Gesen Love Plus Pengo Soundtrack

Well, this surely contains Action Love which is basically Action Game Skills Test, Shmup Skills Test, CombatZeal and Pengo. For Shmup Skills Test, it is redone for the 4:3 horizontal orientation and there are newer stages and replaced ones. Perhaps, this re-change is suited for the 4:3 horizontal orientation instead of the original resolution as well as 4 player support. Also, the soundtrack is redone with additional stuffs for Shmup Skills Test such as the 8-Bit stage clear BGM for example as well as the new Game Over BGM. There are more of these from the overall game soundtrack to find out once the soundtrack CD is out at the end of this month. Pengo on the other hand, it is redone by Triangle Service because we can recognize the sound effects as well as the famous phrases of the respective loves for games and game genres.

It’s a shame that the Skills Test games are probably the best due to enough old-school fun of button-mashing as well as to tackle those enemies in old-school form. We surely had fun button-mashing the buttons in some of the stages in Shmup Skills Test and my favorite stages in that game are, the one where you shoot off the meteors without running into them, the one where you shoot off the flippers from Xevious, the one where you shoot off the boss after its core lights up and the 8-Bit stage. For the one where you shoot the boss quickly before it forms, it is the reference to Star Force and Star Soldier where you have to quickly shoot any boss piece before all the pieces form to get the bonus but try not to run into any one of these because it’s a waste of a life. Be extra careful not to shoot the boss before its core lights up in that stage or it’ll be hard to destroy it because the health points may be somewhat multiplied. If the pieces form a whole boss, that’s it, you may have wasted a special bonus for not being quick and you’ll have to destroy the boss to move on. Larios and Lazaros are the famous ones but the way they form by pieces may be different. Perhaps, you’ll need Takahashi Meijin’s skills for Shmup Skills Test to see how suitable you are at this genre. For me, I don’t play action games probably a lot but this old-school style skills test game may be for you if you like those old-school game genres.

Game Center Love Plus Pengo

There may be rumors that this upcoming game by Triangle Service will be released for Sega RingEdge 2 which is the successor to the original RingEdge. Previously, only Pengo was the first part of the compilation and people thought that Sega planning this remake but then this is all Triangle Service’s doing all along because there are three other games in this compilation.

The first one is Action Love which is basically containing the platforming stuff, beat-em-up stuff and other stuffs that don’t seem to be controlled with the arcade controller. The funny part of that game is when you button-mash on three buttons like trying to tap the door-bell as many times as you can within the time limit, you can then know how annoying this is upon doing this AND that no one DARES to do this in real life. There’s also the run similar to 100M Dash from Konami’s Track and Field but you know what’s annoying, the screen rotates in anyway it wants during the run so you have to keep up. Having to move the joystick left and right during the 100M Dash can result in many complaints regarding the control concept for the gameplay that involves breaking so much joysticks. There are other stages like whacking stuffs once they come out of the hole but what’s the point of playing properly like that when the whole hammer is controlled with the normal controller. This is kind of bullshit in terms of control concepts and that’s the first flaw of the compilation.

The second one is Shmups Skills Test and is basically the Four Player 4:3 Horizontal Screen Orientation version of the game itself. It was originally released on Sega NAOMI arcade as part of Shooting Love 2007 where the whole game is vertical screen entirely but here, the gameplay is completely extended horizontally.

The third one is CombatZeal which turns out to be the something like the versus shmup game or perhaps the next Shmups Skills Test. There may be power-ups to disturb the other players but the flaw is that your playing field may end up blocking the other when rotated to horizontal screen.

The last one is Pengo and now the huge money is going to be sacrificed on having four machines connected to the network for 8-Player support which may seem to be complicated and every arcade center is bound to be buying four cabinets of this compilation itself.

Last flaw, the game is still looking like the 128-Bit generation with no generation shift whatsoever as if the music, sounds and the graphics are likely to be the same.

Sine Mora Obtained!

Wow, looks like I was able to use the button-mashing method for this game as the firing speed when holding down the fire button is as slow as in Darius series but I don’t know if that surely applies to the entire Darius series as the only Darius game I played was Darius Gaiden on the emulator. For that game, the firing speed is kind of slow but if you tap the button as fast as you can which makes the firing speed faster, you can tackle the enemies with less difficulty. It may be the same in Sine Mora in which I did the two things in button mashing. One is tapping the button and the other is sliding the button. I may have suggested myself into playing this with the arcade stick and button-mashing on the A button like that where else for Shooting Love 200X’s Shmup Skills Test, I should be using the normal Xbox 360 controller as button-sliding like that with the arcade controller is kind of difficult.

The Story Mode was like I can play well but there are certain obstacles that will instantly destroy you in one hit regardless of time and shield and I was instantly destroyed like that. For example, in Stage 3A, you are supposed to hide in the trash and follow its path without getting out of the trash until you reach the end of the path where the trash is sucked in. If you get out of the trash however, there’s some kind of mine that will explode immediately that will destroy you instantly. For Stage 3B, try not to get crushed or collide with the molten metal. For Stage 6B, the train can instantly knock your plane off if collided. Lastly for Stage 5, the thicker laser beams can burn your plane off if you’re not careful. And those are what you have to be careful for while everything else takes off seconds from collision.

With button-mashing, the enemies can be knocked out quicker than usual, not like those videos of this game on YouTube we have ever seen, that is for Story Mode as I’m still getting my ass kicked in Arcade Mode and I still have to find the solution for that. Even worse is that you’re given three credits for Arcade Mode compared to Story Mode which has more credits to start. Another worse thing is that you will get lesser time compared to Story Mode so getting hit can be worse in Arcade Mode that you will run out of time for sure.

Shmup Games Released - Shooting Love 200X

Seems that Triangle Service's Shooting Love 200X for Xbox 360 was already out. It contains the Minus Zero as the new game but we don't know what's so remixed in Trizeal Remix.
This compilation contains

• Trizeal Remix
• Exzeal
• Shmup Skills Test
• Minus Zero
• Nice DVD ???

I can personally think that the game quality should be improved but so far the game quality balance relies on Shmup Skills Test and Minus Zero. Check out Triangle Service's homepage at http://www.triangleservice.co.jp/