retroheart

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Your friendly California Bay Area artist making anime-style art with the sleek, modern veneer of the year 19XX.
Forever a friend of Eggbug.


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10.) Playing Space Channel 5: Ulala's Cosmic Attack for GBA
9.) Playing Space Channel 5: Ulala's Cosmic Attack for GBA
8.) Playing Space Channel 5: Ulala's Cosmic Attack for GBA
okay the bit is over now


As a known Space Channel 5 Enjoyer, I was looking at the Retro Achievements for the game and, having never played the GBA version, was surprised that the game has an achievement set but nobody listed as a Master for it, and there was a major drop at the Jaguar dance battle and everything after that.

I mean. It's Space Channel 5! In pog portable form! A direct recreation of the original game for the GBA right down to the changes in dance battles if you pass or fail certain sections. It's a call and response game, how bad could

Every once in a while the game's audio consistently runs ahead of the input window, forcing you to just feel out what it wants from you. But the real problem.

Anyone who's played Space Channel 5 knows that as the game progresses, it starts to throw complex patterns at you, and a lot of those patterns require repeated button presses. Cosmic Attack is not built for this. Cosmic Attack will prevent you from mashing a button. Cosmic Attack will prevent you from pressing a button rhythmically. Cosmic Attack will ignore button presses that are too close together entirely.

This game doesn't fumble inputs, it throws interceptions. I now understand why most people gave up at Jaguar, because his pattern doesn't change based on pass / fail conditions, and it has a LOT of rapid inputs that the game drops like an ugly baby. This game was not meant to be played by human hands.

(Fortunately the original Space Channel 5 still slaps, and nothing can change that.)


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in reply to @retroheart's post:

I never knew there was a GBA version, let alone have played the original.

There was some kind of team on SEGA making the worst versions of their IPs on GBA. I'm convinced after reading this and playing Sonic 1.

I gotta have compassion for the people who made this.
I'm guessing this game was made under significant crunch and pressure, since it was published by THQ and ported by a company called "ART" that I've never heard of before or since, and was only released in the west.
That they made a playable version of the game for GBA is an accomplishment. This game absolutely needed more time for testing and polish, though. If this is someone's first experience playing the series, they'll never want to touch any of the games again.

That said, the original game is still a joy to play and works fine on real hardware and, uh, Definitely Real Legitimate Hardware! The input windows are a little more strict in the first game compared to the second, but not to the point that modern TVs make it a problem.