Danmaku Unlimited Series

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.

Danmaku Unlimited 3

Yesterday I was puttering around Steam looking for something to play and I discovered Danmaku Unlimited 3 dropped Thursday. It’s twice as much. Maybe cause it’s twice as good. It’s challenging, the boss patterns are creative and tricky. The djent kinda blurs together for me, to be honest, but I can dig it.

One thing that is a little different, at least to me, is that both spirit mode (the easier mode) and graze mode have auto-bombs only. Spirit mode has an auto-trace default–I have no idea why anyone would want that–but you can turn it off. They dropped DU2’s upgrade system for a unlockable weapon system, and you earn additional bombs and credits as you play. It is kind of interesting to play a bullet hell hot off the presses when it’s new and fresh and we’re all starting from the same place.

As far as I can tell, DU3 surpasses Danmaku Unlimited 2 in all respects. THAT BEING SAid DU2 is currently on sale for $1 on Steam.

Danmaku Unlimited Forever, Switch Shmuppery, and TATE

My love of the Danmaku Unlimited series is well known in these parts. I have commented before that both of these games and my other bullet hell favorite, Crimzon Clover, are really hard on my hands. Sometimes remapping the controls helps.

Danmaku Unlimited 2 and 3 are both available on Android/iOS so I picked up DU2 on mobile to try out the touch controls. It’s a different game this way and it makes for a relaxing diversion. I don’t feel very competitive about it because of the lack of precision. Even on a larger screen, like a tablet, I sometimes found my finger obstructed the hitbox and I felt I couldn’t make incremental adjustments nearly as well as with a controller, but I’m happy to have it as a mobile diversion.

A number of Neo Geo shooters are available in the Nintendo Switch estore, all with TATE mode. I picked up Gunbird and it’s fine (Imagine me saying this is in DA2 Fenris’ post-coital voice). It’s good, clean fun with no surprises. I suspect a lot of these older shooters are fairly interchangeable and I have set my sights on newer ports. I was excited to learn Aka to Blue (which I cannot play because my devices don’t support it, boo) has been confirmed for Switch, but there’s no release date yet.

I was also looking forward to the Switch version of DU3, which dropped 03/13. The game looks great and plays great. I was slightly disappointed DU3 does not take advantage of the Switch’s touch screen to provide touch controls as well, it would be really great to be able to switch between the two. Naturally, this game has TATE mode.

The good news is the Switch screen naturally compliments TATE mode, or portrait orientation. The bad news is the Switch only allows joycons to be used horizontally when unattached and there is no official grip. This seems like an oversight for such a versatile console, especially considering the prevalence of vertical shmup ports in the estore, until one considers how the Switch’s heat vents are positioned.

The “work around” is to leave the bottom joycon slightly undocked. It’s an inelegant solution, not only because the controller isn’t fully secure but because the Switch is undeniably top-heavy in this configuration. The small joycon buttons actually worked in my favor, sparing my thumbs, but the top-heaviness was hard on my wrists and I missed having a D-pad (heresy, I know, but I do occasionally change it up).

ClydeRadcliffe uploaded a 3D printer schematic for a nice-looking Switch vertical grip. I think I could have it printed for about $5 at the library, however, the grip covers the vents so I’m concerned about the unit overheating.

Arstechnica just ran an article about this and highlighted efforts by Fangamer and Jeremy Parish to design a vertical grip. Unfortunately, their current design also appears to obstruct the heat vents. Supposedly the Switch manages heat well so I would still be interested in trying something like this.

I ended up picking up a $9 Switch stand for a tabletop fix. Playing DU3 with a controller and a stand isn’t exactly the portable bullet hell experience I was hoping for, so I look forward to an announcement from Fangamer or a chance to print off that 3D grip.