. No need to register with friends. Come with people or come alone. You play your cards and the organizers will sort you out.

Players can sign up by going to this thread, sign in, quote the 2nd post of the thread, fill out the entry form, then post it in the thread. People are around to help out if you don’t understand. Don’t be afraid, child. Compete. No need for skill levels. Everybody of all types welcome you with open arms; some with more gin on their breath than others.

Registration period is now. The shooting begins August 31st.

I do believe this also means Robot Panic turned one year old recently. Congrats to the three deans for not stumbling drunk and accidentally shutting the site down for 365 days. They should make a ceremonial chip for accomplishments like that, like sobriety periods.

Xbox 360 disc. $20. Three games: Raiden Fighters 1, Raiden Fighters 2, Raiden Fighters Jet. 5-8 Stages each. Two-Player dualplay (co-op), local only. Everything comes unlocked. 8-16+ Selectable ships. Detailed video settings (Scanline config, Tate, etc.). Caravan Mode/Score Attack, Boss Rush Mode, and Leaderboards with two difficulties per mode for all games.

Replays recordable, viewable from leaderboards, and savable to hard drives. Replays include fast-forward feature, but not rewindable.

Worth the price?: One of the best gaming deals, period!
Very Much Recommended: Literally everybody. Yes, even a host from Gamers With Jobs. Shocking!
Not Recommended: Anybody who absolutely cannot stand the Shooting Game genre for significant reasons. If you’re on the fence about the genre, that doesn’t count; buy this game. It’s the perfect place to begin or re-experience the genre.

Armed Police Batrider fans, get the hell over here, send Valcon some thank you letters for flying this west, and celebrate with case of (ugh!) Busch. This here is a party in a box for some frugal-ass gamers.

Raiden is a shoot-em-up series known for its slow pace, those bastard sniper helicopters, and the crazy fun purple laser. It’s usually enjoyed by gentleman with or without top hats and extremely dedicated “retro” gamers alike. But this is the Raiden Fighters series we’re talking about. Imagine the original Raiden series being a wine and cheese party somewhere in The Hamptons with detailed, frilly decorations hosted by Hugh Laurie and populated entirely by (the better) B-list celebrities but without Bruce Campbell. Now envision the Raiden Fighters series being Lil’ Jon crashing that party with the entire East Side Boyz crew, T.I., Akon, Michael Vick, a just-escaped O.J. Simpson, 17 Strippers, a bigass strobe light, Rasheed Wallace, Chuck Norris, Norm MacDonald, somebody in a big-ass Tinkerbell costume, Soulja Boy, and Vanilla Ice holding turntables and a pound of pure mixed with speed and adderall.

(more…)

I got some epilogues to shmuppreciation month. One is this dohicky. There’s like, six sites now that break down shooting game news since Danmaku-gata, the once great king of the shooting news blog took a nosedive. Much of that news, like a NeoGAF thread, gets buried in whining and paragraphs about scanlines. Other chunks of the new shit passes by much of Kotaku’s nets. Furthermore, a lot of old great references need a good ‘ol fashioned bookmarking. All people really need are references and name drops in a genre like this. That’s what this here news feed’ll give you. There’s a few people workin’ the post button on that scene: Megalixir, Postman, GaijinPunch, and Meself. Follow the cause if you’d like, RSS dat shiz, or just run though those other forum discussions manually. You got choices, kids.

Gotta plug some sites since they’re good guys: Shoot-the-Core ‘n Gamengai

Super Noize Post, but whatever.

According to an awesomely questionable article from dailymail.co.uk, the better your reaction time, the longer you’re going to live. Like, real life; not in the game.

The 7,414 volunteers in the study have been followed since the mid-Eighties, when their reaction times were measured with an electrical device fitted with a small screen and five numbered buttons.

The volunteers had to press the matching button when a number appeared on screen. The time they took to react was measured and averages worked out.

Since then, 1,289 have died, 568 of them from heart disease.

The researchers then compared the reaction times, smoking habits, weight and other factors of those who had died with those who had survived.

