Gave it a bunch of tries. Managed to blow up the boss only on some attempts. Man this game has no chill when it comes to speed. Can’t slow down if I wanna shoot everything. This score is solid for me, I can’t figure out how I got this high haha
7 Likes
I’m getting very into this lol. Think I can still do much better.
I used the F primary (triple shot) and the R secondary (rotating shot) to clear the screen during the enemy waves n then I bombed the boss once and point-blanked it to death
10 Likes
I’m in. I’ll be able to give this a stab soon
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Gotta say I love seeing the many ways in which this game is being played. Keep shooting those screens please.
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How are folks playing? It’s always cool to see all the different ways. I’m playing on an NES with a flashcart on a crt.
SiSTer and 3ds!!
I think this is the best I can do tonight. Feels like 400k is the real difficult boundary to cross.
My problem is I keep screwing up the middle bit. If I could manage to keep spread shot throughout, and play the area properly, I think I could bump up to 350 at least.
Oh also this game is really fun. The charge shot is very satisfying.
6 Likes
Here’s my third run from analogue pocket. First two times lost to this guy, but third time I got a TIME UP. How do I get more time?
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I don’t think there’s a way to get more time. The game only gives you 2 minutes to score as much as possible and most runs end with that big guy.
1 Like
Got it! Wow, I’m impressed even more that people are getting double my score in 2 minutes! Got past the big guy and teased by the next zone
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So… I was intending to grab the relevant text from another very good guide on this game and insert gifs from off-crt footage I just recorded to exemplify the weapons but I realized I don’t have the time nor pacience right now to get every gif cut right nad looking good under 20mb so I’ll just link to the guide and post a single gif. The guide covers the weapon types and scoring system pretty well.
https://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?t=5286
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Yeah, I Recca… my ship by flying into unopened score boxes.
Think I’m comfortable cruising on 3 speed, but my weapon choices are pretty chaotic so I’m not doing anything consistently.
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I feel like I’m going about this all wrong. I’ve had a couple runs that felt “perfect”, where I didn’t get hit, upgraded my weapons all the way (I’ve been using F and R), killed most of the enemies on the screen and gathered the stuff they drop, beat the boss and had some time to kill the enemies afterwards, but then my final score never goes above 260,000 or so. This high score I got was on a run that felt a lot worse (I died several times):
Does increasing the speed (using the select button) also make the clock go faster? I can’t actually tell. I’ve been playing on max speed in hopes that it’s a risk reward thing, where the game is harder but if you do well you get more time at the end after the boss to shoot enemies. I’m not sure if it actually works this way?
This is my first attempt score-attacking an STG like this. Are there any generally applicable score-attack strategies that I might be missing?
Edit: looking through some Recca score-attack videos on youtube, these guys all seem extremely “surgical”, killing every single enemy on screen no matter what. So maybe my problem is that I feel like I’m killing a lot, but every time a lone enemy in a group survives, I’m losing points.
4 Likes
Here’s my best run so far. This kind of thing is super addictive! I got really into a YT caravan event a few years back.
I could be wrong but I don’t think that’s how it works - your speed is just the speed your ship moves around the screen, so it’s a control preference thing. If you have super fine control you can zip around the screen and get optimal position at high speeds.
The way you get more time is fast killing everything. If you kill an entire wave just as it’s coming on the screen, you spawn the next wave “early” so every time a wave completes its pattern and leaves the screen, that’s a lost opportunity to gain time (obviously the timer is always 2 minutes, so I guess you aren’t gaining time but cutting back on wasted time).
I get the sense that the boss just kinda spawns in at a certain point in the timer, so if you kill the boss super fast you might get a few waves after but you’ll never get many (I managed to kill the boss in like 1 second by hitting it with a bomb and blasting it as soon as it spawns). But if you kill faster before the boss, you just get more waves before you have to fight it. On my good attempts I have been getting waves with lots of score medals spawning, allowing me to rack up points before the boss.
It seems to me the biggest difference in score comes from maintaining a score medal combo - sadly it’s not super clear in the game but in the shmups article @穴 linked it describes how you get more points as you combo picking them up, up to 2k points for every medal from 50 at the start of a combo. I think only a medal floating off the screen breaks the combo, so picking those up is more important than killing a wave - and also killing an enemy and spawning a score medal behind you that immediately floats off the screen will lose you a combo.
It takes 16 medals to get to maximum score per medal, and that gets you 7850 points vs 16 x 2k which is 32000 points - so missing one medal at max combo costs a minimum of 24150 points. I dunno if there’s any other way to lose a combo (dying probably?).
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Just ran through a few times, pretty pleased with this. Definitely unlocked something when I started using the charge shot bomb more deliberately, especially against those silver circular guys and the start of the boss. Hopefully I’ll be able to dip back in before the end of the week!
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Yeah, focusing on medals over kills helped a lot! on my first try I got much higher than I ever had previously.
Another realization I had reading that guide is that since eating bullets with your bomb charge gets you a hundred points, its probably better to just sit around at the boss and absorb its bullets, killing it at the last moment possible rather than rushing the kill, which is what I’d been doing before. I’ve never been able to get more than two groups of enemies after the boss anyways.
Will keep trying to join the 400k club tomorrow!
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I was convinced I could get a 450k run on this and I kept messing it up one way or another. Finally got there but uh… where’d the afternoon go…?
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Added a public spreadsheet with the scores in order of posting. It’s on the first post of the thread. Feel free to update with your new scores. And if anyone who’s not an excel dummy like me knows how to sort it by highest score go ahead and make it do that! Spreadsheet also linked below:
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