Pink Sweets bug, I mean feature confirmed

Apparently the reason why nobody plays this game in Japan anymore is because of a bug which causes players to get infinite lives when you roll the ship count (at the top of the screen) past 5 extra ships. Cave says they fixed this and are allowing Game Center operators to send in their boards to be serviced

(probably for a nominal fee of $300). Whats makes this worse, is that Arcadia magazine, which records all the top world records for Japanese arcade games, continues to accept scores obtained on PCBs with the bug.

So these strange set of circumstances have led players to stop playing the game, stating its a hallow victory to cheat through to the end, while at the same time giving no motivation to game center operators to upgrade their boards if Arcadia still accepts these bugged scores.

Getting to the actual bug conditions is not an easy matter, even when making some changes to the default settings to allow extends to come quicker. So after much playing this weekend, I finally confirmed my board is the first version with the bug. I guess I'm ok with the bug, as this will open up a new way of playing the game for less skilled players like me. Its still possible to play through to the end without activating the bug, but is something pretty far out of my reach.


* This score obtained by changing default extends to every 1M

[update]Its been confirmed that the infinite lives thing is not a bug, but rather an intended feature by Yagawa. How do we know this? Well apparently Cave reverted this "fix" of infinite lives back to a feature in their latest set of boards updates they are sending out to operators! Unfortunately the damage is done, and the masses have moved on to playing Futari, which is pure Cave mechanics.[/update]

What rank control?

I've been playing Pink Sweets on and off for about two months now, and have run into a brick wall in Stage 4. The game just gets too difficult, and I wasn't able to break the 4M score barrier. For those that know Raizing type shmups, rank control is a vital strategy to completeing (1CCing) the game. What rank does, is increase the difficulty in direct proportion to how well you are playing/scoring.

Score too good in early levels (by medaling and picking up weapon options) and the game bitch slaps you in later levels. If you don't medal, or avoid options, and even suicide your ship (if you have extra ones), the rank drops or maintains, giving you a chance to reach the later levels, and thus potential for obtaining a higher overall score. Very ingenious play mechanics like this make it fun to figure out which parts of the game give higher score potentials but minimal rank increases.

Anyway, since I've only started playing this, I've been ignoring the rank side of the game, happily picking up options, medals, and milking bosses for all the points they are worth. So I've reached that inevitable brick wall and need to start strategizing.

Tonight, I was able to finally break 4M, again ignoring rank, but only by picking up two extends (extra ships) in Stage 3 using a "super power up" option, which in turn made the game quite pissed. I then proceeded to loose two spare ships on the Stage 3 endboss and two more at the begining of Stage 4. I think I could have avoided these losses, and gotten about 500K more in score, if I reach the Stage 4 endboss. Maybe then I'll begin a rank strategy.

4,091,030 - Lace - Stage 4 - DJK

Ibara 2 (Pink Sweets) and Trigger Heart Exelica

Hey Arcade, and Club Sega are two of the biggest and most famous arcades in Japan. And Icycalm, from the shmups forum, is our inside man in Akihabara Tokyo, getting some pics and movies from both of the two location test sites for Cave's new Ibara 2 (Pink Sweets), and Warashi's Trigger Heart Exelica.



You can read about Icycalm's expierence on his Insomnia website. Don't miss some of his previous posts on imaging Tokoyo or Yokohama wide-angle lens.