Topic: The Switch Arcade Community Thread

@OorWullie Just noticed you'd changed the name of this thread. I like it 👍

Will that render all the links I've been posting to the previous Arcade Archives name now be broken? Shame if so but don't bother changing it back. This title is better going forward in terms of reflecting what we hope to chat about in here.

@Lroy The links should still work, just the title has changed.

I just checked the Steredenn devs Twitter and they said they will submit a patch to Nintendo tomorrow. So hopefully it will be available soon after. I'm not going to play it anymore until then as that crash was painful. My high score before was 450k, I was on 1.9m there and nowhere near finished. Ouch!

Edit ; I sent them an email informing them of my woe, didn't expect to hear back until tomorrow at the earliest. I just received a reply there

'Hello,

Really sorry for the crashes.
A big nice patch has been submitted to Nintendo today. I can't give any ETA (because I have no idea) but be sure the fix in somewhere in the pipes.

Again, sorry for the inconvenience.

Cheers!'

That was nice of them to respond so quick and fix the issue. I'm still waiting for the patch for The Escapists 2, which I bought on launch day 2 months ago and am unable to play.

Great news about the patch and I always like to hear about good customer service like that.

@Lroy

I’d like Ikari Warriors, T2 and I’ll be real happy when Punch Out is finally released.

The Wii has some nice gun attachements. I still use them to play Duck Hunt and other NES era shooters on the Wii U, with wiimotes, so I’m hoping we see similar attachments for the Switch and joycons one day.

Speaking of patches. Does anyone know if and when SKYFORCE RELOADED will get a patch to include online leaderboards? It keeps telling me to compare my score with friends?! You know, those little notes that pop up before the levels load up.

EDIT: Just to add for anyone who likes shooters but has yet to get this game. It has quickly become one of my fave modern shoot-em-ups. Really clean level design, logical upgrade system. Not too busy onscreen too early. Nice gradual difficulty curve whilst also empowering your ship with upgrades. Really liking it.

Strange to hear about the sterreden crashes I haven't had one yet. Hope they sort it out quickly. Instead of improving on this game I'm struggling to get anywhere near what I was scoring. Slowly slipping down the top 100 now😕

@Agent721 Ah man, I sold a really sweet pistol for the Wii along with all my light gun games. Had long since forgotten they would also work with DUCK HUNT and the like. I'm sorely tempted to buy it all back, lol!

Yeah it's really nice to see so many of these developers just be very nice and friendly people.
You don't see enough of that these days.
Had the same kind response from Zerodiv as well as Hamster in the past few months.
I'm holding on playing more as well as its really crushing to get kicked out when you're doing well.

Putting in some more time into Danmaku, and the more I play it, the more I'm falling in love with it.
Heard people on other boards call them basically Cave wannabe's which isn't plain wrong, but also disrespectful and it sells these people way short.
The only thing I kinda miss, but that's just me being an old fart, is some nice 2D sprite work instead of the sleek look. But I can't even call that a minus really.
Can't wait to see where they go from here and I hope the Switch version does really well for them.

@Agent721 ah man, the Wii was brilliant when it came to light gun games.
Ghost Squad, House of the Dead Overkill, House of the Dead 1+2 and that NY Gunblade or what was it called, the Sega double pack.
And who can forget the masterpiece that was Link's Crossbow Training!

@meppi64 You mentioned DoDonPachi and CAVE in relation to DANMAKU elsewhere. I really would love games like BATSUGUN and DOGYUUN by ToaPlan to come to Switch as well.

Yep, that's most of what I sold 😩

@meppi64 I'm going to spend some time with Danmaku later . I haven't really got into it yet. Are you playing graze mode? I found that to be crazy hard.

@Jbs-Dad I was the same with Steredenn.I set my score of 450k and made it past the 4th boss the day after buying the game and haven't even come close to that score since. That run there though, everything just went right. I got a next gen heavy weapon, then perfected it and then got a health boost. All that together with what I've learned over the week saw me ease past the 4th boss. Surprisingly the 5th boss wasn't too difficult, then it threw a surprise boss at me and offered a whole new set of upgrades. I'm choking to go back to it and see if I can repeat it but I'll hold off for a couple of days.

@Lroy Glad to hear you're enjoying SkyForce Reloaded. It's a nice alternative to the other shoot-em-ups and nowhere near as intense. I can play that for a good while when I put it on. I might play it later on actually as I'll be up late answering some work emails.

@Lroy Oh Dogyuun! I completely forgot about that one. Only played it once!
I've got Batsugun on my Saturn. One of my favourite shooters of all time. Right up there with Layer Section by Taito. Such a classic.
I really hope someone picks up all the rights to Toaplan's games. No idea where they are at this point.

And speaking of Cave, one game I'd love to see finally come home is Progear no Arashi. I have that on my PSP since it didn't out anywhere but the arcade. Then again, I'd welcome any and all Cave games on Switch.

