Muchi Muchi Pork! むちむちポーク - v1.00 - Loop1 ALL - Momo - 111.813.430pts

Описание: On the French shmup forum, this month's tourney game is Muchi Muchi Pork (v1.00), and this was a great opportunity for me to come back to this game which I really like but never gave the time it deserved. (I swear I must have said the same thing for a million other shmups lmao) I even managed to go all the way to clearing the first loop as well, which is pretty neat!

What makes this shmup so fun for me is the mix of the YGW-style freeform resource management and the visual satisfaction of CAVE games. I bet everyone and their pig already said this about this game, but yeah it really is such a cool mix that works well for the most part. There's none of the annoying super strict score penalties for bombing you find in say, Progear, but you get juicy gold medal items with very satisfying autocollection

As someone who played Brave Blade, some of the similarities are also interesting to notice. The way the shot and lard attack are different stances with the switch delay instead of just a secondary weapon is a bit like the ship and mecha forms in Brave Blade. And the most striking aspect is the fast chain building you can perform in both games, with the max value reached halfway through the first stage thanks to aggressive play and medal collecting

This is a very good system in both cases, and it changes the usually slow and sluggish process of (re)building YGW medal value into an exciting and fast thing. And it creates two distinct phases where you first want to do micro medal spawns to make the value climb, and then trigger massive medal showers when the value is maxed

In both games, there are some recovery mechanics too that make it easier to rebuild a chain. Either by juggling in Brave Blade, or by having the chain value be divided by 10 instead of reset entirely in MMP

Well, it's not all perfect though. Playing MMP more seriously made me question a bunch of little things in the game, to the point where I was theorizing a "YGW Jank line" concept, as in : how much jank can you put in the game before it turns into a kusoge ? Where you do draw the line betwen deep masterpiece and random-ass nonsense? lmao. I feel that YGW is completely unable to make a fully polished game without anything cursed or jank in it. But since the basic game loop works well enough and there's plenty of resources to use, the games remain enjoyable to play

...but boy does it sting when you get those random-ish lone medals that spawn from killed enemies and just fuck up your chain if you aren't scanning the entire playfield or aren't paranoid-spamming stance switches (at the cost of lard gauge refill opportunities). Or when big enemies keep firing even at the very bottom of the screen. Or having to kill bosses at specific times with the lard attack for big juicy cancels even though there's no boss HP bar and they have random patterns that mess up setups. Or whatever the fuck is going on with Boss 4

Speaking of which, it was my nemesis for the longest time. That boss is a total bastard, and if you are low on resources when fighting it, it will destroy you. I used to have many chain break problems and deaths on stage 4 so I wasn't equipped enough to take it on, but on this run, I managed to get to it with plenty of lives in da (piggy) bank. So I could just spam bombs when in trouble, and damn did I definitely need to do that lol.

I already went into Stage 5 once and died farily quickly, but this run is actually the first time I played more than just the first minute of that stage. It is indeed easier than Stage 4 which is an interesting design choice. (Wait, I am assuming YGW had actual intentions there lmao, maybe it's just random). It's not fully blind as I knew a few things I should be aware of such as the tank midboss' side tanks still firing after the midboss death, or the laser attack on the last boss with the top safespots. But I still only had a vague idea of what the stage itself was like

It is crazy how you can ad-lib it more than both Stages 3 and 4. The former has all these insanely bulky helis (in the first half) and planes (in the second half) that forced me to plan bombs, and Stage 4 has those crazy midbosses and the factory segment that loves to break my chain

Thankfully, here I managed to play Stage 5 well enough (despite one annoying chain break) and got to the final boss with a fat stack of lives. "Have confidence!"

And man were those lives necessary lmao. There's a bunch of patterns where it's just a random mess, or those that can straight up wall you. I knew I could play it loose and bombspam my way through, but I also knew the boss had a million phases so it was far from free.

And I cleared on my last life! That's also thanks to an extend gotten mid-fight lmao. No second loop due to IKD jank conditions (1-life loop 1 WTF) but it doesn't matter much. I'm glad to have this clear!

Run for Atelier shmup Janvier 2023
Played on MAME 0.220, recorded with OBS Studio
#shmup #STG