IGBY2 game discussion: shocktro + sf2ce + tp84 (MARP)

General discussion on MAME, MARP, or whatever else that doesn't belong in any of the other forums

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IGBY2 game discussion: shocktro + sf2ce + tp84 (MARP)

Post by TRB_MetroidTeam »

Team, please discuss here about these games:

Shock Troopers [shocktro]
Street Fighter II': Champion Edition [sf2ce (before 0.140) / sf2ceea (0.140+)]
Time Pilot '84 [tp84]

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Some links:
IGBY2 page: http://retrocontests.herokuapp.com/#/event/igby2/main
MARP topic: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15798
Game List (Word) - Settings, DipSwitches, etc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QtS ... pXZVg/edit
Game List (Excel) - Controls, etc: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... edit#gid=0
Streaming List (all teams): https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1vIJJN3 ... 0/viewform
Valter "TRB" - The Real Battle
Metroid Team, from Brazil
Crazy Taxi and Crazy Taxi 2 world champions
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Re: IGBY2 game discussion: shocktro + sf2ce + tp84 (MARP)

Post by hanasu »

How do you get Ken first in SF2CE? He's the biggest pain later on it seems, would be nice to get him first.
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Re: IGBY2 game discussion: shocktro + sf2ce + tp84 (MARP)

Post by BBH »

To everyone playing in IGBY (not just those in Team MARP but everyone else perusing this forum) - I'm sorry for saying we should be playing on US bios for Shock Troopers. It's caused a lot of confusion with people who didn't know to change the bios (or didn't know how), and have submitted scores playing on the wrong settings. In retrospect we should have just played on the default Euro bios even though turning violence off changes the scoring a lot, and shouldn't be considered the proper setting for competitive play IMO. Still... my bad.

Anyway, the MARP team is still falling a little behind on this game except for my and pat33999's scores, so I should do what I should have done at the beginning of this tournament - share some basic tips and strategies for playing this game.

First of all, the control scheme. It takes a little getting used to but feels great once you master it. It's very important to master the art of rolling (button 2). Rolling gives you complete invulnerability during the roll, although there is a slight recovery when you come out of the roll where you can be hit by bullets. You can't move during the roll so make sure you always press the joystick in a direction where you feel comfortable rolling to. There are no cheap unavoidable hits in this game, everything can be dodged with a roll if you time it right (although some boss bullet patterns, like the human bosses that cock their gun in the air and do a huge spread shot pattern, require you to move to a different part of the screen in advance). Rolling also always moves you across the screen FASTER than walking. You can also use the D button (button 4), the teammate switch button, to escape situations unharmed as the character that comes in is completely invincible for a second too. Which brings me to my next point...

ALWAYS PICK TEAM MODE. ALWAYS. "Lonly Wolf" just makes things harder on you. Only having one character on your team makes you less equipped to deal with different situations that happen in the game, and you only get one set of bombs/special weapons (C / button 3). This isn't a fighting game where every character is drastically different, a lot of characters have similar statistics in terms of movement speed and defense, but everyone's special bomb is different. Generally speaking, the best plan of action for picking a team is to pick one fast character (if you are going for points over survival), one "big" character with a default double-shot gun for bosses, and... well, the third character can usually be whoever you like, if they have a special weapon that you think is good. Although it's also usually a good idea to pick characters that get high "star" ratings for the route you're playing. A character that gets 2 or 3 stars for the level gets a +8 or +16 bonus to your health, and their movement speed is increased for that level only.

So which route should you select? For my score attempts I always start with Jungle route, and then switch to Valley after the 3rd boss. This route has the most scoring potential of the 9 possible route combinations. HOWEVER, it's not the easiest route in the game. If you are playing only for survival, I would recommend picking Mountain for the first half, then either switching to Jungle after stage 3, or staying on the Mountain route... but generally I don't recommend staying on the same route for the entire game. Switching routes at the halfway point forces you to play an extra stage on a train, which while it's quite short and doesn't have as much scoring potential as other full stages, every little bit counts right? Right.

Now, as for actually playing for score? I wouldn't worry too much about doing an excessive amount of stalling / point pressing like I do in my replays, things like that should only be attempted after you are comfortable with being able to finish the game on one credit. With the violence setting turned on, enemies randomly "drop" and go into a bloody animation when you shoot them. Therefore it's much more advantageous to be killing enemies with close-range kills, as you get double the shot value for the knife stab, plus a guaranteed item drop. Usually they will drop a blue 30k gem which is the key to high scores. Other times they will drop red gems (kill all enemies on the screen, good for survival but BAD for scoring), yellow gems which make you invincible (good), health pickups, or powered up guns like the Machinegun or Vulcan, etc. Enemies have different behaviors though which can make them challenging to get a close-range kill on - some will stay stationary, some will walk towards you, other will walk towards you and then back away and fire (these are the hardest to deal with, you have to perfectly time your roll through their bullet). There's a lot to go over here, but the enemy layouts don't change from game to game - so just playing and making a mental note of which enemies appear where will serve you well. Also, the human bosses - the ones that come out of vehicles in the 3rd and 5th stages of each route, the train boss, and the last boss himself - every one of these bosses is worth double points when killed with a close-range attack, and drop a guaranteed first-aid hit that restores 64 hit points (except for the last boss of course)! This is HUGE, the stage 3 and train bosses will give you 600k instead of 300k, the 5th stage boss will give you 1 million instead of 500k, and the last boss is worth a whopping 1.6 million instead of 800k!

There is one exception to times where you want to go for close-range kills - and that's on stages where you're standing in water. For whatever reason, the "violent" death animations do not occur when enemies are standing in water. In these situations, you can shoot an enemy up to 12 times before they "drop" and no more shots can be registered - and each shot is worth the same amount of points. Some enemies will be worth 3000 points, like the ones clad in white outfits, so you can get 3000x16 = 39000 from a single enemy. Enemies in purple are worth 5000 per shot, so you can get 60000 points from them (but be careful, purple enemies always take two shots to kill initially). Of course, if you're feeling REALLY saucy, you can start shooting an enemy with your gunshot while you move towards them at the same time, and then by releasing the A button and pressing it again when close enough, you can get a bonus close-range kill when they drop, which could potentially be worth a blue 30000 point gem. But, I wouldn't worry too much about this if you're not comfortable doing it. Stick to just getting 12-shot kills on enemies in water and you'll have a safer time scoring points (Jungle 2, Valley 2, Valley 4...)

This is already getting longer than I expected, but hopefully some of this information will prove useful!
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