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Made some serious progress, thanks to looking at your vid, marus, plus Rob's old superplay (where he uses Kart). It's really tough to trigger some of the Volcanons on stage 1's sky stage and I find myself restarting a lot. But man, what a difference it makes when you play more seriously for score. My PB just shot up by the... quadrillions?

Arcade Mode (Dreamcast):
2,576,312,892,374,660 - EmperorIng - Kart (RF) - 4 - DC - https://i.imgur.com/N4EZ5SN.jpg



I really, really wish I had beaten the Stage 4 boss, but I guess the fact that I made it here is good enough (since I've never gotten to the boss on a single credit before). Maybe I should take advantage of that stage attack mode.

I've also noticed that if you DO choose "restart" on the menu, the game starts your score off at "1" like you added a credit... even if you restart on stage 1! What a bummer. Luckily this run (and the previous) were "fresh" (especially once I knew what was going on). It's not going to help my restart-syndrome.

I tried playing some of the other ships for laughs, and Limi's stage 1 seems a little limited but doable. I have the hardest time in the city stage for Romi and Ralugo, with much fewer Volcanons. I wonder if it matters what stage 1 you have as long as you 'cash in' on the later stages though. I actually almost never have played as Cherry, but I should give her a try sometime. I tried to unlock the other ships by setting the difficulty to 1, but it doesn't differentiate scores by difficulty on the leaderboard so I was a little nervous about messing up my score-tracking...

Double post, but I'm moving on up! Broke through a major milestone, reaching stage 5 for the first time! Talking with Plasmo, he pointed out how this is one of the most score-rich opportunities in the game, due to how much those little bits are coming from the boss. I have a lot of practice to do, not only to survive but to make the most out of their absurdly-high value.

I've been following more of your routes on stage 1, marus, as well as Rob's old superplay and it definitely made a difference - doubling, if not quadrupling my multiplier and seeing my stage 1 score shoot up into the... quadrillions? The boss is pretty simple, but getting the max amount of volcanons in stage 1 is really tough and a little finicky - especially with those large ships before the battleship raid (where you find the extra bomb). Very frustrating when I don't pull it off!

I focused on survival on stage 4, which means despite reaching 4 red digits on stage 1, my score didn't truly jump up after that. The boss I kinda just tried to spam and kill without milking, because I was too focused on beating it and reaching stage 5 for once. The result of that is that I didn't survive in stage 5 for all that long! I guess I can use score attack to get a better handle on the last 3 boss/stages.

Arcade Mode (Dreamcast):
4,712,736,941,093,000 - EmperorIng - Kart (RF) - 5 - DC - https://imgur.com/ggiVKSq

Nice job! Sorry I missed your last post, but the tables are updated now.

For scoring, I've found that optimizing the early stages does the most for your score. Since your multiplier carries over from stage-to-stage, getting a big multiplier early on will boost your score for the entire game. The bosses in the last 3 stages are all worth a lot of points, so you can actually get a really good score even by just learning to score stage 1 and then playing the rest of the game for survival. When I was playing to beat Rob's score, I restarted a ton of runs on stage 1 until I got a multiplier I was happy with, and then would play out the rest of the run. I'm definitely not very consistent on all of the volcannons myself

I found that stage 4 and onward is when the difficulty starts to ramp up. It's not bad once you have a route down, but figuring out and practicing a route was tricky for me just due to how unique the reflect force mechanic is compared to other shmups. I definitely recommend spending some time doing stage practice on all of the later stages. Score Attack is great for learning survival routes, but one trade off is that it's easier to get volcannons in Score Attack, so it's not useful for learning to score. In Arcade mode though you can restart a stage as many times as you want, so that's a good way to practice scoring routes.

Btw if you want to try out the unlockable ships, there's a cheat code you can use to unlock everything. Just go into the Gallery and input the following: UP X Y X DOWN Y X Y Y

It's been a while, but I've still been practicing, and I'm finally happy to submit a new score that really jumps past my last few attempts! This is partially thanks to watching your replay (and Rob's old Kart superplay) a lot Marus, giving me some valuable tips on how to maximize my scoring on the early stages. I've been wanting to break the 1... quadrillion? mark (whatever the blue digit is!) for the longest time, and despite mistakenly doing a lot of practice on difficulty setting 1 (as my scoreboard shows), this didn't put me at a disadvantage learning some basic scoring routes.

Arcade Mode (Dreamcast):
13,930,596,271,286,570 - EmperorIng - Kart (RF) - 6 - DC - https://imgur.com/hATVFfd




I find stage 4 to be the most difficult to score in. I can barely trigger volcanons in the first half (prior to the midboss) despite my best efforts.

