Rsdio

Yeah, the third beep is the key but I find doing it slightly afterwards works for me. I sort of pretend that me pressing the button is the fourth 'beep' and try to base the rhythm on that. I'm better at the cut-in myself but for some reason I can only ever seem to do it once per laser, I'm not totally sure if it's me just getting it wrong the second time or maybe not waiting long enough for the momentary cooldown to expire or what. You only really need to do it the first time with the assault ship anyway so it's not a big deal. I've managed to do Turtle Dickhead without dying a couple of times now before crashing and burning on zone J. The boss is relatively easy on that stage (though it can be a pain if he happens to use his big plasma sword thing at the wrong moment) but the earlier bits with the corridors and turret wheels is quite nasty.

Been messing around with the other ships to see which one I like the most, did ADI with Gaiden in the process. Everyone loves da black hole bomb. I think the assault ship is the one for me though, I'm struggling to see any downsides to it. It basically has a black hole bomb that can also counterburst (and seems to do more damage than most when you do a cut-in) and also lets you manually detonate it as a bonus. Strong normal shots and the subweapon that homes in slightly too, which is nice to have. Great fun and also seemingly really good for scoring. Seeing a bit of improvement on BEJ but the main obstacle on that route is the zone E boss whose name I believe is Turtle Dickhead and he absolutely lives up to it.

Had a modest 1cc for breakfast this morning, the easy route on Dariusburst AC. I've struggled to get into it before for various reasons (mostly a general feeling of mode/ship/power-up/mechanic overload) but fired it up for a practice run where I managed to finally get the counterburst timing right a couple of times then was surprised to clear it without dying on the next go. Pretty much a totally different game once you actually use the fixed burst, I guess Violent Ruler is intended to teach you that the hard way! I'm pretty cack-handed at directing it still and not remotely consistent at either form of counterburst but at least I feel like I've got my foot in the door of the mechanics a bit. That bit when the music kicks in for Iron Fossil still gets me every time

Eric B and Rakim were alright.

Thanks, yeah I tried JoyToKey the other day - Retroarch just completely ignores it and takes over all the input methods, which probably makes sense in general really but obviously not much help here. I feel like there's a way, my motivation to find it is faltering though. Although with these things you always have that nagging thought that it might just be a bug and if you try again in a version or two's time it'll magically be sorted.

On his way to 50 caps for Brazil, considered one of the best full-backs in the world, just finished a year at Real Madrid after a move from Inter.. Yeah, he was nothing before that one went in.

Cheers for that - I knew there was a way but I was losing the will to live. Through a combination of this, this and much faffing about I managed to manually get the autofire plugin to show up in the MAME tab menu, the only trouble being that it kind of glitches out when you try to actually assign a hotkey to it so it's basically useless anyway . The screen just freezes momentarity then the text box on the bottom flashes up for a fraction of a second, mashing the button you want to use does nothing and it remains unassigned. Someone in the comments on one of those links has the same issue it seems. I imagine it's probably possible to put it in one of the .inis or maybe the game's .cfg but I'm not having much luck turning anything up on that. I'll probably have another look at it later as I've wasted enough time on it now to feel bloody-minded about it but the more sensible part of me is telling myself to just put some time into one of the bajillion other games out there.

Can't help you with any proof or anything but I've definitely read something similar before, for what it's worth.

Played a bit of Raiden Fighters earlier on, only works in MAME in Retroarch though so it was a bit of a ballache to get set up.. Since MAME in Retroarch is a ballache in general. It's good fun, I only half understand the medal stuff but did manage to get the giant 2m medal on the first stage once (sadly not in time to get the apparently all-important Miclus thing though). 20m is the best I've done, crashing and burning on stage 40. I got to 50 once with a worse score. This was with the slave Ixion, having the tiny hitbox on the slave ships is obviously a huge deal but it can quite hard to tell which is your ship and which are the very slightly smaller slaves in the heat of the moment so it's a bit of a double-edged sword too. Think I'm gonna have to figure out or wait for an autofire solution to play it more though 'cos my wrist is fucked. Shame I don't have a 360 around anymore.

I guess roguelikes in general are great for this - Isaac, Spelunky, Slay the Spire etc. There's complexity there but very little fat. Shmups. The various versions of Street Fighter II (not Rainbow Edition lol) in comparison with modern fighting games. You could learn it in minutes, frame data basically doesn't matter but it has such depth that people are still playing it 30 years later.

With five taunt-based V-system variants.

Wow, any guesses? I'm going: Makoto Dan Sodom Oro New character Guess C. Viper, Dudley and Fei Long are other strong possibilities.. Think I've covered most of the bases there.

The base game is currently £1.29 on GOG. If anyone else is playing, don't buy Stefano Sensi. He's shite. I should've just played Ribery as a number 10, I vaguely recall that playing attacking players there used to be more effective than midfielders even though it really shouldn't be. Despite my big summer signing bombing I managed to gain promotion in 2nd place, twenty points behind runaway leaders Genoa. And only £3m in debt by the end of the season! I don't think I ever quite figured out how to stay debt free, that side of the game always seemed a bit broken. I'm starting the new season £1m in debt so there might have to be a big sale at some point, Cutrone perhaps. He does score his fair share but Chiesa is too good to let go so he's the prime candidate if there are no takers for Sensi. Only two goals were scored by players who aren't strikers and one header went in all season . Basically I've got the diagonal shot to the far post from just outside the box and that's pretty much it apart from rebounds and flukes.

The PC version is free on the Epic Store for the first week too.

Booted up Bakraid, lost two really daft early lives but decided to soldier on, ended up halfway through the last phase of the final boss at which point I was thinking that this new stick must have some sort of incredible game-winning abilities like the Power Glove in The Wizard. I died, but it was a confidence-boosting attempt and I felt like I could get it. I was at that annoying point you sometimes get to where you've pretty much clocked something and you start getting that dangerous feeling of somehow deserving to succeed, but runs keep being undone more by stray deaths in stupid places rather than on the actual hard stuff. Dying with bloody bombs in stock as well, which I've always been terrible for. I think that might be one downside of practicing with save states, it gets you in the habit of trying to dodge everything because while you're in a practice mindset, you might as well. Anyway, after a few near misses the 1cc eventually came! Really fun game which deserves better than to just be seen as the poor relation to Garegga. I might go back for the advanced course one day when I feel confident enough to engage with the mental scoring/rank system, though I don't foresee that day coming anytime soon.