** Monday MAME Club [9/15/08] - Gaiapolis **

[Flack]

Sotenga has selected Gaiapolis (Konami, 1993). Download, play, and discuss! (KLOV Info)



Club Rules

01. You do not need to sign up for the club. If you want to participate, simply download the game of the week and post about it!

02. At the end of the week, I will randomly select someone who participated this week to select next week's game.

03. The current MAME Club Pick of the Week can be found every Monday stickied at the top of the Arcade Alley.

Previously Picked Games: Avenging Spirit, Violent Storm

Now, MAME ON!

[poloplayr]

Ooh, looks interesting. Will DL and try out straight away!

[Sotenga]

A few random notes about Gaiapolis:

1: This game is damn long. There's like... a lot of stages (some of which can be somewhat lengthy), about a dozen bosses (a bit more than that, I think), and each one takes a large load of punishment. I think the final boss has sixty lifebars? Yeah, eep.

2: In contrast to the game's length, there just so happens to be a password feature! Now I don't know if the password just saves your character's level or if it saves your level and your progress into the game. I just picked the Dragon and blazed through the game in one sitting. Took a bit more than an hour, AFAIK.

3: There are a lot of neato graphical effects that occur in this title, quite impressive for 1993. MAME now runs almost all of them flawlessly, though I believe Gaiapolis used to have several glitches (and a few are still somewhat apparent).

4: The sound's damn good, and while most of the music doesn't stand out, it's still fine stuff that you'd expect from a hack-and-slash. At the least, while I don't remember how it went, the music for the Indian-style area was REALLY awesome.

5: I know you can do a powerful all-around attack by performing a 360 motion on your directional pad/joystick/keyboard/apparatus. Also, you automatically perform a dash attack after stopping a run. I think there are a few other special moves, but I'm not quite sure how to pull them off.

Konami made a lot of awesome beat-em-up style games, and simply for its top-down view, this is one of their more unique titles. I recommend to give it a play, but be prepared to plug on that 5 key!

[IronBuddha]

Awesome! I'm about to gets me something to eat, then after that straight to playing this. I'll post back what I thought.

[XYXZYZ]

This game is a fun beat em' up, rather similar to Capcom's Dungeons and Dragons games. There are some strange things that set Gaiopolis apart from other beat 'em ups-

The joystick motions for special moves, like the 360 attack Sotenga mentioned, which comes in handy when you're surrounded but doesn't do any more damage than a normal hit. But it can score multiple hits on bosses, normal enemies are knocked down. Also, tap forward for a dash attack which also does the same amount of damage.

Another abnormality was the password feature, which was a string of Japanese katakana characters I didn't bother writing down so I don't know what exactly the passwords save. The only other arcade games Ive seen with this feature are the new Gauntlet games.

But the strangest thing I found with this game, for the most part a traditional beat-em up, was Konami's decision to make this game use a vertical monitor. So it's not really a "side scrolling beat em' up", but an "up scrolling beat 'em up", similar to Capcom's Avengers. But this is one of those games that just feels weird on a vertical monitor, like Contra, Kiki Kaikai and Namco's Valkyrie No Densetsu.

Difficulty's not too bad, and like Sotenga said it is a damn long game, which I don't think they intended anyone to play it in one setting, hence the password system. And one other thing, the score does not reset to zero when you use a continue credit which is something I'd usually bitch about, but the score is also experience points. So I think you'd want your experience to be there when continuing a game with a password.

And one last thing, this game has some pretty demanding system requirements and is a real RAM hog. My machine ran it, but it was a little choppy.



And speaking of score, on one credit I got to the second stage boss with the fairy, got 567 points on default settings. I would have done better if the boss hadn't murdered me before I was ready to fight.

[Sotenga]

Now, a gameplay video of the AWESOME Indian-style stage I mentioned earlier. Really, this music just TOTALLY kicks ass. After that is a rather benign stage without a boss, but at least you get cooler weapons. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kN-CeABDzw

[Cryomancer]

That's a very interesting game. Graphical neatness all over the place towards the end...pretty impressive scaling / rotation. The walls in the Dark Corridor and when the dragon comes out are crazy.

