ersatz_cats here again. Today, I hope to introduce you all to shmup supergamer Pearl. (For those who don’t know, “shmup” is short for “Shoot ’em up”, a genre of game typically including small ships and lots of projectiles.) A while back, Pearl conducted a fantastic interview of Japanese Donkey Kong master “ACU-AZU”, which I had the privilege of publishing at Donkey Kong Forum and later here on PPMDC. But it turns out, Pearl has a story of his own worth telling. While Pearl is reluctant to discuss his own top accomplishments, a quick perusal of his profile page at shmup leaderboard site Restart Syndrome shows a dedicated craft of tutorials, strategy analysis, and competitive leaderboard entries (most of which are not formally submitted). A visit to his Twitch channel often shows him working hard at his craft. Recently, Pearl and I chatted about shmups, Minecraft, FPS games, arcade classics, more shmups, and some filthy no good cheaters.
Let’s start with the basics, sir! Tell us a little about yourself and your background.
Hey, I’m Pearl; real name Eric, and I’m a primarily shoot em up focused player while also playing any other score attack or time attack arcade release that catches my eye. I run a sort of podcast named Average Superplay Enjoyers, and co-founded an arcade team under the same name of ASE.
I played Minecraft competitively since 2011, racking up at least 5,000 hours in the game until July 2015, where I drifted away from the game due to the poor updates from Mojang and the PvP community as a whole, and picked up the Touhou games as a cool interest and just got completely invested in the genre.
We’ll get back to each of those in a bit. But before that, tell us about your first introduction into video games, or at least the earliest that you can remember.
This is an easy one, as it’s something I can still mostly remember. The year was 2001, and I was two years old at the time and we had a PS1 as it was a cheap console at the time. My dad was playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, and I asked to play it since I guess it looked fun! I can’t remember how well I did but that was the start to it all. There are some scattered memories of 2002 with Pac-Man World and the PS1 port of RoadBlasters as well, to name a few.
I know you’re big into the classic arcade scene today. Nice to see you had some early exposure to Pac-Man, albeit of the 3D platformer variety.
I can highly recommend the remake (1+2), it mimics the physics of THPS4 styled games very well, and is a great entrypoint.
Did you ever get competitive at those early PS1 games?
Considering I was very young (age 2-4), I had no concept of what competition was back then. I didn’t know that people took games seriously at this age, just played until completion.
lol That makes sense. When did you start approaching games from a more competitive angle, playing for higher scores / faster times?
So, the earliest I can recall doing this for is in 2005, I owned the GameCube versions of Midway Arcade Treasures 1 and 2, and I would turn the DIP switches down and edit the extend settings to create my own marathon modes of sorts. Games like NARC, Gauntlet 1 and 2, Bubbles, Smash TV, etc. Of course, these weren’t real runs by any means and more just me being a young kid and wanting to see the score increase.
I did run into a bug on NARC that took me years to find documented anywhere and discovered a continue-only infinite pattern in the game, which was quite funny.
I started playing FPS games in 2009, which are competitive in their nature, but if you mean which games I played as a competitive interest would be Minecraft in 2012, and Touhou 8 ~ Imperishable Night (shmups as a whole) in 2015.
I will definitely ask you a bunch about shmups in a moment. But what was this NARC bug? I’m not familiar with it.
So on the Highway stage of NARC, there are one or two sections where a helicopter will take off from the road and start firing at you from the air. In this stage, you also get a car to drive periodically before it inevitably explodes. But if you were to somehow drive the car at max speed into the stationary heli before it takes off, the game would freak out and just clear the stage right then and there.
Nice! I’m guessing since NARC is classic arcade, which tends to lean toward the Twin Galaxies end of things, and since TG historically had a policy of banning glitches, this was just never used in competition.
Its strange with that whole tg banning glitches thing, as they allow jumping beside dk on the rivet stage which IMO is a bug (unintended behavior).
Yeah, TG was very selective. Walter Day was literally announcing the Centipede trap trick on his TV clip, lol. I guess it was whatever the cool kids wanted, versus whatever they thought was unfair.
Many such cases, really!
I wasn’t aware you had been into the FPS scene. I assume this means the proper competitive FPS community? Tell us a bit about your time there, and which FPS games were your favorite.
Not competitive FPS, just playing them with the intention to improve and get better. But my favorite one is still Call of Duty 4, that game is perfection to me.
What did you like about Call of Duty 4 more than the other FPS games out on the market?
When CoD4 was out, I was only 8-9 years old so based on the other games on the market, I couldn’t really tell the differences. I just enjoyed the fluidity of the movement, and the simplicity of how it played. Other games I tried around this era were the Medal of Honor games, which were slower and more methodical. Whereas CoD4’s design (and future games onward) was for fast paced gameplay with small, regenerating health values. Allowing for quick TTK’s (Time to Kill) to continue fast pacing.
Having the simple rewards for you and your team in the form of 3 killstreaks (3,5,7) was also good even if the balancing on the 7 killstreak was often a bit wack.
What was it like playing Minecraft competitively? Do you mean just speedrunning it for time, or at actual live competitions?
