Raiden Fighters Aces DVD question

[shallowgamer]

So I pop in the DVD that came with Aces, and the guy playing Raiden fighters seems to intentionally kill himself almost immediately. I say "intentionally" because he uses up his bombs before he destroys himself. I'm sure the reason is in the Japanese caption. Any insight?

Thanks

[Doctor Fugue]

It is to control rank. By immediately lowering the rank, the latter stages of the game will be easier to handle.

[shallowgamer]

So is this a strategy that all of you use?

[Doctor Fugue]

It is a very highly advanced technique, and I would only use it for a game that I could successfully survive without dying for the first 80 percent of the game or so. And, it is only useful in games where the rank becomes unmanageable without suiciding. Battle Garegga is a perfect example, as it is generally considered to be MUCH more difficult to beat the game without killing yourself a few times.

I'm not explaining this very well. Let me try again. "Rank" in a game is a hidden statistic. The game will keep track of how well you are doing (score, current number of ships in stock, survival time) and it will increase the rank as you do better. This means that the enemies will shoot faster and will take more hits to destroy if you are playing well. It is meant to keep the game a little more interesting for the expert players, but it also means that sometimes the game will become almost totally impossible unless you die a few times to lower the rank.

Some games do not have "rank" and the game will not increase the difficulty. Some games do have rank but it doesn't affect the game too much; suiciding will not be necessary. And some games have the dreaded impossible rank rise during the game, and it requires extreme care to know and avoid exactly what will raise your rank and make the game nearly unbeatable (in Garegga, every single shot you make increases your rank, as well as every powerup!). Often rank is very complicated.

Now, I am not an expert at all in Raiden Fighters, so the situation might not entirely involve rank there. Some games will give you really excellent bonuses when you die, like more powerups than you had while you were alive. So, you might want to kill yourself to get certain powerups that might increase your score more quickly. All these things are to make the difference between a very high score and an extremely high score.

[marurun]

That's an excellent explanation. I suggest you flesh it out into a generic "strategy" guide for shmups and pitch it to Racketboy as an idea for an article. Either that or incorporate this into a shmups 101 style piece and pitch that to RB instead.

Actually, I think shmups 101 would make a nice collaborative article between 2 or 3 people.