RF Generation Message Board

The Japanese shooting game scene has long been plentiful with doujin titles. Single developers, or small studios, lovingly craft games they care about, often for little or no profit. One of the more unknown doujin developers is Akiragoya. That may be due to the fact that most of his games, like Galshell, or the Yakouga series of shooters, were released only in Japan, and are of a more "adult" nature, often with nudity, body horror, and grotesque designs inspired by the likes of famed German artist H.R. Giger. To date, only two of Akiragoya's games have come to the West officially, and commercially. One of those is the more traditional shooting game, Steel Vampire.

Five hundred years have passed since the last war. Humanity has succeeded in eliminating all forms of war, disease, and poverty, bringing about an era of perpetual peace. However, calamity soon strikes! The sudden arrival of flying objects known as Steel Vampires threaten the entirety of mankind's existence. On the brink of extinction, the fate of mankind has been left to a single person; a man deemed far too dangerous to sustain humanity's serenity. He was cryogenically frozen--his existence nearly erased from history. His name is... Yoshino Sakurajima.
Join the RF Generation Shmup Club in April 2020, as we play Steel Vampire, available on Steam!

Participants:
MetalFRO
Addicted
SaturdayDevelopment
zoydo
Smakificator

Steel Vampire? 🤔

Indeed it is!

Looks good, I'm in.

Cool, got it on Steam. Haven't played it too much yet, so that's a good opportunity to give it a closer look. I'm in. 👍🏼

Welcome back to both of you!

Did a few runs during the last days. I played mostly for survival and kept the rank moderate in the later stages, so i got a clear in Very Hard for the first time yesterday.

[img width=500 height=281]https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49734010331_1e2efe75b5.jpg[/img]

Also played the Extra Genocide mode (It's unlocked when you finish the game on Very Hard and has 5 Loops). Made it to stage 1 midboss of the third loop (1-13 / 3-1).

[img width=500 height=281]https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49734335717_b375d26a3d.jpg[/img]

This is a lot of fun!

Great job on the clear, zoydo! Does Very Hard have more than 1 loop? I assumed so, because of the 1-# format of the stage numbering, but maybe not? I've managed to make it to stage 5 so far, and nearly made it to the end of 5 last night. I'll have to drop my photo in a bit later, when I can get it downloaded off my phone.

Thanks. :)
I don't think Very Hard has more than one loop. I checked the online leaderboards and they're all 1-All in every mode. Even Genocide Extra which has 5 loops  says 1-13 instead of 3-1 on the leaderboard.....makes no sense to me.

Greetings Earth Humans!   I'm joining in this month officially for the first time.   I've been watching Shmup players on Twitch for a long time.   And watching the Shump club plays by 'Fro for several months.   Usually I dont' have a chance of getting a decent score.  But Steel Vampire is a different beast.   There's a decent chance I can compete.   Here's my scores so far.  Game on!   

Update:   Zoydo you da man.   Nice scoring there.

I managed to clear Steel Vampire tonight, on the default Very Hard difficulty!

@Smakifikator: thanks and welcome to the club. :)
 Good job so far, keep pushing.💪🏼

@MetalFro: congrats on the clear. 👍🏻

I reached Stage 5 of the third Loop in Genocide Extra yesterday.
Still trying to improve in "Genocide Hard", Stage 1-4 is the best i could do so far.

Smakificator - Please forgive me, I forgot to officially welcome you!

zoydo - there's quite a divide between your Very Hard score, and my own. What are you doing, from a score perspective, as you run through the game? Anything in particular you would recommend?

I'm still figuring out what's  good for scoring. At the moment i try to play stages 1-3 on a high rank, but not too high so that i still can dodge and don't get hit too much so i can keep my medal chain. In stage 4 i try too keep the rank moderate for the same reason. In stage 5 my rank and medal chain usually drop in the speed trap section. So i try to keep it up as good as possible and build it up at the boss battles again. In stage 6 i try to play on full rank and point blank all enemies. I also try to destroy the different Parts of the bosses and bigger enemies to get more medals and bonus points. But this becomes more difficult the stronger your weapons get, because you literally nuke them away.

While I failed miserably at playing Gaiares (a few failed runs and then Border Down showed up and stole my attention and dedication entirely), but this is an interesting one. I actually bought Steel Vampire right after it came out on steam and had high hopes but wasn't really feeling it for some reason or another and stopped playing after a few hours. Perhaps this would be a good opportunity to go back and see if I feel any different.

