Mushihimesama

[venom743]

I would be over the moon with just an arcade port without the extras if it's too much for the PS2!
Arika please make it happen!

[Shibusawa jr.]

Mihara is a passionate man, responsible for two great Cave ports but slightly silly if he thinks Sony will give him a PS3 devkit (at this stage) to port a five year old 2d shmup.

Maybe he should limit his ambitions somewhat and just give us a Ketsui ps2 port of DOJ/Galuda standards.....please, please.

On topic, it's still not here

[VR46]

I've "TATE'd" Venom743's vids; right click and save as

www.trizeal.co.uk/tated1.avi (41mb)
www.trizeal.co.uk/tated2.avi (60mb)
www.trizeal.co.uk/tated3.avi (55mb)

[Lurch]

Nice one. Makes so much more sense when it's the right way round. Still can't wait for this, but even when I do get it I won't be able to play it properly cos I'm lumbered with a **** tv at the moment that can't be shoved on it's side

[eastyy]

Mihara is a passionate man, responsible for two great Cave ports but slightly silly if he thinks Sony will give him a PS3 devkit (at this stage) to port a five year old 2d shmup.

Maybe he should limit his ambitions somewhat and just give us a Ketsui ps2 port of DOJ/Galuda standards.....please, please.

On topic, it's still not here

But the fact sony are limiting people on what they can and cannot convert annoys me.

[Bleeders]

A breakdown of the game-system courtesy of Icarus @ shmups.com and the brers at the click-stick forums.

This is a digest of everything I know and have discussed at Click's forum regarding Mushi. I'm attempting to archive and summarise the whole of the strategy that is contained in that monster thread, so this little mini-FAQ will get bigger as I progress and add more detailed information, such as in-depth analysis of how the hardware-assisted autofire circuits are meant to work, their application and so on. For now, please make do with this quick and basic guide.

And I was going to make the ST, but you beat me to it Wink C'est la vie.

Thaks to Click, BER, DEL, RAM and everyone else involved in said discussion.

-----------------------------------------------------------

> CONTROLS <

Basic Controls:

* A Button - Shot
The standard A button activates Reko's main shot and the lasers on any extra Options that Reko has, and her main Shot is determined by what Power you selected before you started, or have recently changed to. As in all Cave games, holding down A will slow Reko to half her speed. You also get the benefit of having her hitbox highlighted by a glowing orb, and Options will be brought closer to Reko (thanks zakk), but unlike most other Cave games, you do not switch to a secondary weapon when holding down A.

* B BUTTON - Bomb
By pressing B, you will launch a Bomb which clears the screen of bullets, and does damage to anything caught in the Bomb's explosion. I believe that you have limited control over the direction the Bomb flies in when fired, by moving left or right when you fire the Bomb.

* C BUTTON - Fullauto
C is your customary autofire button. In essence, the C button is a simple way of rapidly tapping A, and by holding C down, you get rapidfire Shot and lasers but without the half-speed movement. Holding C will also let you trail your Options, or kep them in formation, depending on what Option power is currently active (thanks again zakk). Like all Cave games before it, tapping C will fire a single burst of Shot, good for precision damage.


Combinations:

* BUTTON A+ - Rapid Shot
and
BUTTON C+ - Rapid Fullauto
These terms will be used to describe the hardware-assisted autofire settings that appear on some Japanese cabs, and now as available control configurations in the PS2 port of Mushi.

In short, A+ works in the same manner as rapidly tapping A, while C+ the same for C. The difference being in that they operate so fast, that they cause Reko to fire a single burst of Shot without her Option lasers firing, the same as tapping A and C simultaneously.

According to Japanese player RAM, only the C+ button is required to bank child counters.

* HOLD A AND C
or
HOLD A+ AND C - Powerful Attack
By holding down A and C you create in essence a "doubled" Shot, which is far more powerful than your regular Shot. Great for dealing fast damage, but crap on your chain.

Both button combinations work well, but RAM states that the A+ button used in conjunction with C is the strongest possible combination:

RAM wrote:
If you press A rapidlly while pressing C, you get little higher counter and close high power range shot get even more powerfull. I think this is a kind of bug. But if you play ultra then A+ is essential because it's power increase is about 1.5 multiply. Can't ignore at all.


* TAP A AND C SIMULTANEOUSLY - Counter Banking
This is an advanced technique for scoring that will be discussed in the relevant section. In short, by tapping A and C simultaneously, you cause Reko to fire a single burst of Shot but without her Options' lasers firing. What this does is it causes any child counters on the enemy you're attacking to be added to it's parent counter, greatly increasing your chaining multiplier.

Any time Reko fires in this manner, child counters will be banked. Tapping A and C together works best for non-hardware autofire assisted setups, but for hardware-assisted setups, all you require is the C+ button.


