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shmups strategy thread wrote:ATTACKS

All four attacks, as we said, depend from one button.This basically means one thing: turn off the other functions, or unmap them for the other buttons.The arcade configuration has just one button, do the same.Why this?Because using more than one button will cause some nasty delays when you need to switch attacks: trust me, if you're using auto-piercing and you need to trigger the MRD, you will notice half a second of delay, enough to kill you in many occasions.You don't really want this, so the best thing is using just one button, since Takumi optimized the four functions to work in a smoother way (the arcade version requires a tenth of a second more to charge the piercing shot, dreamcast version is a tad faster and smoother). Once we have just one button to use, we can actually start studying it detail the various attacks, starting from

BASIC SHOT

The basic shot ( from now on BS)is the only upgradable weapon in the game, and comes in two variants: wide (mosquito 01), and forward (mosquito 02), like we said earlier. It is used by simple tapping, and its usage should be avoided most of the time, since you will surely destroy too many enemies and it will be more difficult to collect their cubes. So, the only shot you can upgrade is also the less useful.Cool, isn't it? It's actually more useful than you may think, in overcrowded sections the BS can clean the screen more quickly than the pierce shot, if you're fully powered up though.

PIERCING LASER

The Piercing Laser (from now on: PL) is your true main weapon. It's simple: don't shoot for about half a second and a violet ball of energy will tell you that the laser is ready.It does a devastating damage through everything it encounters, for the equivalent of half a screen of range (horizontal length, of course).While the MS will give you points only if you land hits, the PC will consider every single hit as a kill (say, if you need ten hits of level 8 for an enemy, a piercing laser laser will be the scoring equivalent of ten hits), you can actually damage less an enemy by not hitting it in its core.This means that you can,for example, place two PLs to kill an enemy that takes 8 BSs, so you'd score 10x2 instead of 8 times a score.

MOSQUITO SYSTEM

(From now on, MS) This is your true weapon of mass destruction.It basically consists of a device that sucks bullets, let them rotate in an energy ring surrounding the ship, and release them back against enemies.
It's triggered once you hold the button, and the bar in the lower corner of your side will will be depleted the more you use it.You need about 5 seconds to completely deplete the MS energy, and after you will release the bullets, it will start replenishing (for a total of roughly 10 seconds to go from 0 to full) after half a second roughly.An important thing about the MS is how you reflect bullets: as i said, bullets are sucked in the energy field surrounding the ship.

This field makes you invicible and is also a strong melee-like weapon (the strongest if hits the enemies,roughly like two piercing cannons at once per second of contact), and the bullets rotate into this field according to your movements (right=clockwise, left=counterclockwise). Once you release the button and the bullets, they will move in the direction of the field radius focused on the bullets. This means, using your hit-box as the centre of the field, that bullets will go up if they're right in front of you (trace a radius from hit-box to bullet: that's the direction).

This also means that you have to omve roughly in the opposite direction of the attack, once you absorb it, to reflect it back at its source...And that you can use two tecniques:

1)The pseudo-gigawing tecnique: dive into a mess of bullets, make a quick 360° rotation, then put the joystick in neutral position, and release bullets, they will roughly go in all directions.
2)The instant backlash tecnique: go close to an enemy, let it shoot and go in the opposite direction of its attacks while absorbing bullets, the release the said attack in front of the enemy.

These two tecniques, once learnt properly and done in a micro-second (actually, half a second is the minimum amount of time you can use to absorb bullets) are the key to complete the game on one credit.Also, don't forget that only flying enemies release cubes,and the MS allows you to
generate cubes (always worth +1 per bullet) by reflecting them against ground enemies.

GRAVITY HOLE BOMB

(From now on, GHB) This is your last resort.Basically it works in this way: once you deplete the MS energy, you wil trigger this and renounce to reflect back any bullet. It will do the rough (very rough) equivalent damage of 15 PLs in a diameter of the horizontal length, and less damage outside this virtual circle.This means that enemies in the corners of the screen, if you release it exactly at the centre, will be only slightly damaged.This also means that most of the time it's absolutely useless, and you will probably have an hard time to survive if you didn't destroy the meanest enemies on screen.