Ketsui Death Label

[spatular]

Hello

sorry i'm not sure if i'm supposed to have played the game before making a thread here? anyhow i'm quite excited about this, it was released on the 23rd in Japan, i'm still waiting for mine from yesasia (and it could be a while yet if raiden 4 is anything to go by, 23 days and counting).

this is the first and probably only bullet hell type shooter for the DS (although it wouldn't surprise me if there were some homebrew ones?), I love this type of game, a shed load of fairly slow moving bullets to weave through that looks impossible but isn't because of the tiny hit box of your ship (you only die if a bullet hits you right in the centre of your ship), they usually have a mad scoring system that's really hard to either understand or execute too, although i tend to ignore this in favour of staying alive.

cave, who made the original Ketsui arcade game, are strongly accociated with these bullet hell shooters as they make a lot of the best ones (anyone heard of or played dodonpachi? sure someone here has one of the sequals, dodonpachi DOJ?), they are pretty much confined to japanese arcades though and not really well known anywhere else it seems. the Ketsui arcade game is a lot like dodonpachi but the scoring system is much easier to use, it's a bit harder imo and the bosses are better - which is a good thing for the DS game as it's a boss rush game as in you mainly fight the bosses and mid-bosses from the arcade game, including doom - the last boss that i think you only get to fight after the second loop on the arcade game.

Arika are responsible for Ketsui death label - they ported 2 cave games to the ps2 (dodonpachi doj and espgaluda, both ports of the highest quality) and were trying to port Ketsui to the ps2 as well but they couldn't get it perfect so wouldn't release it! so born from that is this DS game i guess.

the game is pretty expensive (£30+) because it comes with a superplay dvd of the arcade game. this makes it good value as the now hard to get hold of inh superplay dvd used to cost ~£36 on play-asia. but if you're not interested in the dvd (most people probably aren't) then it is pretty expensive.

sorry for going on a bit, i'm always trying to get more people into this type of game, and mostly failing - and to that end, if anyone is interested i'd probably recommend trying some games on mame (arcade machine emulator), dodonpachi probably is the best place to start, there are other cave games that work on mame - guwange, ESP ra de are both great for a start and the non-cave game armed police batrider would also be a good starting point.

having said that - anyone else getting this?

i'll post impressions when i get the game.

here's some info from the shmup forum (the thread was massive but was trolled and mostly removed or something?):

http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?t=22976

and there's a thread at ntsc-uk:

http://ntsc-uk.domino.org/showthread.php?t=91208

and some vids on youtube:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=dOaTEuRfOlU

http://uk.youtube.com/results?search_query...p;search=Search

[DANGERMAN]

Ban request for Spatular please mr illdog.

I was wondering why the box seemed so big, I figured that would explain the price. I actually really want this too but £35 is a bit steep for a DS game, especially a shooter, that said it'll be a shame if people just download it or something, I might get it nearer to christmas

[spatular]

Ban request for Spatular please mr illdog.

does this mean i shouldn't have posted yet?

some of the people commenting on this on the shmups and ntsc-uk forums will probably have downloaded it but then if it gets people playing games like this then i'm not sure it's such a bad thing? although it might not be the best introduction, unclear.

thanks for replying, even if it was to try and get me banned i post stuff like this on the clan forum and never get any replies

[spatular]

this finally arrived (about 2 weeks ago) and i'm not liking it as much as i expected but that's probably because i keep playing the rediculously hard mode in an attempt to unlock the last mode, the mini stage, but because of it's rediculous hardness, it's just annoying. playing the earlier, more possible, modes was much more fun.

it works really well though, the ds handles masses of bullets with ease and the bosses look really good, just like their arcade counterparts.

not watched the dvd yet.

[illdog]

Im semi interested in this, ive developed more of a taste for shooters over the years. That and mustard.

Im afraid tho, if Bullet King spatular cant doing, damn sho i cant do it.

[Jimboxy]

i always love the way these game look, they always have so much going on and the style of the sprites and the likes i think look awesome.

However when it comes to playing any of them, i suck the big one. I'm utter utter rubbish.

[DANGERMAN]

Im semi interested in this, ive developed more of a taste for shooters over the years. That and mustard.

Im afraid tho, if Bullet King spatular cant doing, damn sho i cant do it.

He's playing on some stupid hard setting though, it might be doable on easy with infinite continues. Like I said above, I'd love to have a game like this on the DS (that one from near the DS launch wasnt up to much imo), but £30 for something I'll likely get stung on import duty for is a bit steep

[spatular]

yeah what ben said, i'm playing it on a silly setting just because i want to unlock the last mode.

there's 9 modes total:

novice

normal

hard a

hard b

hard c

very hard

death label

doom mode

???

the last 2 i've got are crazy hard and i haven't unlocked the last one yet - i need to beat death label.

on each mode (apart from doom and ???) you get an extra life if you loose, up to a maximum of 20 (your starting life and 19 extra) and on each boss your bombs are refilled to 3 i think, so actually all the modes are up to very hard are quite easy to finish, and very hard isn't that difficult to get to the end of.

someone on the shmup forum has put a replay of very hard mode on youtube - split into 2 parts:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ws_65NY73VY

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=aXaj3W1Kjjg

note that to get the best scores you need to have all the lives as you get more points for lives remaining at the end, doesn't take long to just leave it running to rack up the extra lives.

- edit - also i think really anyone can get reasonably good at these games just no one plays them much, any shooter that people seem to play a lot, like geometry wars they seem to get good at it. also it's really hard to access manic shooters over here, shikigami no shiro 2 on the ps2 is the only really good one i can think of that's been released here? oh and probably giga wing on the dreamcast.