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| Defender Thread (was 5/2/08: The Day I No Longer Suck!) |
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| DrBunsen:
--- Quote from: TOK on May 06, 2008, 04:35:17 pm ---Wish you were closer, I'd love to have one of you high scoring guys over to have a beer and kick it's ass. ;D --- End quote --- Actually, that sort of thing was going to be suggestion #1 of things that I'd recommend order to improve your game. Unfortunately, finding someone nowadays that's good that you can watch is practically impossible. But if/when I MAME my Stargate isn't there a way to be able to record games for people to watch? If so, then it'll be possible for me to play and send you a recording. Seeing someone do the controls isn't nearly as important as seeing what it is that they're doing onscreen. The reason why seeing someone play is important let's me tell another story (but I promise to keep this one shorter <grin>). The reason why I started playing Stargate instead of Defender came down to the fact that it was a Stargate that was put into the grocery store that I worked at. If the vendor had put in a Defender then it probably would've been Defender that I played like crazy instead. Anyways, I'd get off work and dump a dollar or two into it almost every day. Since it was a popular game all of us guys at the store were playing it like crazy and trying to get the top score. I remember that the high score was something like 90,000 and I was getting close, and then I came in one day and some "drive-by" had come in and put up something like 110,000. Kinda depressing. It felt SO out of reach. But I kept at it, and eventually beat that score. But it felt like every time I'd get over 100,000 I'd collapse, like it was suddenly so hard. I got a little better over the course of several weeks, but I was only in the 120,000 point range and I was pretty sure that I'd probably never get close to 150,000 points. Still, because no one that I knew was even getting close to 100,000 I felt like I was fairly untouchable. Like Stargate was so hard that no one would be able to be much better than I was. Then I wandered into an arcade and saw someone else playing Stargate who was better than me. He was smooth where I was ragged, confident where I was timid, and when he was finished he was well over 200,000 points. After watching him I realized that it WAS NOT AS HARD AS I THOUGHT IT WAS. And I knew that I could do what he did with just some changes in technique. Within a week I was regularly over 200,000 points. So, my first tip is this: Realize that it's not as hard as you think it is. If you're at 100,000 points it really isn't a huge leap to get to 200,000. Don't freak out when you get close to 100,000 points thinking that you're automatically going to start dying off a lot - have the confidence to just handle a little more speed and a little more aggression. It's just a little bit more per wave, not a whole lot more. You really can handle it. If you could see someone good play then you'd KNOW that rather than just suspect that. More later. :) Bunsen |
| DrBunsen:
Arzoo gave some great strategic rules, but I'm going to delve more into techniques. Stargate/Defender tip #2: Don't go slow, but don't go full speed either. Get those landers as quickly as possible. I'm *pretty sure* that this applies to Defender, but someone like Arzoo will have to confirm. I've seen some guys who could play some amazing Stargate while going rather slow, or while just guarding a few people, but almost all of us really good players were usually blazing around the surface of the planet most of the time, killing landers like crazy first, then worrying about the other baddies. Your people on the planet are worth a lot of points, so killing the landers quickly should be a top concern. But I don't think anyone would go FULL speed when the screen was full of landers. I'd probably go 70% to 80% of maximum speed most of the time, and only go to 100% when I really needed to get to or away from something quickly and the screen was relatively clear. The way that I regulated speed was by tapping the Thrust button independently from the fire button. So I was mostly laying on the thrust, but letting up for a fraction of a second once or twice a second. Which brings me to tip #3: Learn to "flutter-tap" the Fire button. I don't know of any better way to describe it other than flutter-tapping (and I just sorta made up the term just now), but what I mean is for you to have the Fire button partially pushed down most of the time, and just vibrate it up and down to have it make contact and release. Stabbing at the button doesn't work for quick firing, but learning to flutter-tap can greatly increase the number of shots per second. The way I did was for my fire and thrust fingers to be almost rigidly straight so that I was pushing the buttons with the middle