I believe I finished at level 28, and on my third weapon as the Fairy. Water weapon I believe. I probably required a good 35 credits to make it through this one, but I wasn't being particularly strategic or careful either. I had to enable the frameskip to have it play at a decent speed, too. Definately worth playing through though. Surprised I'd never heard of this one before.

[scooterb23]

Tried it out, game hates my computer. I had to turn off the sound to get it to run even close to smoothly. Decently fun game. Seems easy here at the start, but somehow I died fast anyway. Typical :P

I really find the use of the vertical screen (as others have said) unique for this kind of game. I'm glad to hear it is a long game, as I feel like once I really sat down and got into it, I could get deep into it quickly.

Interesting game for sure.I kind of wish I had a joystick of some sort so I could try out those moves you guys are talking about. Hard to 360 spin aarow keys.

[InsaneDavid]

About the slowdown stuff, if your video driver isn't up to date MAME may run laggy for some games. My current motherboard doesn't like ANY video driver for my video card other than the stock one the card came with, (either gets a Windows Protection Fault or works fine but then ALWAYS hangs on shutdown / restart) so I had to find an alternate route. (my old motherboard liked the most recent one fine but it crapped out during my recent move)

I had about given up all together on getting MAME to run at speed with the old drivers. Everything else runs alright (although SNES emulation is a little laggy on some games, I really do miss the most up to date video drivers) and I just need to leave it alone and come to the realization that I need to buy a modern computer sometime soon.

Then I thought about poking around in the mame.ini file. (I run MAME versions in the late 0.70's) By changing a couple settings I realized what was going on and by turning off a SINGLE option I got my speed back. Granted the video isn't as well blended as it was with the top video driver, but everything runs at speed. That setting was switchbpp, which from what I understand allows each game to set the color depth. By turning it off (chaning it to 0) the speed came back instantly and I'm still able to run full screen with full speed.

In other words, try a couple changes in the settings. After doing the above this game and Violent Storm ran perfectly aside from a couple tiny audio hiccups here and there - but then again this computer is a 900MHz machine with all kinds of onboard stuff turned off in favor of PCI cards and the mobo REALLY wants the crappy graphics card it shipped with.

[boatofcar]

I really enjoy all the loot drops in this game, seems like every enemy leaves something.

[IronBuddha]

I never played this until it was brought up this week and I really enjoyed it. The game is very long as mentioned, I got pretty far, wrote down my password but then misplaced it and I didn't feel like starting all over. Leveling up is whet made the game addicting, I didn't want to stop playing just so I can reach another level

[Dee96]

Is it me, or is this game too laggy? I didn't REALLY like it, but it's ok... I wonder how it's like when 2 play together...

[IronBuddha]

Is it me, or is this game too laggy? I didn't REALLY like it, but it's ok... I wonder how it's like when 2 play together...

I'm not sure how other emulators work, but I use mame32 and whenever I come across a game that runs slow I hit the F9 button and it speeds the game up.

I had to press the F9 button on this game until I got it at the right speed.

[Flack]

Anyone have a suggestion for next week?

[Clownzilla]

Anyone have a suggestion for next week?

Boogie Wings

[InsaneDavid]

Cosmo Gang The Video.

[Sotenga]

I'll refrain from making my own, as having another choice after the current choice was my idea would be greedy. The two above are fine suggestions, though. Shmuppy goodness? Yes indeed.

[Cryomancer]

Boogie Wings

Pretty sure we already did that one.

yep: http://www.digitpress.com/forum/show...ghlight=boogie

(not that i'm against doing it again!)

[Clownzilla]

Pretty sure we already did that one.

yep: http://www.digitpress.com/forum/show...ghlight=boogie

(not that i'm against doing it again!)

Oops, didn't know. With so many choices I think we should try something new

[Dee96]

Anyone heard of Hyper Pac-Man?