Playing Minecraft competitively was a very interesting environment, there weren’t many competitions (there were a few and my team placed 1st in one of them) but I mostly played servers that were team vs. team, Death in these servers often meant 1 hour or more of lost time as you’d need to regear, re-enchant your equipment and prepare healing items once again.
Though, the team I’d always run were often much better than other teams on these servers, meaning we’d have dozens and dozens of armor sets to spare, sometimes over 100 full sets, meaning we didn’t lose any time for regearing.
For me, the fun was always PvP, I was never a builder or someone who was good at redstone, I just liked how fluid the movement was and how I could take advantage of it.
Though since this was 2012-2015, DDoSing was very very common back then, and I went through about 6 different skype accounts back then as anyone with your skype username could go to a skype resolver, get your IP and hit you off for 10-15 minutes with no problem, so it was always mass hilarity when someone had to resort to that in team fight.
Ugh, not gonna lie, the DDoS aspect sounds kinda miserable. But if there’s a way to cheat, someone’s gonna try it.
So I met you through the Donkey Kong scene, but what I really know you for are shoot-em-ups and bullet hell games. What got you into the genre in the first place?
I quit Minecraft in 2015, and somehow stumbled on the earlier Touhou games as something I played in my science classes, when I was able to start improving at these games, I felt it was a better use of my time than to continue playing MC at a higher level, as Microsoft had recently pushed update 1.9, which killed the game for me.
Really quickly, my apologies, but I’m not familiar with all the Minecraft updates. What about update 1.9 killed competitive Minecraft for you?
1.9 changed the entire combat system. Before, you could attack as fast as you could click (but there is a limit of X amount of ticks needed to deal damage) which led to pre 1.9 combat being very movement heavy, relying on a lot of strafing and momentum manipulation in order to perform better.
1.9 added a delay on your attacks, turning the game into a far slower experience. Fights would last 3-4 times as longer for no reason whatsoever and it completely killed the pacing of everything.
So what has kept you invested in the shmup genre over the long haul?
The thing that keeps me engaged is their simplicity and desire for creativity, I can sit down and create brand new routes and patterns for stage sections for better scoring or better survival, as well as the thrill of putting everything together for a clean run is something that is unmatched to me.
Not to mention, the satisfaction of actually engaging with the scoring systems of these games is great, too. Often you’re rewarded for risky play and unorthodox methods, so it’s fulfilling to figure it out, especially if it’s methods that haven’t been documented for years.
That sounds awesome! I have to say, as someone who’s never really played the shmup genre, it just looks crazy to me. I think my problem is, when I’m playing a game like that, I’m used to focusing on the threats, and there are too many to focus on. What advice would you give to someone trying to get into the genre?
This is a common problem for newer players for sure, something you have to figure out early is how to properly assess the screen. Don’t process every single bullet and enemy on screen, but rather change your perception between using your peripheral (about 3-5 ship lengths above you) or in a short vicinity around your sprite during heavy bullet patterns or intense sections.
Not every bullet is out to get you, only a few of them at a time are dangerous. It’s the entire screen that becomes overwhelming at first so if you can begin to isolate certain things on the screen, you can start picking apart ways to deal with patterns you’ve never seen before, ways to find gaps through specific combinations of things. As with all skills it does take time though.
What are some of your other favorite arcade classics?
Some other classic arcade games I really like (but am not very good at) are DK3, Arkanoid, Chiller, Pac-Mania, and Crazy Balloon.
As I said before, I met you through the DK community, but when preparing for this interview, I was surprised to find your name on the high score list way down in the 91k range. I’m sure you’re a better player than that, of course. May I ask if the game just doesn’t interest you competitively, compared to other games? Or do you have any big DK plans in store?
So my actual DK PB is still rather small, I think 160K. The only reason it’s on the leaderboard is because I submitted a 1-1 score and Jry [Jeremy Young, moderator of Donkey Kong Forum] also included the end score to mess with me.
I am not very interested currently in playing the game myself, it’s just not a game that interests me especially with it’s long length.
At some point, a killscreen would be something I’d like to do, but at this time it’s uncertain as it’s a genre I’m quite bad at myself.
Any time we talk about competitive Donkey Kong, it’s hard to avoid the big monkey in the room, which would be the Billy Mitchell cheating scandal that broke a few years ago, pertaining to scores going back to 2004. And of course, that whole saga is still in litigation, with Billy suing Twin Galaxies and TG counter-suing both Billy and Walter Day for fraud. Did you have any thoughts you’d like to give on that?
I enjoy the term “big monkey” for this as it’s very accurate.
Personally, I find this whole situation amusing. Mostly in the sense that it’s just quite sad that BM has allowed it to progress to such an extreme instead of just coming up front and saying that his plays were illegitimate. Sure, he can stand on paint cans all he wants now but at some point they’re going to fall over and everything is just going to crumble, I’ve been following this saga since the beginning and I must say, I’m always laughing when some other absurdity happens in regards to this situation.
