fell off of ultimate on psp a few months back so I was a little shocked that jumping way further back in the series' history would give me a more even experience (at least for a first loop). I go back and forth between this and castlevania (mostly 1), and I've found that I prefer the highly dynamic enemy spawns and quick movement/fire rate of gng over the more rigid, planning-centric cvs; a little strange since I'm a routing guy at heart. ghouls still has its moments of that of course, since enemy spawns are predictable, but their behavior tends to feature much more random chance than cv. you're more likely for an enemy to suddenly stop early, like the bouncing turtles at the start of stage 2, or to overwhelm you with numbers like with the galaga-esque swooping enemies at the start of stage 3. weapon balance also shocked me a bit; it's definitely stricter than cv in the sense that you never have a "normal" weapon to fall back on if you get a bad option, but at the same time you can fiddle with your playstyle in order to get a nonsynergistic weapon to work in a particular sequence. the knife obviously has ridiculous dps, but something like the torch can even be useful to clear paths ahead, and certain angles that the discus or axe can hit are perfect for spots where the usual four-directional attacks won't do. definitely interested in practicing this more, both to eventually get a second loop finished and to hopefully get a 1-all (I mean, a 2-all is def doable, but it's not gonna happen soon lol). probably will switch to the arcade version eventually as well.

I've been quick to hate on this game in the past bcs I've gotta represent my love for sega in the face of overzealous namco fans... but I've been picking away at it in the background for some time now and it's unfortunately a great game in its own right. the simplicity of its drift system, where one pumps the gas and cuts the wheel get dial in the desired exit angle from the oversteer, belies a fair amount of adjustability that comes from the timing variations that one can use when executing the maneuvers; certainly not as demanding as the shifter finesse you need to lock in the same (or even more exaggerated) angles for daytona, but with some effort you'll get a nice bit of nuance all the same. the campaign is remarkably approachable for newcomers, and the extra trials give a nice kick in the pants to those wanting something more demanding. realizing that the latter existed definitely energized me to keep coming back here and there to work through the other campaigns and car vendors I hadn't tried yet. if I wanted to be snarky I'd say this is a menu game, in the sense that people play it just to look at the menus. but if we're being real, I gotta admit that shit pulls me in as well.

this was my first attempt at fucking around with a more modern shmup, if we're setting a dividing line between eras somewhere around garegga and ddp. feels disingenuous to call this an actual bullet hell, but from what I can tell yagawa's work in general focuses more on higher speed patterns with lower density, although I may be generalizing bcs I haven't touched his cave-era work at all. compared to garegga the rank system is more forgiving here (especially on the normal difficulty) thanks to bullet grazing decreasing rank in addition to the classic life sacrifice mechanic. what made it a little off-putting was that I was expecting to come in for a routing challenge but instead found myself contending not only with rank but with this convoluted random stage sequence (again, on normal, you can select stages on advanced), which meant that I would often be entering into stages with completely different rank than previous attempts, which stymied my ability to pre-plan stages as much as I would've liked. superplays for this are funny: the timer for chaining is pretty short but can be stalled either with a bomb or a death, and with that synergy top players will milk bosses by setting up the chain on inessential pieces of the boss and then alternating deaths and bombs (which you replenish on death) to keep the timer frozen perpetually. you can gain a ton of extends off of this to keep the train rolling, so it's essential to score play. eventually I'd like to get some 1ccs under my belt but I sort of have a hard time forcing myself to practice since I jump between games so incredibly frequently, even with a 20 min game like this that should be easy to practice daily. I've diverted my replay attention to zoe2 for the time being, but maybe I'll return to this or another shmup afterwards.

absolutely barren diablo clone on gba. I played as a big dragon guy and his unique traits basically boil down to just having a random fire breath counter-attack that you can level up... otherwise he just wields axes and flails. enemy design is mostly "thing that walks towards you and attacks when in range," and they don't interact with each other at all so clump them up and fire away. to spice up the loop of kiting a group and then pressing A to kill them you get some charge attacks, but the usefulness of this is mitigated by your accuracy stat and the notable chance of missing any of your attacks; throw yourself into the middle of the crowd with your spinning axe charge attack and watch 3/4 of the attacks miss. probably the most that I can give it is that the menuing is intuitive and clean even with the limited button layout. you have an interface at shops for picking and dragging items between your core inventory, the shop layout, a "sell" bin, your equipment, and then quick-access repos for weapons and consumables. works well with minimal switching screens, and swapping weapons on the fly functions rather admirably. really struggling to think of things to talk about other than that. probably way better as a multiplayer experience.