Shmup of the Month Club 2014 (Completed)

[DocHauser]

Ah, to answer my own question...

From Smraedis's playthrough on YouTube:



There's a bit just before the boss (1:35) where it stops scrolling and you have to destroy a laser turret blocking the way. If you don't destroy it right away, the wave of ships that drop the Y eventually appear (2:05).

[mjmjr25]

Thanks, Doc.

I'd only gotten it once or twice before, but rarely - good to see where it actually was, huge help.

[ExedExes]

Yeah, thanks for that there DH.

Which also helped my next score -

ExedExes - 4,371,280 - Windina - Stage 4 - MAME



I saw the oddly scoring 81,500 point items! But wow. Milking one boss can literally double or triple your score that fast. Unbelievable. I'm on to you all now!

[mjmjr25]

I'm still missing something, only at a little over 2mil, stage 4, and I feel like i'm getting almost every blu orb, but they're only up to 20K. I must not be creating enough of them?

[ChrisHaha2049]

^Possibly not creating enough... Some of the bigger enemies fire missiles that you can shoot (or cancel) into a blue jewel or two. Also there's a little secret in the first section of stage 2 that gives 6 free blue jewels in a vertical line just before the stage transitions. Not exactly sure how it's triggered, but it seems to be just shooting down all enemies in this section very quickly. I've only been able to do it with Windina...



Yet, the bulk of the score doesn't really happen until stage 3. Case in point, the individual stage scores for my last entry:


431K in stage 1
787K in stage 2
5.7 million in stage 3
stage 4 needs work.

So stage 3 is when the blue jewel collecting really kicks in. I usually hit the max value just before or during the boss.
Shoot every piece of junk that's flying at you, including the junk spewing from generators. In fact let them spew... Lot of jewel potential here.
Then the boss... For the first part, you want to destroy its tail that shoots the 3-way lasers first and as quick as you can. Then it will shoot big red bullets much more frequently which can be cancelled into 2-3 jewels every time. Milking the second part is pretty self explanatory... a ton of jewels can be had here.

Also those Event Item orbs... It was mentioned in an earlier post, if you let 9 colors go by, the next one will be blinking (not the kanji one). This is the max multiplier and makes everything you shoot x128. So you should try to grab this when there are a lot of popcorn enemies to shoot. A good place is stage 3 with the junk spewing generators... I'm sure the color order goes like so:

Yellow
Orange
Brown
Red
Pink
Dark Pink(?)
Light Blue
Blue
Green
Rainbow Blink (MAX)

Good luck!

[mjmjr25]

Just realized I didn't actually submit a score in my last post:

2,176,480 - mjmjr25 - Stage 4 - Dino246 - MVS

I plan on doing considerably better this weekend w/the tips from ChrisH.

[pierrot]

pierrot - 2,869,160 - Windina - Stage 3 - MAME

Tough game for scoring, for me. I was playing this game a tiny bit last year, and thought it was pretty cool. Before reading through this thread, I'd thought breaking 1 million on the third boss would be pretty good. Apparently I did not really understand the scoring. Good game, though. I really hate the third boss, so I may not get back to any more runs right away.

[dsheinem]

new best, probably best I'll post for a while.

dsheinem - 2,428,550 - Stage 4 - Windia - MAME

[mjmjr25]

Ok, so no one has posted the funniest part about this game. The intro to the stage 5 boss is:

SOMEONE WAKES THE NOISE UP!

Yes, the 5th boss' name is "Noise". Hilarious.

Anyways, I played probably as good as I can, at least survival-wise. I dropped my gem chain a couple times on stage 3, and i'm not good at milking those 2 spawning ground pods at the 1/3 point of that stage where I know there are a ton of points. I also panic on 3rd boss and end up just killing rather than dodging and milking.

Stage 4 is just crazy - considerably more difficult than stage 5. All those enemies from behind are just brutal, really hard to dodge. I'm sure it gets easier the more I see it, but it was pretty intense. I'm really baffled at you guys getting 7-8 million. I can see where the points are, i'm just not sure how you all keep your gem chains so consistently through 3rd and 4th stages.

This might be my best:
3,446,800 - mjmjr25 - Dino246 - stage 5 (boss) - MVS

Breakdown:

Also, I had told my kids before if they could break 500K, i'd post there scores, so:
798,860 - Aidric - Dino135 - Stage 3 - MVS

[ExedExes]

Ok, so no one has posted the funniest part about this game. The intro to the stage 5 boss is:

SOMEONE WAKES THE NOISE UP!

Yes, the 5th boss' name is "Noise". Hilarious.

Someone needs to wake Noise up, I still haven't seen a score from him yet

As for scores, new update tomorrow night. Lots of participation for our first game of 2014.