-----------------------------------------------------------

> SCORING SYSTEM <

like in all Cave games, chaining is an essential part of scoring. In Mushi, the chain isn't made up of linked kills (a-la Dodonpachi) or time-controlled bursts of destruction (a-la Ketsui or Espgaluda), but rather by constant attack. Whenever you hit something with an attack that isn't a bomb - either your main Shot, or Option lasers - you start to increase a general counter that lasts the length of the stage, or when it's fully depleted (back to zero). This counter is termed:

The Parent Counter:
This is the main chain counter in the game. As stated before, it is increased by sustaining fire on enemies, and wil start to decrease (quite rapidly) if you stop attacking things with your shot.

* PARENT COUNTER AS A MULTIPLIER
The parent counter acts as a large, general multiplier that affects everything that gives you points. All point-giving objects in the game are influenced by the formula:

(base point value) x (parent counter) = (points given)

Say for example, you destroyed a large enemy that had a base value of 50pts, with a parent counter of 125,000:

50 x 125,000 = 6,250,000pts

Usually, the base value of the enemies are low, because with the parent counter able to reach in excess of 600,000 in some stages, you;d be reaching Takumi-style scores if not limited properly Wink

Gems are also affected by this multiplier equation, and it is from gems that a large bulk of your in-stage points will come from.

* KEEPING THE PARENT COUNTER UP
To keep your parent counter at an increasing rate, it is essential to know that your counter will only continue to increase if you are dealing damage to something on screen. The very second you stop damaging something with your Shot or Option lasers, or if you die, or when you use a bomb, your counter will start to decrease.

Edit by zakk (thanks!):
Some enemies freeze the parent counter temporarily upon death. It may even happen on every enemy, but I notice it on item-carriers and larger enemies during the stage. It gives you a split second to position for the next enemy.

This is the reason why Mushi's scoring system is classed as "chaining", as you have to be continually linking together enemies to keep your counter going.

There are methods of doing this:

o You can leave enemies on screen and time when you kill them to sustain you chain, like in Dodonpachi. This requires the building of a good chain route.
o You can limit how much damage you do to an enemy, by either using controlled bursts of fire, or by using the weakest part of your Shot - for W-Power users, this will be the very edge of the spread.

There is another expert method of increasing your chain counter, and it is related to:


The Child Counter:
You may have noticed that on some large enemies, you not only get one large number - the parent counter - by also a few smaller numbers above it. These are child counters and just as using Reko's main Shot increases the parent counter, using the Option's lasers raises the child counters. But what are they good for?

* EFFECTS ON THE PARENT COUNTER
The residual effect on the parent counter is that, the higher the child counters, the faster the rate the parent counter tends to increase. This is an incentive to learn patterns for mid and end-of-stage bosses in order to maximise your child counters.


Counter Banking 101
The main effect the child counters have on the parent counter is related to counter banking...

* THE "FIRST HITS" THEORY:
During a discussion on theories for Mushi's scoring system, BER theorised:

BER wrote:
Suppose you are battling a mid-boss. If you use no auto-fire hacks and you simply hold down the A button so that your shots maintain contact with the enemy, then your first shot will add, say, 200 to your shooting counter and, say, 10 for every frame (or about 600 for every second) your shots maintain contact with the enemy. Once you lose contact for, say, four frames, then the counter decreases rapidly, but once you regain contact, then your first hit will add 200 again.

But if you can somehow regain contact the frame after you lost contact with the enemy, then you can increase your counter by 200 for every five frames (or about 2,400 for every second). You can achieve this with auto-fire hacks. Even if your counter drops a little each time you lose contact with the enemy, getting a little less than 2,400 per second is better than 600 per second.


We can assume that the parent counter will jump in value whenever the parent counter itself changes from the RED (decreasing) to WHITE (increasing), and the child counters themselves are RED. This is to allow you to recover some of your lost counter value if you manage to miss your attacks, therefore enabling you to continue with a good chain: the "first hits" theory. However, players can exploit this by using a special autofire setup which creates a rapid "flickering" of the parent counter, allowing you to jump the value of the parent counter quickly.

A more detailed theory by BER:

BER wrote:
Suppose you are battling a stage mid-boss. You will notice two types of counters: the bigger one which we will call the parent counter and the smaller ones which we will call the child counters (one counter for each child beetle you have). The sum of these counters is what we will call your overall counter, which is displayed in the upper-left corner (for the 1p side, anyway). You can make your overall counter skyrocket by battling any enemy that displays the child counters.

