-JUSTICE IN SPADES-

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > -JUSTICE IN SPADES-

Paul.Power: Feb 7, 2009; The three roles of APCs:
Transports.
Supply trucks.
Distractions.

I couldn't finish the game - got as far as beating all of the Order of No Quarter, but couldn't even reach the first checkpoint on the Tower of Fate. Still a brilliant game, though. Looking forward to this LP!

# ¿ Sep 14, 2016 21:43

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 10:21

Paul.Power: Feb 7, 2009; The three roles of APCs:
Transports.
Supply trucks.
Distractions.

Tuxedo Ted posted:

Ok, if this LP doesn't finish it, I'm gonna have to play it myself. I can't handle another failed Shovel Knight thread.

Yeah, this game has a bit of a weird LP Curse hanging over it. Still, if anyone can get a Shovel Knight run done, it's probably the guy who LPed Saints Row 2 while the game fell apart around his ears.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2016 08:44

Paul.Power: Feb 7, 2009; The three roles of APCs:
Transports.
Supply trucks.
Distractions.

Hirayuki posted:

CJacobs did a complete (and fun as hell) run in the casual LP thread late last year. That's not stopping me from watching this one!

Fair enough. There's also some cool stream recordings of it by goons, like pokecapn's blind run. And yeah, still looking forward to this

# ¿ Sep 15, 2016 14:19

Paul.Power: Feb 7, 2009; The three roles of APCs:
Transports.
Supply trucks.
Distractions.

On your workflow: :stare:

(kudos for the dedication, though!)
On Croaker: :getin:

# ¿ Sep 17, 2016 22:49

Paul.Power: Feb 7, 2009; The three roles of APCs:
Transports.
Supply trucks.
Distractions.

I wish there was a better word for yellowy green than "chartreuse". It's such a common colour.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2016 06:22

Paul.Power: Feb 7, 2009; The three roles of APCs:
Transports.
Supply trucks.
Distractions.

Kaubocks posted:

y'all are gonna hate it when I make conscious but unspoken decisions to skip breakable walls in the interest of time

I just wish you'd said more about the awesome helicopter rats.

Ah well, there's always the Flying Machine

# ¿ Sep 20, 2016 20:41

Paul.Power: Feb 7, 2009; The three roles of APCs:
Transports.
Supply trucks.
Distractions.

Yeah, I had a tough time with the darkness, although looking back at least the level designers did their best to ramp the gimmick up at a reasonable rate. It's still kind of crazy how much tougher this stage is than Pridemoor Keep though. I'd almost want to swap it with one of the next set of levels (Lost City for me, although YMMV).

# ¿ Sep 26, 2016 07:37

Paul.Power: Feb 7, 2009; The three roles of APCs:
Transports.
Supply trucks.
Distractions.

I think Lost City might be my favourite stage - it's quite a relaxed one, and the bouncing mechanics were fun and unexpected.

I certainly found it a lot easier than the Lich Yard even with all the insta-death lava, and if it were up to me I'd be tempted to swap the two levels around (although saying that, it's still a lot tougher than Pridemoor Keep. And I was probably helped out a little by having more health and tools when I tackled Lost City).

# ¿ Sep 30, 2016 19:50

Paul.Power: Feb 7, 2009; The three roles of APCs:
Transports.
Supply trucks.
Distractions.

A Pleasant Hug posted:

This blows my mind pretty thoroughly. I always feel like this sort of software costs too much money whenever I look into it. I should probably look harder.

If you're curious, I think he used Famitracker in VRC6 mode. It's a pretty neat tool (speaking as someone who has used it to do a lot of silly things).

And yeah, Lost City has pretty great music. It's not quite my favourite (we'll be getting to that one some time later), but it's definitely up there.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2016 21:39

Paul.Power: Feb 7, 2009; The three roles of APCs:
Transports.
Supply trucks.
Distractions.

Treasure Knight is a bit of an odd beast, in that he has some things that make the fight easier (big hitbox, spends a lot of time standing still) and some that make it harder (range, when he does move he's pretty quick, that goddamn whirlpool treasure box). I guess it makes sense that you have a variable time fighting him.

