ESP Galuda

[J2d]

But mine has. lol

If it makes you feel better, it'll probably take 10 days to get it.

It doesn't

It's funny because lately I've been in a shmup slump because of a lot of new games but when I read some impressions 30 mins ago I got this warm and fussy feeling just like I got when Ikaruga and DDP DOJ were released, if Arika could only put up a stage 5 replay to ease the pain..

[Ryan]

Mine went out, I'll have it on Friday.

[cigsthecat]

Ditto. Yay.

edit- This is pretty impressive. Announcement to release in about 4 months.

[Bonestorm]

VGD said they wouldn't be getting it until the end of the week, so I downloaded it in the meantime.

Before I blabber on, is the "tate hose" video mode a true low res mode? And the regular "tate" is the high res filtered thing? I never really knew for sure with DOJ.

I watched a lot of videos of espgaluda, but for some reason it came across quite differently when I actually played it- and I mean this in a good way. This game is more classic cave than DDP DOJ, but is still a progress foward for cave in terms of its "inner design".

I was expecting this to look like DDP DOJ, but I was happy to see it has a very classic, hand drawn sprite look instead of the pre-rendered look of DOJ. It's similar to esprade's backrounds, but I thought even a little more traditional. There was only one background I wasn't crazy about, and that is a static "over the city" background which looked rougher than the one in esprade. I especially liked the blood splatters, because it was pure 16-bit style (esprade's seemed more animated).

I'm not much into game music, but once again it has a classic style and is very catchy.

I would say that this game is less like esprade than DDP DOJ is to DDP. Overall I thought it was a kind of mixture of old and new Cave in many aspects, while maintaining some of the esprade foundation.

Lastly, my biggest concern was framerate. Overall it seems to be much better than DOJ, but still had some trouble spots. I of course haven't played the PCB, but a lot of the slight slowdown here and there seemed to be more of the intentional type. Unlike DOJ, the last few levels couldn't really be exploited with slowdown, but there was a small section of one of the early part of the final boss where u could cheat pretty bad (I got it to slowdown constantly using my rapid shot). But it wasn't such a big deal, because the rest of the final boss ran pretty smooth and he beat the shit out of me.

Thats about it- the game is fun as hell. There are some really cool boss patterns, but I don't want to attempt to describe them in words. I'm curious to see if other people feel the same way about it as me.

[Click_Stick]

If anyone is interested, here is an interview with the almighty Clover-TAC [expert ESPGALUDA / ESP Ra. De. player.]

Very interesting stuff.


[Still waiting for GALUDA. Should be here tomorrow or Saturday.]

[gameoverDude]

Framerate problems? Well, I do have an actual PCB of Ketsui and noticed a tad of frame droppage during a few of the busier parts of stage 5. I wonder if ESPGaluda is exhibiting similar behavior to the arcade as both these games' PCBs run on PGM hardware.

Click- Good article.

[J2d]

Nice read, thanks.

On the group note, didn't you, Valgar, Bern-D and a couple of other familiar names start one, what happened to that, is there some kind of deep scoring technique hideout where you people hang out?

edit: Just check out the superplay dvd later on, it should be from the pcb and then you can put the versions up against eachother, my guess is that there's not much of a diference between them.

[JM]

Thanks Click, that was very cool.

JM

[epmode]

ok, game's great and all, but there are only two selectable characters in arrange mode (arrange mode = original esprade character types). you'd think they'd simply bring over each character, but they left out the guy with the basic straight-ahead shot. he's my fave.(

tonic's right, by the way. there's nearly no slowdown. much better than their last port.

[J2d]

tonic's right, by the way. there's nearly no slowdown. much better than their last port.

Again, compare it to the superplay dvd included in DOJ, I can't spot any real difference between the port and the pcb so you should just blame Cave for their use of slowdown.