Having my internet cable outside the house damaged since before xmas has meant I haven't been able to stream or do online gaming or much of anything... However it did give me an excuse to focus on shmups, in particular Blazing Star which I got back into in a big way. And, after busting my ass learning stage 6 and the final boss, I ended up getting a 1CC! And a nomiss at that! The score sucks, but whatever, it was the end of a long day where I was sick of the boss milking and just wanted to get a damn clear of it. It'll go on Youtube eventually, assuming my internet ever gets repaired.
Stage 6 is the major hurdle stage for a clear. The stages and bosses beforehand are tricky, but Stage 6 has a ton of obnoxious and outright memorize or die sections including:
• The pink enemies that fragment into scrap metal, encountered with the bouncy ball firing worms
• The fanblades you have to squeeze through quickly
• The tanks that drop down you have to quickly rush past
• The second after a screen transition where suddenly enemies come in to ram you from behind, if your ship can't fire backwards there's only a tiny space at the top left just under the top row of ships to hide
• All of the stage 6 boss, seriously, there's at least one spot early on where a giant orange ship will squish you if you don't move to the bottom left in time
• Knowing you can kill the S6 boss's second homing laser turret before it fires makes things massively easier, the first one only fires an actual lock on laser every few shots whereas every shot fired from the second turret above the ship's giant thruster is aimed at you
The final boss is tricky, but you can hide at the bottom right during BABY HAS A GUN phase to avoid everything, and the final phase is mostly about speedkilling the two protruding things ASAP before they start firing because they're next to impossible to dodge. The giant energy balls look scary but they form a gap at the bottom left to squeeze through.
I tried showing my mame autofire settings before entering my name but while doing that apparently it timed out without button inputs or I hit start by accident and it denied me name entry. ;w;
WELL FINE THEN `w`

I also discovered
thanks to this site's character profiles that there's a third ship colour you can select by pressing button C an D at the same time, neat.