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.
bgaregga-patches.zip
Contained in this zip file are two very small IPS files; which rom they apply to should be obvious.
Changes:
- Mahou characters are unlocked. No more konami code every credit!
- Rank no longer gets worse with every game played. You won’t have to reset your board after a bunch of consecutive plays to restore default rank
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.
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’
Hey look, another Galuda 2 score!
The way this works is I get a new HS, post it, and then within 2 days beat it, therefore obligating me to make another post about it. I refuse to break this pattern because then I’ll stop beating my scores.
A little less confused on the 4th boss, but I still don’t have a good path for the boss or the stage. I’m especially bad at the mid-boss; I kill the arms too fast in the first form. I opted to just guard barrier the 2nd form out of most of its health.
I totally zoned out on the 2nd boss’ last pattern and went into zesshikai too late, realized it, and then tried to correct it; promptly dying. I GOT THE POINTS THOUGH, good job. Lost the fixed 1up again due to dumb bullet hitting me in Kakusei 
Third boss was a mess.
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So hi. Got some Galuda 2 playing in lately. I’m still not close to extracting the points I should out of any part of this game, except I think I’m close to my non-cheaterpants stage 1 max. I’m quite adept at clipping bullets while at 500x and getting my whole barrier meter drained and losing a bunch of points in the process.
So things to note in this video:
1) above mentioned incompetence.
2) I don’t even bother milking the stage 3 midboss right now.
3) marvel at my confusion in stage 4
4) marvel at my SUPER confusion during the (short lived) stage 4 boss
Trying something new now; I’m encoding all video to h264+AAC in mp4 container format. Theoretically this should allow me to have the videos playable via the embedded flash player AND allow downloads if you people actually care to do that. You may need an updated flash plugin? I dunno. If you do, you should upgrade anyways. If you want to save the original mp4 just click the ‘down’ arrow in the flash player control bar.
I need to tweak the colors for Galuda2, they’re coming out too strong and it’s washing out some parts of the video. Grr.
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