I do hope TG comes out on top of this case, as they have good grounds to counter-sue for fraud and defamation.
I bet BM thought his 1 day scores would turn into 1 day lawsuits but I guess not.
Absolutely. There have been multiple times he could have dropped the pretense, and most people would have eventually forgiven him. He’s effectively gotten away with it this far, but like you say, it’s not going to last, not with these lawsuits.
Of course, any time people are playing video games competitively, cheating of many varieties will come into play. Another incident that came to light a couple years ago was that of Omnigamer. I can say, I was disappointed to discover he had old shmup playthroughs on his YouTube channel, which seemed to be presented as real time plays, but which were identified by the shmup community as abusing the game’s pause feature, which gets removed when the later replay is recorded. You were one of the few people I’m aware of from the shmup community to comment publicly on that at the time. How did you feel about that situation, and has your perspective on that changed in the last couple years?
Omnigamer’s cheated plays have been known by the Touhou community for at least 7 years before they were brought to light some time ago, specifically his Shoot The Bullet stage 9-1 score, which was WR at the time.
When I took a deeper look at his entire backlog of replays when the issue was first brought to light, it was shocking just how many abused pausing in order to gain an advantage, especially since he stole strategies from a cheater to begin with!
So when he would always come out with the “Don’t cheat on speedgames, regardless of community size” it always felt a bit off, considering he did the same to the very early Touhou community, dropping monster scores and even a WR back in that day too.
While it took the two of us some time on that one Reddit thread to get him to fess up, my opinion on it has not changed since then. Pause buffering is absolutely cheating in these sort of games, and I still think what he did was very slimy, especially to make a deal about beating a Japanese score back then.
Yeah, the whole situation was very disappointing. I hadn’t heard of any of it until it was brought to light in 2020, so I had always taken Omni’s mantra of “Never cheat, regardless of community size” (or however he phrased it) at face value. I was appreciative of yours and others’ willingness to be candid about it, no matter how unpopular it may have been to challenge someone who is so highly regarded in the community. That’s a big thing with me. I will say, I have some mixed feelings about his situation, since I know all the stupid stuff I did in my own youth, and since Omnigamer (eventually) acknowledged what he did, which is a lot more than we can say for some people. But I also recognize that I’m not a part of that community, and I can’t speak for those who were cheated out of recognition years ago.
What are your thoughts on Twin Galaxies as a competitive platform, both in general and for shmups in particular?
TG as a competitive platform is in a strange spot. Shmup players don’t want to use it as our rules and playstyles more mimic the Japanese side of things, allowing autofire, macros, frame buttons, etc. For speedrunners, they have Speedrun.com, I think the best group for TG is actually the classic arcade community.
So what’s Average Superplay Enjoyers all about? I see the YouTube channel. Are you a competitive team as well?
Average Superplay Enjoyers is a sort of podcast I run with Plasmo “every now and then” where we cover replays from very old Japanese MAME input file sites, or user submitted replays as well.
Shortly after we started, the two of us decided to actually make it a team, ASE.
A history lesson, you might see Japanese players use two (or 3+) sections of a name. An example earlier is ACU. These are groups, or teams. And they’ve been a large part of Japanese arcade history since the 80’s, you can go back as far as you can and you’ll find teams that might even still be going recently too.
The English side doesn’t have many teams, the concept never caught on here, I can only think of AST, which was used a long time ago. So Plasmo, Meriscan, and I thought “lets turn ASE into a team!” So we got a group of people together and now we have our own team, where we all use ASE as our initials for scoreboards (while the full names are, ASE-PRL, ASE-NOA, ASE-MER, etc.).
https://twitter.com/Plasmo_STG
https://twitter.com/PearlescentX
I like that! Also, on that topic, a while back you interviewed a Japanese Donkey Kong player who goes by the handle “ACU-AZU”, after he became the sixth player to reach 1.2 million on that game. How did you come to meet ACU-AZU? And what have you learned interacting with competitive players from Japanese gaming circles on social media?
I met ACU-AZU over the course of following other Japanese players on Twitter. Over the course of time, you’ll see more and more players popping up as players retweet each others’ runs. Usually, Japanese players are quite friendly and are eager to follow back. Sometimes they’re talkative and sometimes they aren’t. The whole “finding new players from different RT’s” thing kinda goes like: You follow one person, who retweets someone getting 50 million in Twin Cobra, then they retweet someone getting WR in Street Fighter Alpha 2, then that person retweets someone scoring Bioship Paladin, etc.
Over the years though, I’ve learned a lot of how Japanese players interpret strategy discussion and sharing; which gave me a lot of motivation to start researching these lost techniques myself in the past year or two.
Where can people find the Average Superplay Enjoyers, and get notified of new content?
The ASE podcast is currently in a state of slumber as Plasmo and I are both very busy lately, but I just upload the episodes to my YouTube channel.
Anything else you’d like to get on the record today?
Try shmups, even if you think you’re bad at them, everyone is at first.
Thank you immensely for your time, sir Pearl! We’ve chatted here and there before, but it’s awesome getting all of this into a formal interview for everyone.