Otomedius Gorgeous

[Atticus]

Can't see how they can justify charging for some of these ... at least Dick Turpin wore a mask ...

Cheers for that Dazzy. I've sussed which are BGM, which are costumes, which are themes and gamerpics ... the only one I'm unsure of is the one right before the Easter Island level (think it's 4th on the list, after the free ones, costs 400). If anyone knows what it is could you let me know please

Easter Island is a top extra level ... Tokyo's still my fave though.

[Kron]

Cheers for that Dazzy. I've sussed which are BGM, which are costumes, which are themes and gamerpics ... the only one I'm unsure of is the one right before the Easter Island level (think it's 4th on the list, after the free ones, costs 400). If anyone knows what it is could you let me know please

Easter Island is a top extra level ... Tokyo's still my fave though.

Its a new playable character called Esmeralda.

[Atticus]

Cheers Kron ... I can sleep easy now ... with my 400pts intact

[briareos_kerensky]

Thread revival...after a couple of hours with the game and having tested both original and gorgeous mode I can't say I'm very impressed by the title but probably it's because I have more questions in my mind than anything else.

For example: how do I freely browse through the stages in original mode? Without the touchscreen, using a standard Hori stick, I place the cursor over the world map and go around by pressing A, but I'm not able to chose Easter Island, it keeps spinning until I end on a stage I already completed...so far I visited San Salvatore Island, Tokyo, Alexandria and the North Pole, I think I miss other stages besides Easter Island but I couldn't figure out how to properly spin the globe.
I did understood that X turns on some kind of touchscreen emulation mode but it seems that it's not working properly...whenever I press X the game simulates a "click" from the touchscreen and I have to keep the button pressed to make it work: basically the cursor goes around constantly "clicking" and sometimes it locks onto active areas even with X firmly pressed; for example, if I want to grope the girls, I need to press X, position the cursor over them, release X and then press A to confirm the interaction...why?

This leads to the next question, Tita Nium's bomb: how does it work without a touchscreen? By pressing random buttons I was once abel to position a few markers where I wanted, but so far I weren't able to replicate the action.

Now, about the game itself...has anyone ever understood where the real hitbox is? At first I thought it was near the girls' waist, but in the South Pole sometimes I get hit sligthly behind or in front of it.

So far I'm enjoying original mode more, I don't really understand why they removed so many things in gorgeous mode...gone are the elemental tokens, the burst mechanics, rhythm (normal difficulty) is bland and with some characters you're left with an incredibly weak attack even at the first mid-boss.
Original mode is easy, too, but at least you can ramp up the difficulty of a stage by playing it at least once; San Salvatore Island (the "first" stage) is extremely uneventful but in hard becomes much more interesting...if you're using a balanced character, Tita and Madoka are far too powerful for any stage.

[Kubrick]

Been a while since I played this. In fact reading your post just reminded me that I haven't checked out the Easter Island stage that got added. The endless grinding involved to complete the gallery meant I didn't want to touch it again for a good while...

Anyway yeah, the hitbox is hard to pinpoint with any real accuracy. It definitely IS somewhere around the character's waist as you can squeeze between a narrow pair of laser beams that one of the Bosses tries to hit you with, but how far infront or behind it extends...I don't know. I actually think it might even move around a bit in relation with the inertial movement on the ship that the character "wears".

For browsing/groping in the menus, thats pretty much how you describe it if you're using a digital controller. It just doesn't work very well. If you want to move the pointer freely, you'll have to use the right analogue stick on a standard controller.

I think the idea behind the Burst attack is to destroy enough enemies with it so you can immediately make another one available by quickly mopping-up the tokens left behind, then rinse and repeat. As I recall, you get more points for killing stuff this way so most of the top scores on the rankings were achieved by people just constantly spamming Burst attacks over and over.
And that kind of gameplay mechanic is something that doesn't appeal to me, so I pretty-much only play this in Gorgeous mode as a straight-up Gradius-style game. Its pretty boring on default difficulty, but on Hard or Very Hard, its a lot more fun and feels more like one of it's ancestors.

[briareos_kerensky]

Thanks for the explanation...yesterday I tested if it was possible to use the right analog stick on the 360 controller when the pad is set to no.2 but met failure. Basically Tita's bomb is useless when playing with an arcade stick, that's simply awful...not that she needs a bomb when you have all options and missiles, but screwing up controls like this a very bad way to present a game.

[briareos_kerensky]

The more I play the more I get confused.
Tried with the 360 pad today and my first thought was to customize buttons...does that option even work? Under the controls tab there are two sub-tabs, I set both to the same layout but there's no way the game recognizes the layout I set even if it's saved.
And then the globe in the original mode...how do I select the Easter Island? Tried my highest level character with all stages set to maximum difficulty (now the game is interesting) and with the 360 pad but I'm still not able to go to Easter Island. Is there something I'm missing, like getting a card to go there?

Finished the gorgeous mode too, the two levels created for that mode are absolutely horrible...nice citations but how Konami was able to rip a boss rush from previous Gradius game and make it completely uninteresting here is something developers will have to explain, it's an impressive task.

[bcass]

You do know that the Easter Island stage is DLC don't you? You have to buy it off the JPN Marketplace.

[briareos_kerensky]

No, didn't knew that. However I saw its cursor on the world map, so at the very least the game could stop over it and tell me that I'll have to buy it...maybe for Japanese speakers it's a non existing problems but the interface is one of the worst seen in the last years.

[MonkeyJuggleDX]

Got this at the weekend and I think it's great, but that last 200G is really killing me. I've spend a good 3 hours going for the last two picture cards but having no luck at all!