Between you having it here, and it appearing in Mark's top 25 list I feel like perhaps it deserves another look.

@Dingo: i felt the same way. I bought it on a sale, played a few runs and thought it's nice, but wasn't hooked. Now that im digging more into the game i'm having lots of fun.

Here's my score update wih yesterdays runs.

Very Hard:
[img width=500 height=281]https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49745170402_4b31125a16.jpg[/img]

Genocide Hard
[img width=500 height=281]https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49745170387_f01f8d1384.jpg[/img]

Extra Genocide
[img width=500 height=281]https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49745170377_a48a70a15f.jpg[/img]

I started doing runs in Genocide Hard last night, and holy cats, it's difficult! I would say the difficulty is a fair step up from Very Hard, and if you're playing for survival, I recommend collecting the blue gems to down-rank. You can get all the way down to rank level 0, and it does help make it less punishing, but then naturally, your score tanks. I will need to find a balance in it. I've managed to make it to stage 3, but that was as far as I got. I still died in stage 1 a lot, and I can see this being a much larger challenge to tackle. It almost feels like this is the "real" game, and Very Hard is just the warm-up.

That's hwat i thought too. Very Hard is like: "Grab a gun and wreck everything" and becomes easier the better yor weapons are. And Extra Genocide is like " let's see how far your best weapons can get you".
But Genocide Hard seems to be the actual game with default ships and no further options.

From what i understand, the blue gems are for upgrading your shield. In Genocide hard i try to play the first stage on "Even" rank, because your shield upgrades faster, as you get more blue gems. And progress is easier with more shield points of course. In stage 2 i start collecting more green items to lower my rank steady throughout the stage and try to stay on very low rank as far as i can get from stage 3 on.

Yeah, the blue chips award points, but also will refresh your shield, if you take a hit. I don't know what the ratio is, but you need to collect a decent amount of them to restore a single shield segment, so that's where the point-blanking comes in, because you get more chips from doing that with the standard weapon, then either by firing from a distance, or using the focus attack with your sub-weapon. The gold chips will help refresh your VoBurn/bomb stock, though it seems like enemies tend to give far fewer gold chips than blue. Some popcorn enemies never give gold chips, from what I've seen, and the ratio of blue to gold is pretty large. If I manage to at least get a 1-ALL on Genocide Hard (let alone, multiple loops), I suspect the score will be pitiful, because I'll have to really manage my rank pretty closely, to keep things from getting too crazy.

I managed to get to stage 6 in the 2nd loop of Extra Genocide in Steel Vampire. This game ramps up a fair bit in the 2nd loop, and even with purposeful rank management, to keep it low, it’s still pretty bananas. Anyone else still playing?

[img width=700 height=525]http://i.imgur.com/p4QG0Vo.jpg[/img] (https://imgur.com/p4QG0Vo)

Here's my Stage 1 Score Attack attempts from a couple nights ago - it gets frenetic pretty fast, if you ramp up the rank right away, so you definitely have to strike a balance with that right off the bat.

Here's my final Scores:

Very Hard:
[img width=500 height=281]https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49840804626_2a2bf31b21.jpg[/img]

Genocide Hard:
[img width=500 height=281]https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49840804586_b372db1b28.jpg[/img]

Extra Genocide:
[img width=500 height=281]https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49840804571_93c6789a9e.jpg[/img]

Score Attack:
[img width=500 height=281]https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49841104622_9972c96072.jpg[/img]
[img width=500 height=281]https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49840804551_f9acbe3feb.jpg[/img]


Steel Vampire was a lot of fun. I bought it a while ago and checked it out for a few runs. I liked it but wasn't too overwhelmed.
But when i came back to it for April i learned how the game works and had a LOT of fun! I think i found one of my favourite ShmupClub games for 2020 already.
There's a lot going on on the screen, lots of explosions and screen shaking. Sometimes it seems that this game is not too much about dodging but a LOT more about shooting.
The left and right -scrolling of the screen is sometimes a bit frustrating as you run in bullets or enemies you couldn't see before because they were offscreen and things can get a bit fast and hectic. So you lose shield and rank and have to recover. But the easier modes/loops are very forgiving and let you recover fastly. If you lose the medal chain this is annoying anyway.

Thanks for the final thoughts, zoydo, and great job with the scores! Anyone else have final thoughts?