Interesting video: a side by side by side comparison.

I just got an email on Monday saying my copy of Psyvariar shipped, so I hope to be trying it out myself soon. Only ever played it in emulation.

The great Jaimers takes on this instant classic! Shout outs to hobbsc for highlighting this fantastic game in a previous post!

Just in case you picked up Hellsinker during the last game sale, here's an Electric Underground video that explains the basics of this really complicated game.

A video from Jaimers, one of the best players in the business, doing a one credit clear of Devil Blade Reboot. Be sure to turn on the captions for text commentary!

Spotted this on r/shmups. I'm highly invested in Aleste Branch news, so it grabbed my attention!

Transcript (via Google Translate):

[Music] Happy New Year, M2 Co., Ltd. We would like to express our sincere gratitude to all the people who have enjoyed the various reprints of M2 developments over the past 10 years.

The 2025 New Year's card you are looking at was drawn by Shohei Sato, also known as Haruhata, who was in charge of the new illustrations for Dodonpa Daioujo Rinne Tensei, and features the main characters of the original new work Aleste Branch in the M2 Shot Trigger series.

Thank you, Aha-san.

So, this is an update on the development status of Aleste Branch.

The game part of the development is almost complete.

Please take a look at the picture. It is in the mountains. As you can see, the game is complete and we are currently working on implementing it for various hardware. The content is perfect, so don't worry, I look forward to seeing you guys this year. [Laughs]

Also, Night Striker Gear. This work, which was revealed during the Zuta Night live broadcast last November, is a completely new work in the Night Striker series made by M2. It is a reprint of Operation Night Strikers, commonly known as Ost, Operation Wolf, etc., which are also scheduled to be released on Steam. This work will be released by Fuji-sama. It is scheduled to be released in 2025. Development is of course handled by M2. If you register your wishlist on the Steam store, you will receive notifications not only for the latest information on Ost, but also when the Steam store page for Night Striker Gear is released.

If you haven't registered your wishlist yet, please register your wishlist now. And of course, the development of the music by Director Uchi is still ongoing. This song will be a book.

[Music]

Happy New Year. This is Mominoki, who is putting together the transcriptions. Last year, including the broadcast, we were unable to provide you with much new information. However, I will be working on the next project with the team that worked on Dodonpa Daioujou Rinne Tensei, and I have also been working on other projects, so I think we will have a lot of information this year. I think there will be many opportunities to announce things this year, so I hope you will look forward to it. Once the situation is ready, I would like to give you all the latest information directly on the Mz Shot Trigger live broadcast, so if you are interested, please subscribe to the channel now. Thank you for your continued support of M2 Co., Ltd. this year.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro \ 03:35 Basics \ 06:38 ...and Knuckles? \ 08:20 Stage 1 \ 11:14 Stage 2 \ 14:15 Stage 3 \ 19:08 Stage 4 \ 20:16 Secret Extend \ 24:17 Stage 5 \ 30:10 Final Boss

Chapter \ 0:00 Intro \ 1:11 Gunhed \ 3:40 Aero Blasters \ 5:58 Salamander \ 8:29 Soldier Blade \ 11:01 Gradius 2 \ 13:45 Gate of Thunder \ 16:18 Spriggan \ 18:58 Nexzr

The virtual host is gone, shmupsbr is voicing the videos himself now. I didn't mind the "AI" (it was just text to speech, not AI, but whatevs), but people didn't dig it, I guess.

00:00 Intro \ 01:23 Night Striker related releases \ 03:32 Dodonpachi Saidaioujou (Switch) \ 05:25 P-47 II - Freedom Star (Mega Drive) \ 06:26: FZ / Formation Z \ 08:14 Metal Cancer \ 09:02 Arondight \ 09:43 Guardic (Egg Console / Switch) \ 11:44 The multiple versions of Earthion \ 13:20 Platypus Reclayed \ 14:06 Rendering Ranger R2 Rewind \ 15:11 Interstellar Sentinel and Airanblade updates \ 16:06 Under Defeat HD \ 17:15 Raimodula \ 17:50 Wrap Up

From the description:

>Shmup Slam 7 Announcement Trailer! May 17th and 18th. Shmup Slam has returned! To those new to the event, Shmup Slam is a GDQ-ish type of event that I do that hosts a non-stop wave of live shmup runs where players set their own scoring or survival goals and try to pull them off live on stream. What's really fun about shmups, unlike most speedrunning, is that if the player messes up, the consequence is destruction and a game over, vs just losing some time or a PB. So the stakes are extremely high which makes watching and playing the genre in this setting very exciting. > >This year Slam 7 is going to be hosted at Akihabara Arcade in Westminster, Colorado, which will be extremely cool because if you are a fan of the genre but don't feel like your wanting to play a live demonstration on stream, coming to the event to hang out and watch and play all the awesome arcade cabs at the venue is still going to be a great time :-)

I don't usually post links to Electric Underground videos. I figure shmup fans are either already subscribed to his channel, or they don't like him and don't want to see him. But I thought, eh it's a slow week, why not?

This is an excellent introduction to bullet hell shmups, and was mentioned by 1CC JAM in the Meet the Player podcast.

Bringing a little clarity to the "Dariusburst" line of Darius games.

From the description:

>In episode 075, MetalFRO and Addicted look at a spooky shooter that delves into the nightmares from the perspective of a child's inner mind - NeverAwake!

And, just a quick personal update: I'm going to start posting and modding this community from my alt account because as much as I love lemmus.org, I've run into a couple of federation issues -- like whole threads of comments not showing up.