Pink Sweets Suicide Club [Fan-made Hack 2017/2018, PCB]

[EOJ]

Seems we didn't have a thread for this game. It is an unofficial arrange/hacked version of PS, made by Four Horsemen (programmers/hackers group).
It was shown this week at Stunfest. You can see a pic of it running here:



Source: https://twitter.com/pestro87/status/997403036413779968

It runs on a first-gen CV1000 PCB, the same board as Mushihimesama. The one on display at stunfest has the serial number PSSC-00003, so perhaps there are at least two others out there?


(sourced from here)

Useful links: Arcadeotaku thread, shmups forum thread.

[pmp]

Icarus streamed some gameplay at stunfest
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/262665158?t=16m04s

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

That video is superplayer level balls to the wall scoring play. If you play with suiciding down to no men in stock and milking for 1UPs you can fully control the rank and have it low even late in the game.

Saying it's more difficult to clear than the original is a misunderstanding. It definitely is not more difficult once you understand the game and it's not difficult to understand, but maybe is on your first run(s).

You can either lower the Zan to 0 or raise it to 5000. At 5000 you "flip the zan" and get a 1UP. You can exploit it like on the stage 6 boss, kill it more easily by bombing destructibles and raise it 5000 points just on that boss and then get a 1UP on the beginning of stage 7.

[Plasmo]

If you play with suiciding down to no men in stock and milking for 1UPs you can fully control the rank and have it low even late in the game.

Saying it's more difficult to clear than the original is a misunderstanding. It definitely is not more difficult once you understand the game and it's not difficult to understand, but maybe is on your first run(s).

I'm sorry, but that's not how the game works. Having played both versions to quiet some degree, I can only agree and say that Suicide Club overall is more difficult than the original game.

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

https://mega.nz/#!wupEUYrA!x6e75CFfRykNVSsPa9SYtj6sc-nWZes0aQgDmYwVDdM

That's showing the easier way to clear the game by keeping rank low. If you do play it balls to the wall like Icarus from the first second of the game to max your score then the first few levels are harder but the last few are easier - overall it is still easier to 1CC than the original PS whether you play for score or rank control or both, unless you are talking about using the infinite lives trick in PS which is exploiting a bug.

[Plasmo]

unless you are talking about using the infinite lives trick in PS which is exploiting a bug

Sorry, I should've clarified this. Of course I meant the original Pink Sweets (with infinite lives) and not the port or a different PCB version. If it is a bug or not doesn't matter that much imo. If something is in the game, I use it.

If you - for whatever reason - do not have infinite lives in PS, then SC is the much easier game, I agree.

[EOJ]

https://mega.nz/#!wupEUYrA!x6e75CFfRykNVSsPa9SYtj6sc-nWZes0aQgDmYwVDdM

Wow, direct-feed video! How did you get that? (or do you have this PCB??)

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

I have the pcb 

[EOJ]

I have the pcb 

How did you get that? Is it just a fan-made hack?

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

It was made by Four Horsemen (programmers/hackers group) and there's already another Cave game project in the works that is wild as a child on cocaine. 

When you have the ROMs you can just get someone to swap the program and graphics chips on a PS board. The ROMs I think should be released soon.

[EOJ]

It was made by Four Horsemen (programmers/hackers group) and there's already another Cave game project in the works that is wild as a child on cocaine. 

When you have the ROMs you can just get someone to swap the program and graphics chips on a PS board. The ROMs I think should be released soon.

Thanks for the info! I'll update the main post to indicate this is not an official Cave game.

[SuperPang]

So which games exactly can be converted and what's involved? De-soldering and flashing a couple of chips? And I assume the procedure can be reversed?

Fair play, this is an impressive hack. So much so they had a few of us wondering if it was actually legit. I still think the copyright is a bit of a cheek though!

I'd like to play it but I'm not a fan of conversions on hardware that's in plentiful supply like CPS2, let alone CV1000. It's a big concern that dodgy SDOJ PCBs and the like might start appearing.

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

The instructions are take a Pink Sweets board and swap the 2 roms and yes you can just swap them back. I don't know about people's wild theories.

[EOJ]

Well, the main issue is you don't need a Pink Sweets board in the first place. The one at Stunfest was a Mushihimesama board that was converted into this PS hacked/arranged version. So it would be just as easy to convert, for example, a cheap Mushihimetama (or sama) board into a very expensive Ibara Kuro board. I just hope people don't try to profit from such conversions and/or flood the market with undisclosed conversions.

In regard to the game itself, the changes to the gameplay are appealing to me and I like how they changed the desert stage to a snow stage and stage 6 to a night stage. I'd like to play this through emulation some time to check it out!

