February 2021 Shmup Club - Under Defeat

[MetalFRO]

Despite the commercial fortunes of Sega's Dreamcast console waning quickly, after a promising start, the similarly spec'd Sega NAOMI arcade hardware fared better, continuing to grace arcades for years after Sega left the home console market. One of the developers that kept the hardware relevant was G.rev, made up of some former Taito employees. Initially cutting their teeth on assisting other developers with their shooting game properties, resulting in helping Treasure with Ikaruga, and Konami/Treasure with Gradius V, they began developing their own games for the NAOMI hardware. One of those releases was Under Defeat, which reached arcades in October 2005. A few months later, it then released in 2006 for the Dreamcast, roughly 5 years after the system's commercial viability had all but dried up.

Under Defeat sees you take control of an attack helicopter, in an alternate WWII timeline. Controlling this craft for The Empire, a German-speaking armed force, you take on The Union, an English-speaking armored alliance. You must defeat your enemy at all cost, lest The Empire fall into ruin. Under Defeat was also released in 2011 on the Xbox 360 (in Japan), and the PlayStation 3 in both Japan and the West, as Under Defeat HD. Join the RF Generation Shmup Club in February 2021, as we play Under Defeat!

Participants:
MetalFRO
Addicted

[MetalFRO]

First night with Under Defeat. reaching the stage 2 boss on a single credit, during a good run. This is a tough one. The bullet movement is different than other shmups, as Geriatric Danmaku noted on my stream, and it does take some getting used to. One scoring tip I have to share is, take out as many enemies as you can with your secondary/option weapon. You'll score the most points doing that. Also, don't bomb, if you can help it. Obviously bombing is great for survival, but apparently, it hurts your score. Just something to keep in mind.

Oh, and one other thing Geriatric Danmaku noted: playing in tate mode on the Dreamcast gives you a bit of extra slowdown, because of how hard the game pushes the hardware, so use that to your advantage, if you're capable of playing that way

[Geriatric.Danmaku]

Good Evening Shmup Clubers!   I'm in this month.  And with these as my best scores so far in Feb 2021.  Not including past history, starting with fresh formatted VMU.   So far playing "Team Reverse".

[MetalFRO]

Nice score, good sir! I'm also on "Team Reverse" as you've seen in my streams so far

[MetalFRO]

Been working on the game on Easy for a couple days. It's not super different from Normal, but it feels like the bullets are a bit slower, and there are a few less enemies. I've actually been able to get past the stage 2 boss more consistently, now. So I began stage 3 practice in earnest last night. I still need to fire up Under Defeat HD, and check out the differences.

[MetalFRO]

I played around a little bit with New Order Mode last night on PS3. This is an interesting arrangement, in that it switches the view from tate to yoko (vertical to horizontal), and allows you to rotate the helicopter even further, to compensate, which is a smart choice. It also has more enemies, and a 2nd arranged soundtrack that's quite different. One thing that's slightly disappointing is that you can ONLY listen to the New Order Mode soundtrack in that mode, and only the original arcade soundtrack in Arcade mode. Arranged soundtrack is available in both modes, however. I have yet to try the other helicopter, so I'll have to give that a whirl.

One thing about the PS3 version is that it has even more slowdown than you get running the Dreamcast version in tate. It's pretty bad. I'm not usually critical of slowdown, unless it's totally random, because it generally helps. But here, there's just so much of it that it feels sloppy, like the game was lazily ported over from the 360 version, and not optimized at all. Not sure if G.Rev did the port themselves, or if Rising Star Games had any hand in it, but it definitely needed a little more time in the oven. I've never played the arcade version, so I can't comment on whether the DC slowdown is accurate to the Naomi original, but when playing that version, it feels like the insane explosions, particle effects, and smoke effects are all pushing the DC to its limits, so any slowdown would be expected. The PS3 version should run better, since it's a generation (or gen & a half, in some ways) beyond the hardware it was designed for.