Yeah, I figured you were doing some scoring, since your score is pretty damn good!
The way I approach the game is more in chunks than in an overall approach. Stage 1 I find pretty boring if I am just cruising through, and since its so early in the run, I like to see just how high I can push the score. I get really aggressive and make sure to max the counter out, because worst-case, I can just restart if I get hit.
Stage 2 for me now, is pretty much the same thing, except it is a lot easier to max out the counter, so the game gets a little hectic. I do refrain a little though, as some enemies (The manta ray things that wrap shots around you in particular) bring a lot of risk to get the most points out of them. So, I am okay just doing em in early and losing some points there.
That was actually the majority of my scoring in my best run so far. Everything went right in the first 2 stages, so I played it safe and tried to keep my overall counter as high as possible, but didn't want to risk too much, since in BL, bombing is a big no-no (It knocks your counter harder than dying, unlike in 1.5).
Now, looking at what I want to do to beat that score, I'll need to take greater risks in a part of the game I feel most comfortable doing so. That is definitely NOT the 2nd half of stage 3, which I still find to be the riskiest part of the game. So, since I can't make good use of pushing the counter high in the first part of stage 3, I think I will still just play it safe there, and push really hard on stage 4, which has enough cancels that I can do pretty well without pushing myself too far. Downside, of course, is that screwing up here (and I screw up a lot) means I basically ran the whole game before knowing if the run was good or not.
So yeah, thats my approach. Either way, you are building that overall counter, but if you feel safe enough to take things into overdrive mode (or w/e it is called, max stage counter), then you can jump the amount of amber you get in a stage by probably 50%, just from shedding large gems from enemies. Doing it in stage 1 is both fairly safe, and very good, because that 50% amber increase is going to be in your overall counter for the entire game, whereas being risky on stage 5 for a few amber will lead to more frustration, and that bonus amber will only be in your overall counter for the rest of that stage, making it worth less overall.
I also need to focus on lanterns on stage 5, as they are worth a good amount, and end the game with a decent lives/bombs split, since the EoG bonus is a multiplier of those 2.
And just like both of you, I never bomb. I can't even remember the last time I used a bomb in the game outside of the Larsa fight.
