It’s still pretty as all hell, but the controls can still be touchy, the level design is still tedious and far too long, and the enemies are barely even speedbumps. The bosses can be fun (and hard), but there’s definitely a lot of things that need tweaking. Collision detection is a huge one, as it’s not at all rare to find bosses trapped inside walls. Aya seems particularly prone to it, but bosses in general seem poorly tested. The frog, for example, glitched me between it and a wall then proceeded to slap me to death while I couldn’t move. Marisa’s master spark also literally pinned me against a wall from right next to her and took basically my entire life bar… and then part of the next one. It definitely needs (more) patching and could use some improved mechanics and controls to be more than just an afternoon’s distraction. Still pretty though!

As usual, I’ve been slacking when it comes to Comiket stuff.

The two promos above are Hitsuji Shitsuji Meat Sheep from Top Arts Plan, which formerly brought you that crazy-ass River City Ransom-esque Kunio-esque Touhou party brawler. Now it is making Meatboy clones with an anthropomorphic sheepgirl sending her legions of sheep to their doom. It’s certainly a step sideways. The latter of the two is the aforementioned Touhou Sky Arena expansion adding Flandre, Udonge, Moukou (eventually), and apparently a whole lot of electric guitar. And since I’ve been slacking super hard lately, we move right on to…

The Devil of Decline from Strawberry Bose, previously known for The Genius of Sappheiros, a SaGa clone (recently translated too). While nearly graphically identical, it uses a revamped sort of equippable stand system, although some of the shikigamis look a little… weird. The latter is Night Veil of the Mysterious Moon from Desunoya, who has done a number of decent, if unremarkable platformers in the past. Aside from the fairly lame looking bosses and the kind of bland graphical style, it doesn’t look half bad though.

In less exciting news, there’s also the sequel to The Light You Saw, which was pretty much Just Another SHMUP^tm, but it is pretty. And finally, there’s Dystopia, an SRPG which appears to be a clone of Alicesoft’s Mamanyonyo of all things, although I know I’ve seen that general style before too.

And lastly of general interest, there’s Gatling Cat’s Sanae and Momie with Ibarakasen, another sort of genericish but fun-for-at-least-an-hour-or-so Touhou platformer from them. Mikan Douwa’s Heroine Carnival, which looks like their previous Touhou Pocket Wars vs RPG expanded into a full RPG. No PV for that though, just various screens.

There’s the usual lesser creatures too, like Gensokyo Tower Defense… 2! And a Virtua-on clone with horribly modeled SRW characters battling it out on what could charitably be called polygons. Now then, back to doing nothing on a Wednesday. Although that stupid Hoshikaka OVA is supposed to be out by now…

Yep, it’s that pretty pretty Youmu platformer that’s been making the rounds in various trials for the last couple Comikets. It’ll be out in its full version, complete with strange robots and a significantly more advanced (thank god) combat system this year. Meanwhile, Freudenstachel has gotten a number of updates to its trial over the past week. I think honestly that Erka;es has actually gone insane with how long they’ve been working on it. Lastly, if you were curious about the character additions for the latest expansion of Touhou Sky Arena, while the page isn’t updated, all three are posted to their blog; Flandre, Reisen, and Mokou with the first two playable for the trial to be released at the end of the month.

I guess this is as good an excuse as any to get back into paying attention to the doujin game scene since Comiket’s approaching. Maybe this will tweak Witch Fighter DX into a better game, but I’m not holding my breath. Fanwank Black Battler just makes my brain ache. I think MBAACCPC will overshadow all other fighters anyway. Aquastyle’s putting out yet ANOTHER expansion/spinoff to their roguelike too, now with party mechanics. Elsewhere, Area-0′s announced anothe expansion to TSA with zero info, Werk’s off wasting their talent doing Im@s pornography, and Frontier Aja made the bombshell announcement that they’ll be selling… a calendar. Who knows, maybe that means that Freudenstachel will finally come out.

Actually, I have no idea where the breast show has run off to. I skipped it last week because finding something ridiculous would have required sitting down and actually watching it. That’s a 20 minute commitment that I’m just not willing to make. This week, it’s just not appearing at all. Probably a blessing. So, uh… here’s all the Big Bang Attacks from BBBR. They finally hit version 1.03, which means that they’ve got all the moves for all the characters implemented. Personally, I would have thought that’d be the goal for 1.00. Now they can get back to fixing all those infinites. Also FYI, I’ve got a meeting tomorrow morning, so Yuruyuri and "Why Am I Still Watching This?" are going to be late by at least an hour or two… which may be the real reason for this post.

Well, I still haven’t been able to get my grubby mitts on it, but I doubt I’d have much to say that isn’t obvious anyway. Videos are starting to make their way onto NicoNico though, and while the majority are of funny glitches or silly infinites (I’m a fan of Senna’s corner face-slam one in particular), Kinako’s the last character not from BBB, so I figured one of her combo videos was worth tossing up one an otherwise slow pair of days. Other Comiket stuff… eh. I do recommend checking out the full version of Age of Ethanols if you like Age of Empires, but I’m a Civ guy. RTSes will never replace my OCD need to tweak every single specialist for half an hour each turn. They did give it a massive graphical overhaul from its earlier days and has netplay already built in to annoy your friends.

I expected much better from you, Tasofro.

I can’t say I’m impressed. The game’s slow, characters move sluggishly, and having one to two enemies to a level makes it grow old quickly. Characters only have about 5-6 moves each, but there’s rarely any reason to use anything except the highest damaging one, which isn’t even always the Super. Plus the character balance is completely FUBAR. Kyouko and Madoka literally do twice as much damage was the other three with their charged attacks. Hell, Kyouko and Sayaka’s [B] attacks are basically identical (forward rush), except Kyouko’s travels further, covers much more space vertically, does almost three times as much damage, and can’t be canceled into another attack (which is only useful for mobility anyway). Hit detection is also a little… wonky sometimes, especially with bosses. You’d think the teethy side would deal damage, but apparently getting nudged by their tail as they’re getting up causes just as much damage. Maybe it’d be better with multiplayer for more chaos and the social aspect, but the single player is slow and extremely repetitive. It doesn’t hold a candle at all to similar games like Crescent Pale Mist.

Yes, yes. I’m aware that it exists, and that it has a tanuki. Yada yada, etc etc. I’m still waiting for the Touhou leprechaun. It’ll keep until I have a day free where I haven’t spent most of the evening staring at Photoshop.

When it rains, it pours. Tasofro put up a couple videos of Grief Syndrome in action. It does look a little more simplistic than I was hoping, but the spritework and (magical girl) animations do look up to Tasofro’s usual quite good level, and you know how I adore sprites. Hopefully the multiplayer will be hectic enough in that Gunstar Heroes kind of way to make up for it. The music’s often the best part of Tasofro’s stuff anyway, which makes it all the funnier to me that one of the clips they put up doesn’t have sound. Oh well, c’est la vie.

In continued mystifying Type-Moon fashion, MBAACC is FINALLY getting a return to the PC this December packaged as a bonus item as part of Carnival Phantasm’s third episode Limited Edition Box (episode 1 of which is out now… like, literally probably went on sale within about an hour of this post). I… do not understand why it’s like that, but it’s one of my favorite fighters and that makes me happy. I barely remember back in this blog’s genesis when I counted down to MBAC PC’s release date. I think those were all purged from the archive in the great cleansing of 2010 though. Now I just need to reteach myself how to play the bloody game before I get to abuse all the fun changes to Len… like an overhead! And momentum preserving ice spikes!