Dodonpachi Saidaioujou [Cave 2012, ARCADE]

[Kaneda]

Glad to hear you liked it. I thought it was more fun than it looked in videos and I enjoyed the difficulty, but it's hard to get too excited when you know they're going to be toning it down anyways. Unfortunately, the line was really long so I only got one crack at it and chose the A-L because it looked like the most fun. I made it to the 3rd stage mid-boss but wasn't able to put up much of a fight against that beast.

Graphically, I like the color and patterns, but the designs of some of the enemies are pretty weak, the first mid-boss and 3rd boss in particular. The first boss looks great.

[Nereid]

Ah, this is a bit old but sinmoon wrote about his trip to the 1st location test.

http://sinmoon.blog.shinobi.jp/Entry/245/

[eckart]

Thanks for the review EOJ! -Reads and sounds great.

Hope cave will not made this game unplayable. Sad that the slowdowns get less.
Looking foward to april.

I bet we will get an extralive on the ship, like in ketsui.

[Let_It_Be]

Thanks for the review EOJ!  I'm pretty excited (and jealous), I'll be interested to see how this does in the arcades.

[dan76]

Thanks for the impressions - looking good so far. Click

[EOJ]

Ah, this is a bit old but sinmoon wrote about his trip to the 1st location test.

http://sinmoon.blog.shinobi.jp/Entry/245/

Some good stuff in there. Chains can break when your hyper is on standby, and SIN cleared it with c- expert. He said it's easier to clear than the other two styles due to all the slowdown in the mode! He likened it to Futari God mode.

[A47A47]

,

Wow! Wow!

By the way. I tried S, L and EX. I felt that hit box of EX is smaller than that of S or L.

[sh00g]

Thanks for the write up EOJ. The difficulty description certainly matched up to my thoughts when I sat and watched all those 1st loctest videos floating around the web.

[EOJ]

SIN says the current location test ver is dated 2/21/2012:

http://sinmoon.blog.shinobi.jp/Entry/247/

He played it at the Kawasaki location test - BTW he says Akai Katana had a location test there too, so that game had more than one location test as well. Anyway, he posted a list of differences from the previous ver. Here are the main changes:

-Changed enemy placement in stage 3
-Hyper rank makes the game's difficulty rise much higher than before
-Boss life gauge decreases slower, making the fights harder
-Hypers are easier to accumulate

So basically they made it harder than the previous location test version. He says he cleared it (it still ends at stage 3) with B-L, but just barely. He said his rank was 15 entering the boss fight, and the bullet speed was just as fast as when using a hyper at high rank - he said it was pretty much impossible to dodge what was being thrown at him.  Sounds a lot like Pink Sweets' rank system.

[Let_It_Be]

[Chempop]

She's..... leaking 

[moozooh]

Terminal case of candidosis ftw.

SIN says the current location test ver is dated 2/21/2012

Damn, so my eyes didn't deceive me! Indeed the bullets were faster than in Feb 18th YouTube videos!

Perhaps Cave actually had wanted this to be another easily accessible Pachi, but it was their Japanese fans who protested the idea? In any case, this actually sounds fun, and pretty much confirms it will be a single-loop game. Good job Cave!

[EOJ]

Terminal case of candidosis ftw.

SIN says the current location test ver is dated 2/21/2012

Damn, so my eyes didn't deceive me! Indeed the bullets were faster than in Feb 18th YouTube videos!

Perhaps Cave actually had wanted this to be another easily accessible Pachi, but it was their Japanese fans who protested the idea? In any case, this actually sounds fun, and pretty much confirms it will be a single-loop game. Good job Cave!

I still think they need to, and will, tweak shot type to be less brutal, otherwise most people won't get past stage 3. A good difficulty is nice, but in its current state it's a little too ridiculous.

[SuperPang]

Looks like a tiny hitbox to me.

[A47A47]

I bought the current issue of Famitsu Xbox360 (Japanese magazine).
An interview with Asada appears in it.
Asada says "We don't plan porting Saidaioujou to Xbox360 at the moment, while we planned porting Akaikatana to Xbox360 at that time." in the interview.

[Let_It_Be]

Well as long as they port SDOJ (and subsequent releases) to a proper console everyone will be fine.

I remember all of the moaning and groaning when people found out they were going to stop porting games to the Playstation 2, but then everyone quickly forgave them when the 360 ports started showing up.  So don't worry too much.

[moozooh]

Well, to be fair, the PS2 was a bit too hard to get up to par, with Arika even having given up on the faithful port of Ketsui, a PGM game. (Cave themselves weren't as pedantic with that console and the early SH3 ports to it, and we all know how it turned out.)