Now we've hit Iron Whale, there's a couple of things I want to link. First is my favourite track from Strike the Earth!, Sub Atomic by coda. I just love how inventive it is with the source.

The other thing was this neat video where Shovel Knight level designer Michael Herbster made a Mario Maker level, which contained some Iron Whale spoilers. It's fun to watch the thought processes he goes through to make a level hard but fair.

# ¿ Oct 5, 2016 08:03

Paul.Power: Feb 7, 2009; The three roles of APCs:
Transports.
Supply trucks.
Distractions.

C-Euro posted:

I wanna say that Baz originated from some very early concept art/designs of a 90s fighting game but someone's gonna have to back me up on that. It may have even been from SF2.

Pretty much. On the plus side, at least he has an origin beyond "original character do not steal".

Still a giant pain to fight, though. I learnt an important lesson from fighting Baz: if you fight a Wandering Hero, die to them, go somewhere else (like the Troupple Pond to get fresh ichor, say) and come back to the hero, your lost gold is gone. Boy was that awkward.

e: I think the idea of the treasure being on the right in that Iron Whale bonus level is that it's a bit more of a challenge to get to the right side of the screen in the room above than it is to drop straight down into the hole on the left, and that hopefully the player will twig this and go "ah, I should aim to go down the hole on the right".

Unfortunately you sort of learn the opposite of that lesson from the very start of Lost City, where down is progress, right is optional and right-and-down is death.

Paul.Power fucked around with this message at 19:48 on Oct 7, 2016

# ¿ Oct 7, 2016 19:41

Paul.Power: Feb 7, 2009; The three roles of APCs:
Transports.
Supply trucks.
Distractions.

Those rats didn't turn green and explosive on their own...

# ¿ Oct 13, 2016 08:52

Paul.Power: Feb 7, 2009; The three roles of APCs:
Transports.
Supply trucks.
Distractions.

I didn't have a huge amount of trouble the one time I've fought Plague Knight, mostly because of the tried-and-tested "barge through it with the Ichor of Renewal and spamming the Flare Wand in his face" technique.

I guess it's a question of skill - the more skilled you are, the more of a pain Plague Knight becomes relative to the other bosses. Since I have very little skill, he didn't seem like a problem!

# ¿ Oct 13, 2016 20:01

Paul.Power: Feb 7, 2009; The three roles of APCs:
Transports.
Supply trucks.
Distractions.

Unrelated to the latest video (sorry!), more to do with "things that make the two Manami Matsumae tracks stand out as a bit different from the the rest of the soundtrack":

1) Virt seems to mostly use the V00 square duty setting (switching to V02 sometimes) for his melody line, Manami Matsumae uses V01 more.

2) They seem to have different approaches to using the extra channels granted by the VRC6 chip. Virt seems to go more for them making little staccato arpeggios and stuff, while Manami Matsumae goes for chords.

I appreciate that sounds like gibberish, give me a little bit and I'll try to explain what I mean a bit more.

e: The C Major scale, using Famitracker's Pulse 1 channel set to V00, V01 and V02 in turn. The frequency/pitch of the notes stays the same each run-through of the scale, but the timbre changes because we're effecting how long each pulse lasts for. This is roughly what V00, V01 and V02 look like as waveforms:

So same frequency, but the change in the amount of time the pulse signal is switched on for every cycle still effects the "sound" of it.

The NES soundchip had fairly limited square duty control with only a few settings, but if you want something with really fine-controlled square duty, the Commodore 64 was where it was at.

e2: Okay, now let's move on to the second point. So this is roughly what you get when you open up FamiTracker:

Pulse 1, Pulse 2, Triangle, Noise and DPCM are the five channels that you get with the NES's standard 2A03 soundchip - these are the channels that most NES music, including Mega Man, were composed on. Pulse 1 and 2 can be set using those square duty V effects mentioned above to make those different instrument sounds. Triangle is a little different, it makes a noise similar to V02 but its volume is always at maximum so it's a bit tricky to control. It's often used for basslines, or those "descending note" bass drums familiar from, say, Crash Man's Stage. Noise generates blasts of static, typically used to simulate the snare drum or cymbals. DPCM is a bit of a wild card, you can load sound waves into it and get whatever you like, really (with the obvious limitations on how much you can put aside to store it on your cartridge).