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

The timing of the current emulation for Pink Sweets and Ibara isn't going to make or break a 1CC I don't think and probably you could change settings to make it closer to the board like underclocking the cpu and adjusting the blitter dial. If you can beat the pcb you can beat it in emulation I think so long as you have the same controls. Slowdown would be missing in parts but would it always kill you, do you think in PS or Ibara? Stop a 1CC? It's not like in an IKD game where the timing is so off you can forget about using emulation on it for now.

[EOJ]

Slowdown would be missing in parts but would it always kill you, do you think in PS or Ibara? Stop a 1CC?

For Ibara at least, a lack of slowdown didn't stop Archer from getting a V- score 1CC on the PS2 version (which removes all the slowdown).

[Neo_Arcadia]

It's a big concern that dodgy SDOJ PCBs and the like might start appearing.

even if, who cares, as Long as they are sold as conversions. so much better to speak about this than keep making a big secret out of it.

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

This just got released!

http://suicideclub.gameordie.com/

[Monouchi]

Super awesome, thanks for the link!

[EOJ]

I finally managed to get this running in MAME64 and played a few credits today. Overall it still feels and plays like Pink Sweets about 95%, so to me it presents as a minor variation on the original. I wish they made the death animation quicker and gave you some options/power ups back when you die. That's one of my main complaints with PS (thankfully, Ver 1.01 fixes this). Also, for a game called Suicide Club I don't feel like you get lives often enough and suiciding doesn't serve any purpose except to lower rank -- in Ibara, for example, you get a bomb replenishment, as you do in MMP, so there is a strategic reason to do it in parts of the game beyond rank reduction. I would have liked lives to come more often or have the suicides have some added benefit - maybe deaths could give you a temporary power INCREASE, instead of robbing you of all power ups? That would be a cool twist. I also think they could have added more medal showers in different parts of the game or boss fights***, to make scoring more interesting as well. It is a well-constructed game, but perhaps not the game I was hoping for.

This is just a quick first impression. I need to play more before I form a more concrete opinion.

***It is possible this is hiding in the game and I haven't found it yet.

[EOJ]

I played a few more credits, and credit-fed through to the end just to see it all. Stage 5 is a nightmare with zero slowdown, as are parts of stage 6 and the snakes in stage 4, so I won't be playing this game anymore (on Mame64, which is my only way to play it). But I like a lot of the things the hacking group did. I still prefer the original PS with the infinite lives trick for scoring, and Ver 1.01 for a more "normal" 1CC, but this is still very good and I think playing it on the original hardware (with all the slowdown in the right spots) would be a lot of fun.

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

You're much better equipped after a death than in the original because you have essentially a concentration shot on the pea shooter now when holding A+C (slows the ship down and raises the pea shooter frequency and the pea shooter power is stronger overall than in the original). You can pick up against a boss etc. way way easier than in the original after a death if you utilize A+C.

1UPs are pretty abundant. I can pull a 1UP on the stage 1 midboss then milk the stage 1 boss and get another one on stage 2 then on stage 3 get yet another Zan based one, then the tank one, then you can milk at least 2 more on the stage 3 midboss and I can't even milk that well overall.

If you control rank down low enough, on stage 5 a good portion of the enemy bullets don't even show up, lasers are slower, it's much easier than the original but still hard as hell to clear. Pretty much all of stage 6 gives you a slight bit more time to react, but it really makes a difference, makes it more possible for normal players to remember things like certain ship placements in preparation for attacks.

[Monouchi]

Sounds very interesting, will give it some more runs after vacation. (Only play mame at work.)

Technical wise, How is this put on the pcb?
I guess J-tag for graphics, but then desolder the sound chips to reprogram them? Those are really small so not such a trivial procedure on a cv1000 board.

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

The sound roms didn't get changed so nothing needed on them. For the jtag for the program rom, I think the general view seems to be you "buy a jtag and plug it in". That's a laugh, maybe 2-3 people on earth have this setup figured out. For jtag on the graphics rom it's even more so , I guess it's somewhere between theoretical and the average person having absolutely no chance in ever figuring it out. In my opinion it's 1,000x easier to just swap the roms and jtag is more for development where you'd want to swap the program rom over and over which could destroy rom leg pads after a while if you solder over and over and over.

[Monouchi]

The sound roms didn't get changed so nothing needed on them. For the jtag for the program rom, I think the general view seems to be you "buy a jtag and plug it in". That's a laugh, maybe 2-3 people on earth have this setup figured out. For jtag on the graphics rom it's even more so , I guess it's somewhere between theoretical and the average person having absolutely no chance in ever figuring it out. In my opinion it's 1,000x easier to just swap the roms and jtag is more for development where you'd want to swap the program rom over and over which could destroy rom leg pads after a while if you solder over and over and over.

Interesting, thanks for the info.

[EOJ]

You're much better equipped after a death than in the original because you have essentially a concentration shot on the pea shooter now when holding A+C (slows the ship down and raises the pea shooter frequency and the pea shooter power is stronger overall than in the original). You can pick up against a boss etc. way way easier than in the original after a death if you utilize A+C.