X360, on the other hand, has more performance headroom than is realistically needed, and you can have every thinkable option there (save for true 240p output, which just won't happen anymore). I got a Japanese X360 as a shmup console, and I have used it extensively as a shmup console, but that decision was made already after five or six genuinely good shmups had been announced for it, offsetting the cost of purchase and import, as well as the console itself getting a significant discount. Cave?not to mention other devs?would have to release at least a couple games absolutely worthy of a next-gen console investment?I expect upwards of 500$ for the console itself, the cabling, a controller that doesn't suck too much, and importing all of that. That's even disregarding that for some reason I really dislike the thought of getting a damn number-crunching powerhouse to run software designed for Dreamcast-level hardware and still have it slow down and occasionally stutter because it's more cinematic and?OH MY GOD THE BLITTER IS GOING TO CHOKE CALL THE AMBULANCE, with the ports having to stay true to the originals.

I may change my mind if Cave's new console of choice is actually damn good, durable and comfortable to use, but so far one good game with mid-2000 era visuals is just not convincing enough.

[Let_It_Be]

I would actually be really upset if they removed slowdown from ports, sure not all of it is necessarily intentional but a good portion of it is.  Do you get upset when you get slowdown in MAME?  I think that's a bit silly.

[moozooh]

I would actually be really upset if they removed slowdown from ports, sure not all of it is necessarily intentional but a good portion of it is.  Do you get upset when you get slowdown in MAME?  I think that's a bit silly.

No, I just mean it's pretty pointless to go for more and more powerful hardware to do ports on if your game will slow down anyway (and if it won't, the fans will eat you alive).

[Icarus]

To the guys who've played it, care to comment on how the hyper system works? Is it how I speculated it works, or is it completely different?
Nice to hear it was at a-cho recently. Haven't been there since 2004.

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=40442

Interview translation about the game development.

[A47A47]

Im sorry that first I miswrote March for May. I modified them.
I'm foolish. Very thanks for SuperPang and moozooh to point it out.

3rd Location Test is held from March 2 through March 4 in Umeda(Osaka prefecture), Yokkaichi(Mie prefecture), and Shinjuku(Tokyo).
http://blog.am-net.jp/article/54234624.html

[SuperPang]

Phew. I thought it had been delayed for a minute then. March you fool!  

[moozooh]

Yeah, OCN says it's 2?4 of March, not May.

[A47A47]

I went to the 3rd location test held in Umeda, Osaka.
I feel that 3rd location test version is same with 2nd version.

[drboom]

Man, news dried up something serious.  I'm stoked for this, but I haven't been able to find anything more on it, no 3rd location test videos from what I can see. I'm just itching for more about this title - its seriously the first Cave title in a long time I am totally psyched for.

I did notice that SIN posted something about the game on his blog, but my Japanese is, well, non-existent. 

[SuperPang]

Website has been updated. Can someone translate the system stuff?

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

Translation beg bump.

http://www.cave.co.jp/gameonline/saidaioujou/system/gps/
http://www.cave.co.jp/gameonline/saidaioujou/system/hyper/

[EOJ]

Translation beg bump.

http://www.cave.co.jp/gameonline/saidaioujou/system/gps/

Pretty simple stuff. Chaining sounds a bit stricter than the location test ver as you get a 30% reduction when your chain breaks.

-Your GP meter (=chaining meter) rises when you defeat enemies or hit things with your laser.
Kill an enemy or hit something with your laser before the GP meter runs out and your hit count rises and you get the GP bonus.
-Scoring items received from destroyed enemies are larger when your GP meter is higher.
-When the GP meter runs out your hit count and GP bonus multiplier reduce by 30%
-You don't receive any GP bonus from the bosses. You can only increase your hit count on them.

http://www.cave.co.jp/gameonline/saidaioujou/system/hyper/

-Hypers can go up to Level 10. When you activate a hyper all the enemy bullets on the screen turn to score items. In addition, these things vary depending on your hyper level:
-How much your attack strength rises
-How many more items you get when the GP meter is maxed out
-How much of a hit boost you get from destroying enemies and hitting lasers.
-How much of a multiplier you get on your GP bonus
-Duration of GP meter will double (if your hyper is at a certain level)
-How much the rank raises, how difficult the game becomes

Ways to increase your hyper level:
-Get score items (only when you're not using a hyper)
-Hit enemies with your laser to increase hit count (your hyper meter raises faster when you have a higher hit count)
-Collect bee items (your hyper meter will raise more here if you have a higher hit count)
-Hit the aura of a laser.

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

Thanks for the translation. I was hoping for something else added because I suck at chaining and don't find it interesting but even just going 1CC on Cave shooters is generally a million times funner than any other games to me so I'm really looking forward to this, especially Expert Mode which looked like a blast in the videos.