Greetings one and all! Are you supreme in Sylpheed? Extreme in Einhander? Titanic in Triggerhearts? Then do I have good news for you! The Bullet Hell Olympics are back, and tougher than ever!

The event will take place at Arcon (slots 4 and 5 in the movie room)

Brace yourselves people, because this time around you only have one chance to shoot and dodge your way to the top in five shooting games!

And now your events!
1) Sylpheed: The Lost Planet (PS2)
*standard mode
2) Super Stardust HD (PS3)
*arcade mode
3) Castle Shikigami 2 (PS2)
*arcade mode, any character/attack can be used
4) Tohou 11: Subterranean Animism (PC)
*default settings, any character/weapon can be used
5) AngerAze 2: ReBirth (PC)
*default settings, hard mode, any character/weapon can be used

Players will be determined randomly each round. Points will be awarded according to the scores of each game. Points will be tallied at the end of the tournament and places will be determined. Players are not required to be present during other players' turns; but are at the beginning of each round where a short explanation of the game will be givin, and a gameplay video will be shown.

All players who play in all five rounds will be awarded a prize. Additionally, there are special prizes for first place, and a the winner of the fellowship award (determined by me).

There will be only fifteen spots available for the tournament, so sign up early!

Please post questions and suggestions here, sign ups are on the Arcon website, or at Arcon if spots are still available.

For those who want to practice, Sylpheed and Castle Shikigami 2 are both playstation 2 games, and are fairly hard to find, if you'd like to play them contact me. Super stardust HD is on the playstation network, you can download a demo for free. Tohou and AngerAze are both freeware games available on the web, if you can't find them online come to me with a flash drive and i'll load them up for you.

***I've learned that touhou and angeraze have some issues running on windows vista, apparently they work fine if you shortcut their executable files to your desktop and run if from there. If you want to run them on a mac you'll need an intel chip and emulation software.

The Mac emulation software mentioned would be Crossover by Codeweavers (which has a 30 free trial if you only want to practice before Arcon), or VMWare Fusion(some sort of trial)/Parallels(some sort of trial)/VirtualBox (free, open source) to run a virtualization of Windows on your Mac which require a Windows disc. If you really don't know what I'm talking about, seek me out and I can explain.

Important

I have decided to tweak the order of the games a bit.

Tohou will now be game #4, AngerAze is game #5.

Additionally, AngerAze will now be played on default setting on hard mode.

Don't forget to sign up!

Alrighty, now that all that monkey business is out of the way, time for some hints!

Thats correct you heard right, each day leading up to arcon I'll be posting a tip/trick which will give all of you an edge when playing.

Today's tip:

In Super Stardust HD, once a level you will see an asteroid appear with a number on it. Destroy the asteroid to make another appear with a number which is one lower. I.E. if 15 appears, the next will be 14, 13, 12, so on, so on. Once you destroy #1 a large asteroid made entirely of power ups will appear!

Remember folks, if any of you want to practice the games you can always ask me and I'll set you up.

Additionally, this coming Egaming (wednesday the 25th) I will be bringing my PS3 and laptop, so that everybody can get a look see at what you're up against.

Today's Tip:

In AngerAze, whenever you use your magic shot, you'll automatically absorb all of the crystals on the screen, this makes for easy gathering and higher scores.

Today's Tip:

In Sylpheed, the closer you are to an enemy when you destroy it, the higher your score multiplier will be, and the more points you will get. Shooting an enemy from far away is worth 2X, while shooting an enemy from point blank can be worth 16X!

Today's Tip:

In Castle Shikigami, if you destroy enemies with your standard attack, coins will just hang in the air, but if you destroy them with your shinigami attack all coins from killing the enemies will be automatically absorbed.

Today's Tip:

In Touhou, when in a boss battle an icon appears at the bottom of the screen, showing where the boss is located on the screen. This way you can watch your character for dodging, yet still be able to see where the boss is.

Yesterday's tip:

Feeling overwhelmed in AngerAze? When you use your magic shot, not only do you automatically slow down, but all of the bullets and enemies on the screen do so also, making it much easier to dodge.

Today's tip:

In Touhou, you get extra points for being extremely close to enemy bullets, this is called a graze bonus. This same concept is reflected in Castle Shikigami, except in addition to getting extra points your attacks get super powerful!