joints part of my fingers rather than the tips. The trick then is being able to flutter-tap with one finger while doing "push.... release-push.... release-push..." on the thrust, with the release times being much less than the push times to smooth out the speed. That's how I do it. But like I said, that's not the only way. Find a technique that's comfortable to you and do it. But most importantly, practice being fluid and smooth with your thrusting and firing. Which brings me to tip #4: Don't aim at landers, but rather fire into the area where you expect them to be. Essentially, I'm almost always moving up and down in a controlled yet eccentric manner. Putting 5 shots in a row in the same place isn't very dangerous to the targets in front of you, but putting up a wall of shots means that you've got a pretty good shot at hitting something. But I don't use a pure up and down motion, it's more of like "up, down, up, up, down down down up up down up up up down down down" sort of motion. Basically, I'm laying down a bunch of random shots that are filling in a vertical area about the size of 2 landers. That works well since the landers tend to stagger their height a bit, so while speeding around the surface at the beginning of most levels I'm not aiming at landers, but the area in front of me where they are expected to be. When you see it done well and smoothly it's a thing of beauty. So then, tip #5: Try to make your brain control the screen and not your hands. By that I mean, if you have to think about what you have to do with the controls in order to make your ship do something on the screen, then you're still getting basic coordination down. You need to be able to think what you want the ship to do and have it do it **while you're thinking it**, not think, then do, then think, then do. It's a fluid game that needs constant second-by-second changes in technique while still fulfilling an over-arching strategic goal (save the humans (cheerleaders?) - save the world!). You need to put the ship in a place at the same time that you're thinking that you want it there, not think that you want it somewhere and then put it there. The more that you put yourself "in the game" the better you'll be. When you get to the point where it's automatic then when you're at the end of a level flying full speed and a baiter comes up in back of you you'll be able to do stuff like "hit reverse, stop thrusting, fire, hit reverse, thrust" all within a quarter second or so, and without thinking. More later! |
| DrBunsen:
TOK, I finally followed your link to the other posting of your Stargate/Defender project. Totally awesome! Not just in your level of detail, but also in your willingness to document what you did and fill us in on your design decisions. I've got some work I'll need to be doing on my Stargate cabinet in order to rebuild it a bit, and you've really opened my mind to some possibilities. But I fear that it'll languish for a long time though. Dang ol' parenting and job keep getting in the way... Bunsen |
| arzoo:
Every one of DrBunsen's tips are dead-on (for Defender also). :cheers: Killing the Landers is definitely the #1 priority on each new level. The flutter fire is a good way to describe the technique. One thing I've done is adjust the leaf switch on the fire button so that it's split hair close - you can't do this with micro switches. |
| DrBunsen:
--- Quote from: arzoo on May 07, 2008, 08:58:25 am ---Every one of DrBunsen's tips are dead-on (for Defender also). :cheers: Killing the Landers is definitely the #1 priority on each new level. The flutter fire is a good way to describe the technique. One thing I've done is adjust the leaf switch on the fire button so that it's split hair close - you can't do this with micro switches. --- End quote --- Arzoo: Holy smokes! I never thought about that difference between leaf switches and microswitches. That's... huge to me (and apparently to you as well). At one point I was considering selling the Stargate cabinet and just modifying the Slikstik control panel that I got (before they went belly-up) to integrate an accurate Stargate layout. But after reading your post I'm *really* happy that I couldn't make that work out since I would've been using microswitches and I didn't realize how much I would've hated that. No way I could fire as fast as I want to with microswitches. TOK: Don't take the above as proof that you need to change out your microswitches for leaf switches. It could be that your fingers can push/release a microswitch as quickly as Arzoo and I can fire with a leaf switch, it would just take more button travel to make it happen. With me and Arzoo it's more a matter of muscle memory that we probably can't unlearn too easily. Besides, I don't know how easy it would be to have leaf switches and keep the cool LED buttons you have. :) Bunsen |
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