I'm just working down the list in alphabetical order, so I'm starting with 19XX: The War Against Destiny.

This is a Capcom shmup, and it shows in the animation, the enemy formations, bullet patterns etc. They're all so reminiscent of Varth, but thank goodness 19XX has bullet sealing and no sniper enemies low on the screen.

It's actually really fun to play for score. A big chunk of score comes from getting an S rank time on bosses, which is quite hard but really fun to pull off.

#19XXTheWarAgainstDestiny

Enemy destruction also contributes to a multiplier, with 100% destruction giving +5 multiplier. This applies to the medals collected and the boss time bonus, so you want to destroy as many enemies as you can. Aiming for a +4 multiplier gives me more leniency though.

Enemies feel a little tanky with your regular shot, but you also get a charged shot that, more importantly, releases a lock-on attack that does TONS of damage. It's really fun to use, and very important for boss speedkills.

Just overall really fun to play. Varth already had a pretty good "feel" to it despite its problems, but 19XX takes it to the next level.

Next one is Amidar, which is based on the amidakuji, or ladder puzzle, from Japan.

There's a grid which you have to fill in by encircling each rectangle, while enemies move around in the same way as how amidakuji works. Once you fill in the corners, you get a Pacman-style power up that lets you kill the enemies temporarily.

You get 3 jump button uses in each stage, which temporarily stops all enemies and makes them jump up, so that you can get yourself out of a nasty situation.

There's also a bonus stage between each stage that is just a regular amidakuji game, but you just have to find the correct path quickly.

#Amidar

However, there's only a few bonus stages, so you can just map out each path and refer to the map to easily find the path.

Similarly, the enemy spawn positions are static and, with how amidakuji works, their movements are also static for the most part.

To sum it up, scoring high requires memorising a lot, which is ugh. This will be a pass for me.

It is interesting though, since I would've never thought to use amidakuji as the main concept for a game!

It's almost been a week since the last toot because I've been too busy to play. Made a bit of time this weekend to play another game though, which is the legendary Bubble Bobble!

The goal is to take out every enemy, with your main form of attack being the bubbles your cute dinosaur character shoots. These bubbles will trap the enemies in them, and if you jump into them, they will pop and kill the enemy.

Scoring is much trickier though, requiring a lot of in-depth knowledge of how the game works. There are tons of secret items, with different conditions to make them spawn.

#BubbleBobble

Another important thing to note is that upon killing the last enemy, all bubbles on screen may turn into 700-point items. A few stages allow this to always happen, but in most stages, you need to make the digits in the tens and hundreds positions of your score the same (e.g. getting a score of 143110) for this to happen.

You can easily do this by shooting bubbles while you're right up against a wall, which increases your score by 10 points per bubble.

There are also advanced movement techniques like bouncing on your bubble to climb up, which is essential for later stages.

This game is brutal if you don't have a plan, but it is also very well-documented, so it's not too hard to find strategies for all 100 stages of the game.

It is really fun though, and I would like to revisit it and play more of it (I only got to stage 10  ). But for Yolympics, it feels like a game that requires a lot of effort, especially when there are so many players who have been scoring this game for ages already.

I do wish the default speed was a little faster though. The start of every playthrough is quite boring because I have to waste time running back and forth to spawn a speed up. And you lose it when you die.

Following up one legendary arcade game with another, we have the seafood shmup, Darius. Specifically, the Extra version.

Darius is famous for its ultrawide display, at an aspect ratio of 4:1, which is longer than the ultrawide monitors of today. This was achieved with 3 CRTs and some fancy mirror usage in the arcades, or so I read.

This isn't my first time playing Darius and to be frank, my first impressions of it were just, meh.

Being one of those old school shmups, it suffers from Gradius syndrome, since it uses checkpoints and has total power loss on death.

#Darius

A single death is pretty much fatal, as this game is very dependent on building momentum. Recovery is extremely difficult, if not impossible.

For scoring, each life you have left is worth 1 million points, so that's further incentive to not die at all.

To help with the Gradius syndrome, you can get a shield by picking up blue items. However, you do not get i-frames when your shield is hit, so it is possible to lose it instantly if you are in a stream of bullets or you are colliding with something big.

The game also feels sluggish, partly due to the immense length of the screen, but also because there's quite a bit of down time.

Boss fights are the most egregious when it comes to down time. There's a lot of time spent at the beginning waiting for the boss to spawn. Taito gives you a bunch of balls to shoot at, but why not just have the boss fight start immediately?

It also takes a long time for the boss to sink down and for the level transition to happen.

It's also a little annoying that in zones with no ceilings, items can easily escape through the top. Meanwhile, the zones with ceilings tend to be very claustrophobic, which can make things really frantic (not necessarily bad).

I don't know. I want to like Darius more, but I just don't really vibe with it.

It's been 11 days since I last played anything  

Anyway, things are starting to look up a little, so I have a bit of time to play! Next one on the list is Dogyuun, a Toaplan shmup. Incidentally, the title is a Japanese onomatopeia!

This is the last shmup in the lineup, but it's easily the worst of the 3. 19XX and Darius are both pretty good, even if I have my nitpicks, but Dogyuun is just... yikes.

There's not much of a scoring system in place. You just get 5000 points for picking up the same weapon or module you already have, and 10 points every frame if you capture an enemy or item box with the tractor beam.

#Dogyuun

The tractor beam just doesn't gel well with the rest of the game design. The tractor beam is behind the player ship and it doesn't extend far at all, which makes it really risky to use.

Furthermore, the tractor beam is used by holding down button 3, but pressing button 3 also drops the module you have equipped.

And even when you capture an enemy or an item box, your captive also gets destroyed in one hit, so it's very easy to lose it.