@OorWullie
I'm about to try Graze Mode again now, since I'm starting to get a grasp on Spirit Mode. Been playing Normal and Hard and I have to say, putting Trance Mode in options to Manual is a must. It acts as an extra bullet clearing bomb that way if you pop it, so it not only makes score chasing a lot more exciting, it also acts as a life saver.
Couldn't figure out what the difference was between the two as I switched between modes the day it came out. Hopefully now that I'm starting to understand how Spirit Mode works, I'll see what's different in Graze Mode. I'm expecting some sort of gamplay variations and not just difficulty changes, but I have no idea.

That's also something that's brilliant about Cave games, at least the ports on 360.
You can have up to 6 different versions on a single game, each with it own rules and ways of play.
There's something for everyone, from the person new to bullet hell, to the crazy ones who can play these games with their feet.

@Lroy @meppi64

The House of the Dead games are great. I also like some of the newer stuff like Sin & Punishment.

I kept all my light gun stuff as I didn’t know when or if that stuff would ever come back. It’s nice to have a large variety of different style of games to play. I really like the Nyko hand gun...it comes closest to having the original light gun from the NES. My wife loves Duck Hunt so we play that one quite often. And she kicks my ass, that game is her jam.

@Agent721 oh, Sin and Punishment is brilliant, the second even more so than the first.
The only rail shooter I like even better is Panzer Dragoon Zwei.

I think I understand the differences between Spirit and Graze Mode a bit better now.
Graze mode is pretty much the same as Spirits Hard mode, but with a twist.
You don't need to enter Trance to get enemies to drop gems, they do that all the time in Graze mode.
But when you kill them, their bullets don't turn into spirit bullets, they stay regular ones. So that makes dodging a lot tougher, but also building your Trance meter a lot harder.

The only way to create spirit bullets that I've noticed is to either bomb, which you should only do if you can't escape, when triggering Trance mode, or when killing one of the really big enemies.
That last one is just an observation so it might not be fly accurate.

I was just able to perfect the first boss is Graze Hard mode.
That sure got the adrenaline pumping! Wasn't as lucky with the boss of stage 2 who killed me at his second to last cycle.
Score for Graze Hard so far: 25.383.229
True mode is gonna be bullet hell (heaven)!

Also, when your Graze meter gets high enough you enter Graze High mode with a larger green aura around your ship. Not sure what that does at this point. Might make it easier to graze bullets.
Also, trance mode gets you gold gems instead of green ones which are probably worth a lot more. Gonna have too look into that as well.

Another week without any free time, I did this single take, didin't even know strategies, best ship or properly figured out what enemies I should keep on the screen to shoot their projectiles. But I did have fun and thats why we are here.

@Shiryu It is open for another 23 hours as I was late in updating last week. The challenges will run from Saturday 12.00am to Friday 11.59pm now. Maybe you can sneak in another run. If you do have time, go with the 3rd ship, that's the one for getting high scores.

@OorWullie I figured the "Sword" beam weapon is the highest one for massive damage and could probably make quick work of the first level boss. But I do love to hit that trigger finger... Ah well.

seeing as the next game in the weekly challenge is Metal Slug I have to ask what is everyone’s favourite Metal Slug game?

I only have MS1 and haven’t played any others. I decided to pick it up as I was familiar with it from playing it at an arcade in the late 1990s.

@wasilewski Whatever you do, pick up Metal Slug 2 last.
Metal Slug X is somewhat of a special edition of Metal Slug 2 that removes a ton of the slowdown in the game. And believe me, there's a lot of slowdown in Metal Slug 2. Still love the game, but the technical issues really hold it back, compared to the others.
3 is really brilliant and for the longest time has been my overall favourite.
Hard to say which is actually best as the original one feels a bit more pure and X is a great evolution of that.
I'd say, go 1,X,3,4,...

Oh and I don't know how many musou/warriors fans are on here, but Musou Orochi 3 (Warriors Orochi 4) has just been announced.
No idea of what platforms it'll come to, but seeing as they ported Musou Orochi 2 Ultimate (Warriors Orochi 3) to Switch last year, it's not too big of a leap to expect a Switch version as well.
Musou Orochi is a bit like King of Fighters 98, a dream match of sorts where a ton of Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors cross over, alongside a bunch of unrelated characters from other series. (Ayane and Katsumi from Dead or Alive, Ryu Hayabusa and Rachel from Ninja Gaiden, Sterkenburg from Atelier and even Sophia from Soul Calibur for instance)
It's widely regarded as one of the best musou games due to it's vast selection of characters, even though it's quite old now. It originally came out in 2011 so the in-game systems are a little archaic at times, certainly compared to the more modern games in the series.

If you haven't played a musou/warriors game before, the best way to describe it is an evolution of the beat em up genre, Final Fight, Streets of Rage, but in 3D and taken to crazy levels, with a bunch of goals that change and shift during the battle on each stage. With a ton of characters that have a whole bunch of moves locked away in their combo sets.
After the disappointment of Dynasty Warriors 9, I'm happy to see them return to their roots and hope that this will be a return to what made these games so fun in the past.
Looks like it's going to be a great year for musou games with Hyrule Warriors and One Piece Pirate Warriors out here soon and now this one on the way.