Astebreed for PC gets a major update

I guess the videos explain it. The PC version of Astebreed is getting a major update. This game is a no-brainer in my book with a great release on PlayStation 4 already.

PC Engine turns 30, a free game to celebrate!

Aetherbyte has released a free shmup,  NANTETTATTE ENGINE starring ROM², to celebrate the fact that the PC Engine console (not even well known under its western moniker TurboGrafx-16) has turned 30.



As a shmup player you really should get a PC Engine if you don't already have one, it has a fantastic library of shooting games. Make sure to get a variant with a CD-ROM, it's worth it.

You're going to need something like the Turbo EverDrive to play the game.

Here's a shot my own gorgeous unit, complete with IFU, CD-ROM and Everdrive:

Sorcer Striker also got new trailers!

A new Battle Garegga Rev.2016 trailer

Blast from the past - Sky Force Anniversary

Sky Force Anniversary, a fun but grindy shmup from Poland, is free this month for PlayStation Plus subcribers.

It's available for PS3, PS4 and PS Vita as reported earlier.

Under my radar: 3jus

CAVE, yes, CAVE(!), has announced that they are working on a new title for consoles: 3jus.
Next to nothing is known about the title right now, even the official 3jus website is mysterious.

Cuphead does the business

Run'n'gun platformer Cuphead has sold in excess of 1 million copies already.

Super Hydorah review

Super Hydorah was launched on Steam and Xbox One a couple of weeks ago and here's the review. Enjoy.

New Jeff Minter interview

The legend behind convulsion-inducing shooters like Tempest, Jeff Minter of Llamasoft, in a new interview for Arcade Attack.


You might remember that he's working on a sequel to Tempest.

Shikhondo - Soul Eater out on Steam

Shikhondo - Soul Eater is a bullet hell shooter just released on Steam.

Trailer is somewhat NSFW:

Hyper Sentinel video reveal on Switch

Kickstarted horizontal shooter Hyper Sentinel; targeting Steam, PS4, Xbox One, Android, iOS and Switch got a video reveal today for that last platform.

Hyper Sentinel is being advertised as a spiritual successor to seminal C64/Spectrum shooter Uridium.

Castle of Shikigami gets a big (free) update + scoring contest!

Degica games just rolled out a press release about a big update to Castle of Shikigami:

The team has been working hard on improving the game and thanks to your feedback we have a large update to release today. The details are below, but we still have more to come, so stay tuned!

Update Details

• Added Slowdown option
  Accessed via the Options, this can be turned on or off. The slowdown is as close as we can get to the original console releases, but will vary depending on your PC.
• Added Practice Mode
  Accessed via the main menu. New stages are opened once you've reached them in the main game. Each character's practice stages are independent, so unlocking stages for one character will not unlock them for the others. Scores are local only.
• Fixed leaderboard issues
  Without getting into technical discussions, the problem here is that Shikigami's scores are larger than Steam's leaderboards can cope with, so the approach we took was to divide the scores uploaded to Steam by 10, while leaving the in-game scores faithful to the original game.
• Changed Extend scores to match original game
  
  • Very Easy: First 100,000,000 and every further 100,000,000 points
  • Easy: First 100,000,000 and every further 200,000,000 points
  • Normal: First 150,000,000 and every further 300,000,000 points
  • Hard: First 200,000,000 and every further 400,000,000 points
  • Very Hard: First 250,000,000 and every further 400,000,000 points

As always, if you have any issues post-update, please post them here.

Thanks, the Shikigami team.

The scoring contest is described like this:

Score Contest

To celebrate Shikigami's update today, we're having another high score contest and to make sure everyone can take part it's very simple!

Rules:

1. Leave difficulty on default setting (Normal)
2. Play Practice 1-1 with any character and record a score (you need to complete the stage)
3. Take a screenshot with F12 of the Practice screen showing your score
4. Post the capture to Twitter during the contest period with the official hashtag #castleofshikigami and a mention to us (@degigames)
5. Multiple entries OK, but only one score per user will be accepted.  

**If you can't locate the screen captures, open your Steam Library, right click on Castle of Shikigami and select 'View Screenshots' and follow the prompts to navigate to the correct folder.

Contest Dates:

Start: Oct 4, 2017 7:00pm (Thursday)

Finish: Oct 9, 2017 7:00pm (Sunday) 

Prizes:

1st place: A signed Shikigami poster

2nd place: A Shikigami poster

3rd place: The soundtrack (Steam key) 

**We'll also be picking two random winners and awarding them a prize too. 

Small Print

In order to deliver physical prizes, we will need to be able to contact you by email, so please check back at the end of the contest.

In order to send the posters, we will need a postal address and name.

Touhou Kobuto V: Burst Battle coming soon

Touhou Kobuto V: Burst Battle for PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita and Nintendo Switch is a new 3D bullet hell fighting game that releases on Oct. 10th in the US and Oct. 13th in the EU.

It supports PlayStation VR on the PS4 if that tickles your fancy.

NG:Dev spills the beans on Kraut Buster

Kraut Buster is a run'n'gun game in development by NG:Dev that has a lot in common with the series to beat: Metal Slug. One, the graphics style is strongly reminiscent and two, the game is getting released on Neo Geo MVS and AES - the original home of the Metal Slug games.


This means that the game is expensive, looks great and wont be played by that many people. The video above is newly produced and represents an unoptimized build.