The results showed that people with slow reactions were 2.6 times more likely to die prematurely from any cause. Smoking was the only factor linked to a larger risk of death – as it made it 3.03 times more likely.

Physical exercise, blood pressure, heart rate, waist-hip ratio, alcohol consumption and body-mass index all had a lesser effect.

In deaths caused specifically by heart disease, reaction time was the most important factor after blood pressure, this time having a greater effect than smoking.

The researchers said: ‘It has been hypothesized that reaction time, as a measure of speed of the brain’s information-processing capacity, may be a marker for bodily system integrity.

‘This way, slower reaction times, or poorer information-processing ability, might be an indication of suboptimal physiological functioning, which may in turn be related to early death.’

So maybe Brain Age doesn’t make you smarter, but keeps you alive? And then nursing homes will send back the Wii Bowling in exchange for Rock Band, but the old folks will only be allowed to play Visions on expert.

Either way, I suggest you go complete M.C.’s challenges.  Your life now depends on it.

Time to get me a bucket of KFC tonight! Gonna plan my retirement for age 114! I R Invincible!! OVERCONFIDENCE WOOO!!

From Comments of DGR: 02.27.2009

Your comments on Flower are pretty interesting, John, in light of the podcast I heard right before this week’s episode. I was listening to a recent episode of The Geekbox in which Ryan Scott was discussing R-Type Dimensions. His take on the game was essentially this:

“It’s good, it’s really hard… Thank God they put in Infinite Mode because it’s too hard for me to get through otherwise. But the game’s really short– I mean, you can blow through it in 45 minutes.”

While this is technically true, as shmup fans, we get a [i]lot[/i] more out of the R-Type experience than this guy did. Perhaps the same is true for Flower. Obviously, you can’t directly compare Flower with a shmup– DJ Incompetent is likely to vomit upon reading this, in fact– but for many folks, the experience that they get from playing through Flower is good enough that the length isn’t a concern.

- M.C.

I hear what you’re saying. Flower is a “flight-ish” game for certain, reminding me almost of Nights.

I have no problem with short games. Hell, I wish a lot of games were much shorter than they are. I just don’t have time for it anymore. But it wasn’t just the length of Flower that gave me pause. It was just the feeling of, “They could have done so much more with this” that I had when it was done. But like I said, I sort of go back and forth with it. The experience I had playing it was mostly great and often unlike any other game I’ve played. That itself is worth the price. But when I finished it I just had this sort of unfulfilled feeling.

- John

As far as I’m concerned, short games are fine, but I put a lot of value in games that offer options and alternate ways to play through the content. That is what earns the timeless replayable triple-A award for me. Did you know one of the bigger complaints expert players have on Gradius V is that it’s too long? This game clocks in at about an hour, but the ideal time STG players (myself included) want to spend on a one-credit session is roughly 30-something minutes. This is a large complaint for many Compile games as well (Aleste series, Zanac series, etc.), being long stages are a fault and not a feature, especially when they have dead zones of no on-screen enemies for several seconds. An ideal way to maximize content of a single shmup title is to have several different ‘courses’ of 5 stages instead of one massive 8-stage trek. Developers have not thought to include this option besides the compilation multi-game packages. Raycrisis explored this by allowing users to plot a course of five stages out of a selectable eight.

But what’s the issue here with the semi-controversial Flower and FlOw?
They’re great stand-alone games, but players complain not enough is done with it.

(more…)

We’re big fans of the space shooter genre and these days, there seems to be a much needed resurgence.

Well, it seems that one of the stalwart shmup franchises has recieved a killer sequel in Japan. Released today, Thunderforce VI is poised to bring back all the things we love about this series to the PS2. This Technosoft shmup monstrosity has been a long time in coming with a lot of hopes and prayers to the shooter gods behind it. Thanks to the good folks at Sega, it’s finally available and everyone is pretty damn excited that we’re finally seeing a release. Here’s hoping it hits stateside in the near future.

You can check out all kinds of awesome talk about this title over at the shmups.com forums. That’s where the SCIENCE lives, my friends. So, for all you lucky bastards with Japanses PS2′s, some importation is in order.

Thanks to Glen and Mark for the heads up!