Crimzon Clover
Shmuppery
I have reacquainted myself with my favorite shmups plus a few new ones I had stashed in my library. I really enjoy the zen of shooters, but they’re hard on my hands. After a few days of practice I hit 100 million in Danmaku Unlimited 2, but I had a dull, persistent ache in my right thumb, wrist, and upper forearm (???) for the entire day. It’s a personal scoring milestone, but to put it in perspective, the Classic Easy leaderboard top score is 24 trillion. Many of the shooters I’ve played require multiple buttons be held simultaneously for sustained periods. Changing the keymapping helps somewhat, particularly if the game allows mapping to shoulder buttons, but since I depend on my ability to type for my livelihood it does limit how much I can play without resting.
I have a couple of shooters I’m invested in, the aforementioned Danmaku Unlimited 2 and Crimzon Clover: World Ignition. Both are bullet hells that require full mastery to unlock all the Steam achievements. In DU2, the ‘big one’ is the trillion point achievement. Crimzon Clover puts less emphasis on scoring achievements, so the big achievement is 1CCing the game in arcade mode, which means beating the game on the most challenging difficulty with no continues. Both of these achievements are earned by less than one percent of players. I could get into the gritty details and bore everyone, but I think the DU2 achievement is ultimately more obtainable for me.
There was a point in time I would have dismissed any hope whatsoever of accomplishing a 1CC run in either game, let alone on hard mode, but I think I’ve hit some sort of invisible bullet hell threshold because suddenly I found myself improving much more quickly than I had in the past. I think a lot of it is muscle memory, but I noticed another big leap after I practiced grazing in DU2 (allowing bullets to enter a radius near the ship, sometimes even passing through the ship itself, but not hitting the core; this contributes to a graze score multiplier). It made me more comfortable with bullet proximity and less likely to twitch too much, an necessity in levels where the screen is essentially covered in neon.
Anyway, I am generally not a competitive player, so it’s fun to have an interest in scoring mechanics. It’s requires a different mental approach and playstyle than playing a game to beat it.
Crimzon Clover: World EXplosion
Crimzon Clover: World EXplosion is very good. If you’d told me 4 years ago I’d be able to play this game on Switch I would have lost my mind. This version of the game, which includes a new Arrange mode, should eventually be released on Steam as well.
For the sake of transparency, I love shmups but I am an absolutely mediocre player. I dug up my old scores from when I was previously obsessed with this game in 2015 and the best I found was 168 billion on novice (level 4). I resumed playing this game pretty darn close to where I left off. Scoring 20-something billion on level 1 novice means you’re not playing optimally for scoring, so I looked up some strategies to better max scoring on that level (more point-blanking, and making sure to do more full locks, destroying the boss with a full lock which is a strategy I knew but had forgotten about). I think I don’t quite grok “full lock” versus using shot, but in the past just watching one or two scoring PTs really upped my game so I’ll probably do that soon.
On the fip side, for 1CC I’ve been trying to remind myself to bomb if I’m going to lose a ship. (Veggie Tales voice BOOOOMB WHEN YOU HAVE TO, BOOOOMB WHEN YOU NEED TOOOO…) My instinct is to hold on for break/double-break, but I get so twitchy in stage 5 I don’t think I could come close to 1CC without bombing at this point.
In novice mode you can easily stash extra lives, as you get one from each boss plus you can get extras by collecting stars. Yesterday I read that novice limits how many extra lives you can hold (2+) in World Ignition. I have yet to check this on World EXplosion, I’ve gained more than +2 before losing any but honestly wasn’t paying enough attention to the ship count to verify if I actually gained them or not, I just reasonably assumed if I was offered a 1-up it would count.
Anyway, this is a worthy double-dip and a demonstrates the subjectivity of the Switch tax. This is a genre classic and it’s the game that got me into bullet hell. I got the original game in a cheap bundle, the previous version sells for $10 on Steam, and IMO World EXplosion is well worth $20 on Switch. I’m not sure how many older ports I’d unflinchingly accept a 100% markup on, but this is one of them.
I pulled out ye old Flip Grip but found it too awkward to hold for this type of gameplay, at least with my current keymapping that is reliant on L+R to spare my thumbs (I seem to remember the Flip Grip being a better choice for games like Gunbird 2). I really wish something like the Hori Split Pad Pro could accommodate TATE mode, but I don’t want TATE mode bad enough to make things weird and unhip. I have my image to consider. (So I say, watch me purchase that clip mount or something similar within the upcoming months and promptly hate it.)