Press release in full:

Kraut Buster Mission Status Report 2017

Dear customers,

here is the current state of Kraut Buster for NEOGEO.

This video uses a simple RGB CRT effect to make it look a little bit like an arcade screen. 

It's recommended to watch it full screen to prevent distortion and to have it run in 60fps.

We kept the video intentionally short as we don't want to spoiler too much of the game.

C-MODE:

It's the first time we show the player character: Jack "Handsome" Rowdy and the "contra" mode (displayed as C-MODE).

The C-MODE mode changes the gameplay to a faster more action and running and crushing oriented gameplay.
With less stops, less energy for enemies and less bullet sponges.
Masks and treasures/collectable/secrets are removed in C-MODE to keep this mode as clutter free as possible.
The player's knife attack is also disabled to keep the gunning flow.
To compensate the "simplicity" of this mode we also added a fast kill score system additional to the timed chain system to increase long time appeal of the C-MODE.

Content of video:

We are showing small parts of mission 3-1 (train ride), mission 3-2 (train yard), mission 4-2 (boat ride),

Mission 3-1 you are fighting your way across a military train towards it's locomotive to stop it.
It has 4 parallax layers. Far away background, background, train, foreground details.
All train cars have a nice full body hand pixelated driving motion effect applied to them.

Mission 3-2 is about battling yourself through the ruins of a bombed village, a train wreck and destroying some experimental weapon system in the train yard.
It also introduces the enemy characters: Vixens of the Dictator "Heiße Helga" and "Herrin Peitsche"
We are only showing the first 60 seconds of ca. 6 minutes.

Both missions are also very military. While mission 2 and mission 4 have monsters, robots and tesla enemies.

Mission 4-2 is about escaping a secret submarine base, the fortified coastal zone and infiltrating the dictator's battle ship.
We are showing the first 60 seconds of the "fortified coastal zone" part.

As you can see in the map screen the game has 9 selectable missions.
Some missions consist of several "rooms" with their own settings and graphic sets. Right now we have about 17 "rooms".
Each mission ends with a proper and individual end boss. All stages also have mini bosses.

Overall game status:

The base game will be finished in December/January.
We included below information of which nice to have graphic details we want to add to the game and will see if you guys give us the time for it or if you guys want an earlier release.
We won't do a vote, we will just go with the general impression of the mood we get from you guys.
If we produce the PCBs in December we can do a release in January. A release in February is advised though.

The allotted graphic development budget of KB will be used up after December, we will then start the next pixel art game for NEOGEO.

Shipping is done as always in this order: MVS LE->MVS RE->AES CE->AES RE (order of payment)

Features that we would like to implement but that need more time:

Details:

- Proper story intro / ending / special ending / new fitting music composed
- 3rd character: Valaria "Bona" Bossa (needs to be drawn from scratch unless we reuse the legs of the guys)
- Proper character select screen
- Character customization: skin color / cloth colors
- Mission select screen (partially implemented as you can see in the video, but we would like to include some fun stuff happening on the map)
- Animated title screen
- Adding more destructibles, parallax scrolling and small background animations in the stages
- Player stage win animation (each character)
- Experimental: Sliding for players in C-MODE to make it even more fluid/speedy (requires extra frames for each character) / can have large implication on gameplay / not sure if it can happen

We redrew some later backgrounds from scratch to boost quality even further.
We redrew most explosions.
Added a fast kill / quickkill score system

Having the game run in 60 fps was also quite time consuming at times and not an easy feature to archive.
While we have up to 2x the amount of objects on screen the engine kinda runs up to 4x times as fluid as similar games on NEOGEO (60 fps instead of 30fps).
A lot of optimizations, trickery and out of the box thinking was required to archive this.

We wrote a new Z80 sound driver for better handling the limited resources and adding new features such as user adjustable music volume.
We are not sure but we think it's the first time that it's possible for the user to adjust music volume in a NEOGEO game!?

All our future NEOGEO games will benefit from those engine upgrades.

It also looks like KB could become a gigashock game as it is approaching 512MEGS for graphic ROMs. Music is already at 512 MEGs.
It would be the first pixel art giga shock NEOGEO game ever.

We added some new hardware features on our custom PCBs, implementing them and using them well will take additional time too:

AES+MVS:

- 64 KBytes EEPROM: for example to save scores / configs / unlocks / achievements / game progress

- WLAN for example to do software updates / worldwide online highscore list
WLAN needs quite some testing both in hardware and software, hopefully it will make it.
Having WLAN on NEOGEO would be quite cool and could lead to interesting stuff in the future.

- GFX ROM doubled in size

MVS:

- Micro SD-Card (software update) to replace USB update. If WLAN does not work out we maybe add this to AES too.
Allows software updates without the need of a connection to a windows PC.

Those hardware costs are covered by us for the existing pre orders.

Best regards,
NGDEV

******************

This video was recorded at 59.18 FPS -> speedup to 60 FPS and a simple artificial scan line CRT effect was overlaid in post production (line tripling 3x 224p->672p). The music are MP3s of the in game OST overlaid.

As i'm sure you already know: Cuphead has launched

Hotly anticipated run'n'gun game Cuphead has launched on PC and Xbox One to the delight of well, pretty much everyone.


It really does look gorgeous and plays well.
No word yet on a physical release but we can always hope.