To increase your overall counter, you must do two things: (1) build up your child counters and (2) shoot the boss without applying your lasers. To build up your child counters, simply fire your weapons at the mid-boss. Once your child counters are large enough and your mid-boss is about to change forms or be destroyed, you can now shoot the boss without applying the lasers. What happens is that when the child counters are red, each shot will add the values of those child counters into the parent counter.


* AUTOFIRE BASICS:
Regular autofire - either by holding down A or C - allows you to fire in a continuous stream with little to no gaps in your firing pattern. However, this does not help you in counter banking, as you want the parent counter to go RED for a split second before returning to WHITE. As stated in the Controls section, you can create a counter banking effect by TAPPING A AND C SIMLUTANEOUSLY, which forces Reko to fire a single burst from her main Shot without her lasers firing as well. However, by using hardware autofire, you can recreate this Main Shot Only effect on a single button, removing the problem of timing your button presses.

* FREQUENCIES:
To use another game with simulated autofire circuits - Raiden DX - as an example, if I were to set one fire button with a rate of 15, I would get a very even stream of bullets with small, regularly spaced gaps inbetween, while using a higher number such as 30 would create very fast bursts of fire with large gaps inbetween.

in Mushi, this "large gaps in the stream" type of autofire setting is very important to achieving this counter banking trick correctly. In essence, what you want the autofire setting to do is fire a very fast burst of Shot, then a split second pause, then another fast burst of Shot.

What happens in-game is:
- the parent counter goes RED briefly (when there is a gap in the Shot stream)
- then returns to WHITE (when the first part of the Shot connects, banking the child counters)
- then stays WHITE for a split-second (increasing the parent counter/sustaining it's present value)
- then the cycle repeats.

In effect, this is to keep the parent counter sustained at it's present value before the next counter bank. It's a very complex theory, but it does work in practice.

However, one thing that needs to be noted is that the choice of autofire frequency is determined by your range from your target. According to RAM:

RAM wrote:
I use 20 and 10 for C+. Not for A+.
Actually I use another rapid which is 12 for A+.

I use 20 as mid range and 10 as 0 range banking.
As you know when you bank the counter you want red counter to be as short frame as possible.


You need a frequency setting that is slow and regular for close-to-pointblank range, and a faster, staggered setting for longer distances. However, please take note that in the PS2 port of Mushi, the values are reversed - 1 is the fastest RAPID setting while 20 is the slowest (thanks to zakk for the observation).

* COUNTER BANKING FORMULA
As stated before in the Controls section, by making Reko fire with just her main Shot and not her lasers, you force child counters to be added to the parent counter. They are governed by the formula:

(sum of all child counters) + (current parent counter value) = (new parent counter value)

For example, say you have an enemy with three child counters, along with the customary parent counter. Say the parent counter was at 15,600 and each of the child counters displayed 800. The formula would be:

(800x3) + 15,600 = 18,000

That's a pretty big increase! And if you banked again a split-second after:

(800x3) + 18,000 = 20,400

As you can see, getting the hang of the banking method is the best way to increase your parent counter, as you get a massive rate of increase than you would by just attacking things with your Shot. This is what the hardware-assisted autofire settings can enable you to do, without risking wrist injuries in the process.

The only problem is that since you are not actively attacking anything with your Option's lasers, the child counters will start to decrease rapidly. However, with hardware autofire, it somewhat negates this point.

[msm13579]

this arrived today and it's great fun i see what people were on about manic mode now, it's the only way to play, very much like DOJ and the music is great too

[eastyy]

Got it today had a quick go seems very good.Looks the business too.

hmm for these type of games i wonder if i should get removeable eyelids every time i blink i lose a life

[horribleman]

This is a very good Cave shooter.

After a couple of days with it, I can get the following score:

Used wide shot
Maniac Mode
Stage 3
Score = 21,355,345

It's so brilliant. Level 3 is amazing.

[horribleman]

We're having a highscore competition over at RLLMUK if any of you guys fancy registering your scores over there?

[dc-arena]

Does anyone have this game running through Optical Out on their PS2? My PS2 works perfectly, but on this game, I get no audio coming out of Optical. Comes through TV speakers via SCART fine though.

[eastyy]

Having played this game quite a bit i think its excellent.There just feels something satisfying to it dont know if its the score system or just the hoovering up the gems that i like but it just all feels right.

[Naiera]

Does anyone have this game running through Optical Out on their PS2? My PS2 works perfectly, but on this game, I get no audio coming out of Optical. Comes through TV speakers via SCART fine though.

There's no optical audio in Mushihime-sama.

[butchcvc]

There's no optical audio in Mushihime-sama.

bugger! thats put me off buying it a bit.

thats bad news for a audio geek like me!

[englishbob]

bugger! thats put me off buying it a bit.

thats bad news for a audio geek like me!

No optical out! Very poor