This run with kart had the most ass-kicking stage 1 I've yet had, getting nearly 1 quadrillion (4 red digits?) by the end of the st1 boss! Usually I average anywhere between 600 and 800 trillion (at best). Getting so many excellent volcanons so early really set the stage for the other levels, where my high multiplier early on paid off big. As I'm understanding how volcanons work I'm getting a -little- better at manipulating them but it can still be a crapshoot triggering some due to how precise you need to be. For example: the first double-volcanon you can trigger on with the two zeppelins on st1 (sky stage). I can get it maybe half the time I try, but if I'm just slightly out of position or move too soon, I muck it up. Same goes for a lot of the trickier volcanons. I can't get all three volcanon triggers from the three large circular enemies halfway through stage 1, so I can only settle on two.

I had two stupid deaths on the st4 boss, but I managed to soldier on and collect myself enough for some pod-milkin' on stage 5. Are you supposed to destroy those pods on the stage 5 boss? Or do they have infinite health? I recall plasmo telling me a huge part of your score comes from the pods but try as I might they won't die before the boss itself dies or times out.



Thanks for this, and I really will have to start being adamant about restarting stages (despite the indignity of the extra digit!) to learn some scoring routes. I did that a lot to learn some more volcanons on the factory/warehouse stage (though I have only a partial success rate with many of them).

I've also been playing some of Limi just for fun and am getting decent with her as well. Her stage as a stage 1 isn't so bad, score-wise, until you get to the boss, the walker tank. I cannot for the life of me trigger more than one volcanon on it playing as Limi. I wonder if the boss is easier to score with the Reflect Laser (I think stage 4 would be easier to score with the laser).

Nice improvement! Stage 4 definitely has some of the harder volcanons to trigger, not to mention the stage itself is tricky just to survive in if you don't have your route down. Ideally you want to come in with a high enough multiplier that you don't need to play perfectly to max your multiplier, but that doesn't really come into play until you get to a more advanced level. The really good players have their multiplier already maxed out before even entering stage 4. Rob also found that you can score more in stage 4 using Reflect Laser, but I don't think it's worth the medals you'd lose in the first 3 stages.

For stage 5, yes you want to destroy both pods for maximum score. Each pod is actually worth more points than the main boss, and if you come in with a high multiplier your score can really skyrocket on this stage! It's a bit tricky though because the pods have a ton of health, as you already noticed. You need to be careful with your reflects to damage to the pods without prematurely killing the main boss. I think most characters require bombs to do this properly - Limi (Neo Stranger) can do it with her regular shot since it does so much damage and her laser pierces through the towers, but I think most other characters need to use bombs do enough damage. This run (which is the highest scoring video I know of), shows a route with Kart for doing it. It requires 4 bombs and a suicide though, so until you get consistent at surviving I wouldn't bother with it. If you route it correctly you might be able to destroy one pod without any bombs though, or maybe one bomb.

Hey marus! I don't have a new score update to post, but I am finally getting back into this game over the past month after a long hiatus.

I wanted to ask about the the "No emulated runs" stipulation and see if that still applies. Recently I've been playing Giga Wing 2 on the latest Demul build, and as far as I can tell, it is extraordinarily close to my experience playing on a real dreamcast. All of my scoring routes are unchanged and it feels like the muscle memory carried over. Now granted, because I am derusting I am not yet back at where I was when I was posting last May. I have two video samples here of a run up to stage 4 with Kart, and a run up to stage 5 with Limi and am curious to see if you think these are far off from your play on the DC. I have a decently strong PC, built in... 2017? 2018? thereabouts with at the time higher-end parts.

Kart run: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/893755271
Limi run: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/917359009

Hey EmperorIng, I'm glad to see you're playing again! I made that no-emulators ruling at a time when I was a lot more hardcore about any sort of competition being done on as close to original hardware as possible - however at this point in my life I'm of the opinion that it's not worth splitting hairs over. Especially for a lesser played game like this, I'd rather everyone have a chance to play on whatever hardware they have available. If the game gets an influx of new activity in the future and if the community deems it necessary, then maybe we can talk about splitting the boards or something, but for now I'm okay with emulated runs being submitted. Just please indicate what emulator you're using in case we need to do any splitting in the future.

That said in terms of the runs you posted - I haven't watched them in full yet but I can notice some big slowdown differences. For example if you compare the first double-volcannon on the sky stage, the dreamcast version has way more slowdown:
Kart run (demul)
Kart run (dreamcast)
Cherry run (dreamcast)

Outside of slowdown though I can't notice any obvious scoring differences or bugs with enemies or bullet patterns. The missing slowdown will make some segments harder, but otherwise I don't think the differences are enough to warrant splitting emulators into a separate category.