True, a little better than the original, but I think Ver 1.01 in the port handles it better still. A quicker death animation plus getting back all your power ups on a death would have been a great improvement in this hacked version. Even better yet would be a short hyper-like power boost after a death. Like I said, there needs to be some other benefit to a death other than rank reduction, otherwise it feels too artificial to me. In original PS, you really aren't supposed to die at all (except perhaps at the very start of the game, if you want to keep rank low and skip out on the infinite lives), that is why the death penalty is so brutal. So if this game is trying to turn that on its head, more needed to be changed in this regard. All just IMO, of course. 

Another neat change could have been making the rose cracker require charging up from absorbed bullets, instead of having it remain as an infinite bomb. And you could store a few in stock. After a death you could be given a full stock or something.

1UPs are pretty abundant. I can pull a 1UP on the stage 1 midboss then milk the stage 1 boss and get another one on stage 2 then on stage 3 get yet another Zan based one, then the tank one, then you can milk at least 2 more on the stage 3 midboss and I can't even milk that well overall.

Like in regular PS, it is pretty easy to get a lot of 1UPs in the first 3-4 stages. The problem is stages 5 and 6, where you really need them they are hard to come by. And you need to suicide away nearly all of those extra ones in the first four stages anyway, so they won't help you here because the rank drop when you have 3-5 lives in stock is minuscule.

If you control rank down low enough, on stage 5 a good portion of the enemy bullets don't even show up, lasers are slower, it's much easier than the original but still hard as hell to clear. Pretty much all of stage 6 gives you a slight bit more time to react, but it really makes a difference, makes it more possible for normal players to remember things like certain ship placements in preparation for attacks.

I don't doubt this is the case if playing on a PCB. I credit fed through and the rank was near zero in Stage 5 due to all my deaths but it was still very difficult in MAME64 because there is zero slowdown. In a normal run it would be near-impossible.

On a different note, I love that Stage 5 is a snow stage and the boss is now colored blue. 

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

Keep in mind there are other tricks that make the last 2 stages easier, like being able to bomb the destructibles of the stage 6 boss (which means defeating him easier) and at the same time max the zan at 5,000, then you get a 1UP at the very beginning of stage 7 from that, then you can get another one on stage 7 with destroying tank wheels.

There is suiciding in the original, just nobody does it because the rank cushions are so shitty, but they are there. The famous video linked on the shmups strategy thread, the AZY player, suicides in that clear to somewhat control the rank. That's why I'm surprised when anyone says there was no suiciding in PS, because in the first clear anyone saw and the one used to explain the game to people, he suicides.

You ultimately shouldn't need as many men in PSSC to clear it as you do in the original and they come out over twice as often (1200 instead of 2500 plus ones for maxing it at 5000) plus the game difficulty is slightly toned down in various ways. It's plenty beatable.

I don't like how in ver 1.01 you control rank by building up a medal chain and then letting one drop, in my opinion that's the worst idea for rank control I've ever heard.

A lot of ideas too that you'd think of that might sound doable in a hack, aren't. I mean maybe someone out there could figure them out, but hacking comes with a lot of limitations you wouldn't expect, it's not like having the source code.

[EOJ]

Keep in mind there are other tricks that make the last 2 stages easier, like being able to bomb the destructibles of the stage 6 boss (which means defeating him easier) and at the same time max the zan at 5,000, then you get a 1UP at the very beginning of stage 7 from that,

Sounds cool, I didn't know about that! There are a few 1UPs in Stage 7 and I already knew about those from the original game. They are very helpful for the last midboss and final boss fight.

There is suiciding in the original, just nobody does it because the rank cushions are so shitty, but they are there. The famous video linked on the shmups strategy thread, the AZY player, suicides in that clear to somewhat control the rank. That's why I'm surprised when anyone says there was no suiciding in PS, because in the first clear anyone saw and the one used to explain the game to people, he suicides.

Yes, you can (suicide), but my point is I don't think the game was designed around suiciding. And I think that is why the rank reductions are so poor (as you note) and the death penalty is so harsh. A Japanese guy who cleared it with Midi & Meidi and got a very impressive score of 10 million said he didn't suicide at all, he just ignored the 1UPs that popped up throughout the game, until stage 7. He ended up dying at the end of Stage 6 a few times, iirc, but could still clear it with a good score. In this 1CC video you can see someone doing the same thing (no suicides, avoiding all the 1UPs that pop up until stage 7, no miss until stage 7), but without such a good score: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7pDXAZny-4&feature=youtu.be

The fact that the "first clear anyone saw" involved suiciding is not of any particular significance for this topic. The guy was just playing it like Ibara, which is understandable, because it is a Yagawa game and a sequel to Ibara. And you can do that, but that doesn't mean it is the only way, the best way, or what the developers had in mind when they designed the game.