Bangai-O HD: Missile Fury

[caoslayer]

May 16, 2011 14:03:48 GMT -5 kog3100edw said:

Yeah, I'm finding myself really discombobulated by the difficulty spikes in general. I got through the level I was complaining about before, then sailed through the next four or five, then found another rock-hard one. And I'm not talking ten tries like you KCC, I'm sometimes taking twenty goes to get through. There's always like 'a key' to get through, and it seems to take me forever on these spike points to figure it out.

And I was aces on DC Bangai-O. That game just didn't seem as gimmick-y on most of the levels. Maybe I'm remembering it wrong. I just remember skill would get you by. In this game there may be 'doing it' better or worse, but so many of the levels have ONE real solution with the difference in times and scores reflecting refinement.

The main difference was that Spirits allowed you to select the weapons to use and the bat was godlike.

[kitten]

May 16, 2011 14:03:48 GMT -5 kog3100edw said:

And I was aces on DC Bangai-O. That game just didn't seem as gimmick-y on most of the levels. Maybe I'm remembering it wrong. I just remember skill would get you by. In this game there may be 'doing it' better or worse, but so many of the levels have ONE real solution with the difference in times and scores reflecting refinement.

You're definitely not remembering it wrong, the DC game was far and away better designed. It had a few gimmicky stages, but Spirits and Missile Fury are raw gimmick. It's such a shame, too, because this game could have been so much more fun than it is, but they blew it all on making the stages asininely specific in what you need to do to finish them. There's no creativity or different ways to handle the situation, and it just ends up boring and repetitive.

*sigh*

[justjustin]

That's how I feel about Missile Fury. At best, it's refreshing to play for a little while just to break up the pace, but that's about it. The fun is in "solving" the stage, which basically boils down to trial and error and good timing. There are some really stupid moments, though. I hate those stages that wait until the very end of the level to trap the last objective behind a pillar of unbreakable boxes.

Well, I like it better than Spirits, at least.

[kog3100edw]

I think it is a good game. It just isn't as fun, literally, as DC Bangai-O was for me. I can see Treasure didn't want to exactly duplicate what they've done with Bangai-O before... similar to Sin & Punishment having new 'modern' changes. But I think S&P was a step in the right direction and Bangai-O is not.

S'okay. Can't win 'em all. And it ain't like Bangai-O was full retail expensive. I still really dig the counterattacks.

[dire51]

I tried the demo, and I didn't like it at all. Too bad, I was excited about it too.

I guess it's the DC game or bust for me.

[thefunkyredcaboose]

I understand not wanting to do the same thing twice, but the audience for the original was so limited that it would be great if they'd do an HD remake.

[kog3100edw]

So level 40 is kicking the poop out of me in Fury Mode.

Any more-skilled players want to give me an idea how they mastered it? No videos online. Can't access leaderboard replays until the level is beaten.

It is the one where you have all the round missile pods at the top of the stage and you have to dash through their fire to 'return' the missiles to the enemy. After you do that you face a slew of ants, then a small-ish wave of sonic-bots, and finally two Langai-o (pink dashers) robots.

My problem is in not having quite enough time or EX bars to kill the Langai-os. I've got killing the missile pods down to a minute or less. I've got killing the ants down to a minute with no EX usage or less with one EX usage. It is the sonic-bots that take so long since I am trying to hoard EX meter for the Langai-os. I haven't gotten there with five EX (but once, died instantly) so I haven't seen if a MAX attack is quick and powerful enough to kill them. I didn't use a MAX attack for previous dual Langai-o encounters, but these seem resistant to past tactics.

Thanks for any help.

[dartagnan1803]

40?
I'm having trouble remembering which one that was.
I have my own approaches to killing specific enemies.

For the Sonic bots my solution is to always dash into them and shoot them while they're launched (as with all these, always try to launch them into each other).

Longai-os are especially vulnerable to your freeze attack, although I'll be the first to admit that this tactic is rather temperamental since their dash and the touchiness of the attack itself makes it hard to pull off and FRUSTRATING to practice. All in all, I've been letting longai-os surround me and then using multiple freezes to freeze them all and their projectiles when they get close before unleashing a 3x or 4x counter.

If it's just one you can kill it rather easily by just freezing it and doing hit&run with a few napalm shots.

