Improving scores, one failure at a time
Cleared RF2 Normal with the Fairy. All grazing is unintentional! As of this post this is the top score on the RF2 Normal leader board.
This game is easy; it’s even more easy on ‘Normal’. Additionally, it’s pretty much cheating to use the fairy. The need to learn boss patterns is completely removed by just pressing bomb and riding the overpowered flame + invulnerability until it dies. You can see this was my last boss strategy!
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Finally got the 100M point achievement for Raiden Fighters Aces, via Jet normal. Now to work on clearing Jet… I am also very terrible at Real Battle Phase 2.
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A run through the 360 port of Raiden IV; Normal difficulty Lite mode. This is not a particularly difficult game on these settings. However, being true to the Raiden name, a tank still manages to snipe me.
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Slow and not so steady Garegga progress. Stages 1 though 4 represent a near perfect execution of my current strategies; only two things went wrong. I normally don’t upgrade to the 3rd level shot so early: I collected a powerup by mistake. I may consider upgrading sometime before Earth Crisis; the 4th stage is a bit more controllable with more firepower. The other mistake was Mad Ball died earlier than I wanted and I had to adjust my stage 3 suicides a bit to compensate.
I don’t bother milking the Satanic Surfer torpedoes. This will likely be my next major change in my stage 4 strategy.
Stage 5 still sucks, but not quite as much. I think I just need to give in and trigger homing options for use on the platforms.
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Look at me, I changed games again!
Steady progress through Garegga using Bornnam ABC. My suicides in stage 2 are unintentional; I usually space them different, but it all worked out so yay. Stage three is mostly uneventful except for the fact that I managed to get three lives in stock TWICE, which isn’t really going to help me with rank management later on. Stage 4 goes up until just before the two big planes; I’m all over the place here.
Stage 5 is boring and then I die to the first boss.
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It appears being annoyed is a great motivator. That said, I present a small IPS patch to Battle Garegga to make me less annoyed. Maybe someone else will find it useful.
Contained in this zip file are two very small IPS files; which rom they apply to should be obvious.
Changes:
One note: since I’m lazy I took the easy way out for getting around the ROM checks. They always say ‘OK’ even if whatever it’s testing is totally screwed up. I couldn’t find where the ROM0 signature was (I found ROM1) and I got tired of looking at it; so I punted.
One possibility for a future improvement might be to restore the ‘dropped item’ to its “first credit” state for every credit. However, having the item type roll over between credits doesn’t annoy me enough to justify the work it would take me.
This game is hard 
Re-encode of the new DDP second loop video for in-browser viewing!
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In Liberty City, being in a helicopter never ends well…
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Doing video capture of games for the last few years has not been entirely kind to my pocketbook or my free space. Most capture solutions are very focused on ’standard’ video signals, so you get lots of weirdness when you start throwing PCBs into the mix. Trying to overcome this weirdness while not spending thousands of dollars on expensive equipment often leads to comedy. I thought I’d throw out a quick inventory of all the video related stuff I own:
Continue reading ‘The dangers of video capture’