Now let's switch FamiTracker to Konami VRC6 mode. These are channels added by Konami for some of their later NES games (most notably Castlevania III):

You get three new channels: another pair of Pulses (with an extra V mode to boot: here, V00, V01 and V02 are renamed to V01, V02 and V03 respectively, with a new V00 with an even shorter square duty cycle) and a Sawtooth channel which is similar to the Triangle channel except you can actually set the volume on this one. I tend to like using Sawtooth for the bassline and Triangle for the bass drum when I work in VRC6.

And yeah, Virt mostly tries to go with "the new pulse channels act as mostly fiddly backing stuff away from the main tune", whereas Matsumae mostly makes them handle the backing chords. That's how it feels, anyway. I should probably open the Shovel Knight NSF up in Famitracker again at some point.

Paul.Power fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Oct 14, 2016

# ¿ Oct 14, 2016 20:06

Paul.Power: Feb 7, 2009; The three roles of APCs:
Transports.
Supply trucks.
Distractions.

bman in 2288 posted:

Hello, like-minded person.

Well now I feel silly because I was going to say that it's my least-favourite of the stage musics :v:

. But hey, it'd be a funny world if we were all alike. For me it feels like the least tuneful one, but I'll concede that tunes aren't everything, and it does build good atmosphere.

# ¿ Oct 18, 2016 22:10

Paul.Power: Feb 7, 2009; The three roles of APCs:
Transports.
Supply trucks.
Distractions.

C-Euro posted:

I'm not big on it either. At the very least, it pales in comparison to the other two stages at this "tier".

Oh yeah, they're both fantastic (as we'll see soon enough!)

# ¿ Oct 19, 2016 17:23

Paul.Power: Feb 7, 2009; The three roles of APCs:
Transports.
Supply trucks.
Distractions.

Crasical posted:

I'm just glad that Kaubocks uses the subweapons, I've had a bad history with LPers covering the classic Mega-Man games and ONLY ever busting out their special weapons when it was time for boss fights.

And here in Polar Knight's stage he's even admitting he could get away with using the war horn more.

Simply Simon's Mega Man LPs are pretty good about using the special weapons in the stages (and conversely, buster-duelling the bosses).

Watching him find innovative uses for MM5's wonky weapon set is fun.

Paul.Power fucked around with this message at 21:53 on Oct 19, 2016

# ¿ Oct 19, 2016 21:51

Paul.Power: Feb 7, 2009; The three roles of APCs:
Transports.
Supply trucks.
Distractions.

A small version for posting shenanigans:

# ¿ Oct 23, 2016 20:42

Paul.Power: Feb 7, 2009; The three roles of APCs:
Transports.
Supply trucks.
Distractions.

So when I said a while back that my favourite music track was later in the game... well, here we are. I'm a sucker for a good bassline, and Clockwork Tower's theme, "Of Devious Machinations" delivers that in spades (ahem). And as with the Flying Machine's propeller noises, the incidental noises do a great job of sounding like a giant clock.

# ¿ Oct 25, 2016 17:52

Paul.Power: Feb 7, 2009; The three roles of APCs:
Transports.
Supply trucks.
Distractions.

Incidentally, one neat speedrunning trick you can do with the mobile gear is bypassing most of that horizontal "fake autoscroller" section. Just plop it on the spikes and away you go!

# ¿ Oct 25, 2016 22:59

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 10:21

Paul.Power: Feb 7, 2009; The three roles of APCs:
Transports.
Supply trucks.
Distractions.

Pottage and poultry, mutton and meat,
Your maximum butt will increase if you eat!

Thanks for a great LP, Kaubocks

# ¿ Dec 10, 2016 09:23

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > -JUSTICE IN SPADES-