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.
marus wrote:
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
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).