You do get 100 points per frame for capturing a larger enemy, but it also slows down your ship.

It's simply very high risk for very low reward.

The game design is also nothing spectacular. There's just a ton of homing enemies and homing missiles.

So what did Dogyuun do well? For starters, the pixel art is *so detailed*. It turns out it's done by Joker Jun, and once again he delivers! I'm really fond of the aesthetics in a lot of the shmups he worked on, like ESP Ra.De. and Akuu Gallet.

I was also pleasantly surprised by how there's actually no power ups in this game. So, even though it uses checkpoints, you can just get right back into the action instead of being nerfed to hell when you die.

These won't be enough to keep me playing though, not when there are still 15 more games.

Ah, I forgot one more thing. Typical of Toaplan, the level transitions are smooth. There's no cut-aways to a result screen. The end of one stage is actually linked to the start of the next stage. Strangely, this is something that is pretty uncommon, even though it makes the game feel more cohesive and less disjointed, from an aesthetic perspective.

Also, the green weapon sucks. As usual.

A bit of a busy day today, so I got a bit of gaming done in the morning. This time it's Final Fight, one of the most renowned beat 'em ups.

I've only ever tried out one other beat 'em up before this, which was Undercover Cops, and I didn't like it much due to the prevalence of insta-kill traps.

Final Fight is much more enjoyable, even if I still suck at crowd control and making use of up/down movement.

Contrary to what the genre's name may suggest, beat 'em ups seem to require a very methodical approach, often exploiting cheese strats to make the fights safer. You only get so many hits after all.

#FinalFight

Of course, Capcom knew this, so they will swarm you with a variety of enemies, so that you are less likely able to cheese, at least not without skillfully managing the mob first.

But I don't know how to do so, so I still didn't get far into the game ​

Scoring is... not the most interesting? There seems to be only two things you can do. The first is to alchemise the item drops, so that you get 10000 point items instead of the basic items that only give a few hundred points, but this requires a tricky combo to do. The other thing is to milk boss fights for respawning enemies.

Final Fight seems like a fun game to revisit in the future, but for now, it's certainly not my forte, so it won't be my focus for the Yolympics.

That is, if I even have the time to revisit games. But if I do, the current list consists of 19XX, Darius and Bubble Bobble.

I thought I would be more free this week to play, but I was wrong once again  

Since the event is ending in one week, I aim to finish trying out every game by today, and use the last week to revisit the games I want to play.

First up is Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. This is a game adaptation of the film by Atari. There are three difficulties/courses, with the Hard offering the most points, so that's the only one I played.

#IndianaJonesAndTheTempleOfDoom

Each stage has multiple sections, starting with one where you navigate around the temple to rescue kidnapped children. Enemies are also roaming all over, with spike traps on the ground. The most janky part about this section is how easy it is to walk off the platform, possibly to your death if you fall for too long.

The next section is sort of an autoscroller, where you ride a minecart deeper into the temple. Along the way, there are dead ends and pitfalls, as well as enemy minecarts chasing after you (and they rubberband as well). This section is much easier to die on IMO.

There's one last section where you collect a Sankara Stone. You can farm enemies a bit, but eh. You get a big clear bonus once you leave this section.

I did decently well for this game (given that I don't have a lot of time to spend for each game) but I'm not exactly eager to come back and improve my score.

Up next on the list is Jump Bug, by Alpha Denshi. This is a horizontal shooter, but instead of piloting an aircraft, you're driving a really bouncy car.

To score, you want to collect as many money bags/gems as possible, and bounce on clouds with point values inscribed on them.

There are also a variety of enemies, but the most threatening one is the joker, which is pretty fast and jumps around a bunch as well. Apparently they have static spawn positions, so it's possible to predict when they appear and take them out before they become a threat.

#JumpBug

At the end of stage 1 is a pyramid section, where the autoscrolling stops, allowing you to explore it. However, money bags that you pick up will cause a stationary enemy to spawn, so you have to be more careful as well.

The pyramid is an infamous section, as it is possible to perform an infinite, albeit a slow one, by repeatedly killing the respawning enemies. For the sake of the event, this trick is banned.

I didn't get much further than this, but it's a decent game in my books. Early arcade games can have some pretty interesting ideas, and their simplicity can be a breath of fresh air. It doesn't take much to make a good game!

A little out of alphabetical order, depending on whether you take "The" into account, but next is The NewZealand Story. This is a cute Taito platformer, where you play as a kiwi chick that can shoot arrows.

The goal is to rescue a fellow chick that is caged up somewhere on each level, battling enemies along the way. The game gets pretty chaotic by area 1-3, with lots of enemies (most of which fly) and spikes covering many surfaces.

There's an unstated time limit for each level, so scoring involves farming enemies as much as you can before the timeout enemy becomes a threat to you.

#TheNewZealandStory

Items drop in a fixed order (similar to how The Legend of Zelda on the NES does it), with most of them being fruits that simply give points. However, some of the items are weapons or power ups.

Notably, one scoring trick is to use the bomb weapon on enemies riding on balloons, as it can rack up score quickly. This is because the bomb gives points for every frame, and balloons have a little bit of invincibility before they die.

There are also warps that can bring you to a different part of the current level, or another level altogether.

It gets tough, but it's really fun!

Back to another Atari game. This time, it's Paperboy.

I really love the concept of this game. You play as the newspaper delivery boy, throwing the newspaper to houses that subscribed.

But what about the houses that didn't? Well, of course you force them to read the paper by throwing papers at them too, but through their windows and doors! And run over their flowerbeds for good measure. That'll teach them for not subscribing!

The controls, however, are pretty awful. In part, it may be due to the fact that it's analog and I'm using an arcade stick (which has digital inputs only). But it just feels really unwieldy.

#Paperboy