u/NeighborhoodTime2768

Will agree it's the case for Missions 1 to 5 (5 not so much, the street section is harder than X because you don't have a slug, but the train and sewer sections are easier, boss is infinitely easier as well).
The final mission though... That is just a complete shitshow. Obviously I will start talking about the bridge section which is 9999999x times harder than X. On X you can just wait it out and the bowling ball soldiers will just explode themselves upon reaching the end of the bridge. You don't have to press anything. Also, you can trigger the missiles without having to jump on the bridge, so you can dodge them safely and cross an empty bridge easily.
You get the "I" letter gun at this part (little dogs with wheels that explode), and this deals huge damage to Allen O'Neil. Jump on top of him at the beginning, fire them downwards, knife him twice, repeat, easy kill.
On the other hand, MS2's bridge was designed by some moron who thought it would be ok to fill the screen with projectiles like some spaceship shooter game (except you don't move like a spaceship XD). There's not only bowling balls now, but also grenades, indestructible fireworks (whoever came up with these is a criminal), paratroopers with bazookas... And there's no way to cheese them like in X. Until now I could not find a way to reliably pass this part without losing a life. I am currently "accepting" to lose a life there because I couldn't find a guaranteed way to pass this part. I've seen many people's videos but their methods don't seem to work 100% all of the time either. I can cross the bridge without dying about 60% of the time using about 20 grenades but 40% of the time I just accept losing 1 life. As for Allen, the fight is the same, except you don't get any weapons so you can't speedkill him like in X, increasing the chances you might die by a lot.
The factory section is also definetly tougher than X's, but I found out you can cheese almost the entire section by doing what I call slow-scrolling and pre-killing most of the enemies (taking tiny steps at a time so the enemies barely appear on the screen, this way they won't start moving or attacking yet, but you can already kill them).
I haven't trained the sub-boss and final boss yet, but I'm pretty damn sure the black UFOs are shooting a lot faster and more frequently than they do in X. The fact that the grenades fly slower and make a shitty arc in this game makes everything even worse.

TL;DR: Everything easier about 2 is compensated by how much harder the final mission is, to the point I think someone could have sued SNK for basically scamming you out of your coin with a level that doesn't give you a feasible, reasonable way to beat it without dying. IMO, when a coin operated game does this, I would legally consider it a scam. Every level, no matter how hard it is or the difficulty setting, needs to have a reasonable way to be beaten without dying. If it doesn't, it goes against the spirit of games and fair play.

1: I chose Gunbird (1994) as my first serious shmup. Did I choose a way too difficult game or is this ok?
2: The levels are randomized. But are they the same regardless of order? For example, level A being the first in a playthrough is going to be the same as level A being the third in another playthrough?
3: Is it a waste of time to master Easy mode first then move on to Normal? Should I leave the game at the default factory settings of the machine? I'm playing the arcade version.
4: As a beginner, is there a problem if I'm not playing the characters/ships that are recommended for beginners/the strongest ones? It's just that there's no fun for me if I'm not playing Ash, even though he completely sucks. His shot damage is clearly lower than other people's and his bomb might as well not exist. Still, for some reason, it's only fun if I play as him.

The reason I want this is because I want to record gameplay of metal slug x with only 1 credit. When playing offline, you can use savestates and also edit the video and it will look legit. But with fightcade, there's no way to cheat, because the replay will be uploaded to fightcade servers, and you can't use savestates. So I'd like to know if it's possible to open 2 fightcades and challenge myself.

I'm a beginner at shmups, I'm playing Gunbird and I really love it. Love the graphics, the visual design, the characters. I'm currently playing as my homie Epst- I mean, Ash. I like playing as him because I feel he is the fastest and this makes it easier to dodge. His bomb sucks tho

Got MS1, 2, X and 3 on Steam for less than 2 bucks. On top of the emulation being poor (especially sound), there's some awful input lag. I was wondering if I could at least extract the roms from those games so at least I can say I'm emulating a "legit" rom.

I can NOT play any of the metal slugs without autofire both on the gun and the grenades, unless we're talking about an extremely casual playthrough on low difficulty. Say I got myself an AES what would be my options? Does unibios feature it? Can you mod the original controllers for autofire? What about the NGCD pad?

Played MSX the whole day yesterday on keyboard. had autofire on for the gun, but not the nades. The two final bosses on level 8 require you to spam grenades while jumping 24/7. Woke up today and now my right hand is in severe pain whenever I move anything from the middle finger to the pinky. Currently shoving it into an ice bucket for a few minutes every now and then.

Autofire is not cheating, it's a health concern.

Saw you guys posting about tier lists and I just wanted to say the mothership is absolute F tier 100% worst boss in the entire franchise. LAME as lame can be. it's just spamming the same 3 black ufos the whole fight over and over. no creativity, no clever design, no nothing. it has no attacks other than a lame blue laser that always fires straight down, so it just spams the UFOs to fight for it. the UFOs are the bosses, not the mothership. on level 8 each of these ufos take a million hits to kill (FOUR grenades EACH), their movement is too fast and completely random and unpredictable, they actually dodge your attacks, actively move away from your reach and often place themselves somewhere your grenades won't reach, and they will often fire in a way that leaves no gap for avoiding.

The dude who made this boss deserves to never be employed in anything videogame related ever again. Might as well just have the UFOs as the final boss and scrap the mothership altogether. Lame design, trash, low effort, no creativity, half-assed boss.

And the sub-boss (dai-manji) that comes before the mothership is also lame for the same reasons but it's a bit less lame because it at least got some actual real attacks and is not just spamming the black UFOs 24/7 non stop.

Guys were like "we suck at designing final bosses so let's just make a boss whose only attack is to summon a very powerful, fast and hard to kill and hard to avoid enemy non-stop and call it a day"