Seriously though, longai-os will become the least of your worries when you encounter giant napalm or the stupid fucking Crazy-Kings;
imagine a Longai-o that fires lvl4 napalm (homing+instant death), has tons of health, employs a MAX attack, AND regenerates all health if you don't kill it within a few seconds of it's max attack burning out. . .that's a Crazy-King, and you have to fight two at once at some point.


As for the game itself
I cleared Fury mode almost 2 weeks ago with much difficulty.
As for the game itself; for all its frustration, for all the stupid levels I've had to endure, I found it all oddly satisfying. I've gone back to a few stages to try and do better and ended up having fun improving my time/tactics.

The most frustrating thing about the game is without a doubt the fucking dash meter.
I can't count the number of times I've lost track of it and/or failed to dash because I was a fraction of a second away from recharge and instead got hit by a barrage of fire. The mechanic IS nicely balanced as is, but could be better if it were just a little faster to recharge.

The bonus maps add to the experience. . .most of the time.
Puzzle stages seem pointless and angering at first, but when you FINALLY find the solution it's the angering 'why didn't I see this before' type of satisfaction.

The extreme maps WILL make you cry. Crazy kings aren't much trouble for me anymore and I STILL HATE THESE STAGES.
At this stage I only have Puzzle Stage 6 and Extreme stages 4 through 13 to go before I've cleared everything.

The thing I miss most is the story, a game this frustrating really needs it to lighten the mood. A talking core or a Sheep-Author swirling a glass of scotch would go a long way toward making this game perfect.

[kog3100edw]

I got level 40 sorted several days ago now. I had all the right techniques, but as ever with this game the clock is my main enemy. Finally managing to kill the waves of enemies with the needed efficiency was mostly down to luck but there you go.

Crazy King didn't give me that much trouble because I had my kid plunk him down in a edit mode room so I could practice him.

I managed number three on the leaderboards for level 47 so I must've done something right.

Cheers.

[kog3100edw]

Oh, in addtion Dart, I'll say I agree with almost everything you posted there re: the difficulties, tactics and comparison to old Bangai-O!

[dartagnan1803]

It's strange, just days after I declared my hatred for the Extreme maps I've knocked out another 4 of them.

Which makes another quirk about this game apparent;
There is plenty of fun challenge here to many of the stages, the PROBLEM is keeping focus when you're seeing red when you die in the sea of bullshit that leads to a stage's climax. Dashing through the early parts of harder stages is frustrating because you KNOW the simple solution, you're just losing your patience and want another go at that pair of crazy kings at the end of the stage.


The Roadmap to tackling harder stages for the first 20 tries should look something like this; (and this is AFTER you learn the game mechanics).

OK, that was good, gotta get to the end and try again.
To hell with those breaker-turrets in the center, I'll just fire some homing shots and

. . .

FUCK!!! freaking Napalm tank came out of nowhere FUCK!!!

Ok I'll try again. . .
HA, IN YOUR FACE TREASURE, I'm gonna

. . .

Why are these blocks in the way??
MOTHERF@&K3R!NG hell.


Bangai-O HD's exhibit-A to why it needs a wacky story to lighten the mood.


As for direct comparison;

It's not so much stages being gimmicky, I actually like stages like the one where you DIVE straight down cutting a swath of destruction before racing upwards through a rain of various blocks.

It's the complexity of the newer ones (multiple weapons) vs the simplicity of the DC one. In the DC one, the entire game was built around two weapons, making flow much easier. Spirits allowed you to choose whatever setup was appropriately OP for each player. Stages being relatively open to different setups, although some worked more than others for certain situations, abandoning favorites and finding what worked was the issue there.

Missile Furry built its STAGES around a pre-chosen setup and handicaps, which forces you to adjust tactics, but at times forces you to play the game for the most part on its own terms, which leads to a repetition of following directions rather than delightfully blowing shit up your also blowing shit up according to how flavor text told you to.

The DC game was limited to two weapons, leaving one to decide out of those two, rather than experiment with 6 on the fly to verrying results. It's fun to discover how well weapon-x does in a situation, but they're often too specific.

Mechanically, this game has perfected what the other games tried.
It upped the carnage, and streamlined the weapons (taking away select and leaving in pickups], merging reflect-freeze-dash into one easy to use (hard to master) mechanic.

I really like the game, I just WISH they had fixed the niggling issues.