The Non-Shmup 1CC Thread - Share Your Triumphs Here!

[Randorama]

Bump poster...

King of the Dragons is up. Also, congrats Chum! I didn't see your Pulirula update until now, well done!

[Randorama]

Shameless self-promotion: Funky Jet is up.

[Randorama]

Tumble Pop is up (ahem).

[BareKnuckleRoo]

The wins just keep coming, congrats Rando.

I cleared Wangan Midnight Maxitune 5's story mode without a loss this weekend.

[xxx1993]

Achieved Grandmaster rank in Locked 'N Loaded for the first time!

[davyK]

My Wardner deathless 1CC.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJdsmH9RTg0

[chum]

King of the Dragons is up. Also, congrats Chum! I didn't see your Pulirula update until now, well done!

Thank you!
King of dragons is a pretty funny game. I want to clear that sometime, but I don't know what character I prefer in that game.

I want to share my Sailor Moon hard difficulty clear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5Np6mzLChk

People have often told horror stories about this game even on Normal.. Hard is a pretty significant upgrade in difficulty but I honestly don't think it's that crazy? I did it with Venus and I think I might play some runs with Jupiter too on occasion.
The worst part is the stage 8 midboss of course. Predictably that's where my death was, to a time over. However if the game had dropped more crystals (it only dropped 2 after stage 5, which I think is the bare minimum) then it would've been a no-miss. So I don't really care whether I died or not for that reason.
The 2nd hardest level is 5 where you can do 2 different bomb routes, either you bomb the masked men before heading inside the storage, and then use the 1 bomb you get before the boss on the boss after doing a "tricky" and seemingly a bit luck dependant strategy. Or, you fight the masked men before the storage and then instakill the boss with your bombs.
After trying for a while with savestates I realized the former route was much easier for me as that group of masked men cannot be fought 1 by 1 with some 2 at a time on hard mode without most likely losing to time. So what you need to do is to group them all up and then combo as many as you can at the same time, and I couldn't get that to work consistently. Which means that the boss is a big choke point, since it's quite hard with 1 crystal.
After that the hardest stage is actually stage 3 which might sound weird since it's one of the first stages, but that's just the weird balancing... Especially when played for score this stage is quite difficult. Stage 6 can also be choked (sometimes to the boss) but is a bit easier overall.

Now I do intend to improve my score on this game on the normal difficulty but that thing I mentioned about crystals is really a handful. Each crystal drop is another 30k and there's so many potential random drops that the difference between great and shit luck could be 180k or even higher. These are sums you cannot make up for through better gameplay.
For that reason I'm really hoping that crystals can be manipulated to drop and that I can find how to do this. So far no luck. I've tried reloading savestates under the same condition on "random" droppers while just holding a combo to kill them and the item is different everytime and only like 10% of the time it is a crystal. So is it random...?
If it is random, do best player just get amazing, amazing luck? Wow! We will see if I find anything regarding this! If I don't maybe this won't be much of a long term thing and I will just stop at a reasonable, well played score. But If I can find out more about crystals I would like to play this game more long term.

Some runs from Calice Cup also! Runs that felt nice to complete!

Naname de Magic - 634,204
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuIW68lF-Q0&
There is a newer WR on MAME but I beat the old WR on arcade with this run!

Prop Cycle - 19,890
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeX6ILXd0-E
A fantastic flight time attack game full of soul and wonder! Despite the RNG, it is enjoyable and interesting to time attack! I figured out a lot of strategies, it was especially difficult to figure out things relating to the RNG on Industarn, but after a lot of experimentation I figured out a good route for every different RNG seed.
I knew this game had to be awesome the moment I first saw gameplay of it, when the player went into and out of the cave on Wind Woods.

Special criminal investigation - 10,127,580
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzC-ZEi-vx8
This game is like Chase HQ, the driving is and stage design is really simple so scoring isn't so much about driving well but more about things like, never hitting any friendly cars (kills your chain), getting good boosts on bosses, hitting all your rocket launchers, killing bosses ASAP with crashes. the WR is 10.4m and I think I might be able to score 10.3m with savestates right now but I don't know how to get more than that?

Snap Jack - 189,930
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV-TS3F33fE
Snap Jack is a really interesting early 80s game, the style of gameplay is pretty unique and it is well done overall, it was really fun and the difficulty gets a bit out of hand on the final level (which repeats forever) but I managed to loop it a few times.

I also managed to clear/score some shmups and other titles on Calice like Shock Troopers, Undercover Cops, Waku Waku 7 (no rounds lost), Spin Master. Shmups includes Dangerous Seed (nomiss), Airgallet, Dangun Time Attack (2.1 million), Super Cobra.
Everything is in this playlist. I have to say Shock Troopers is really entertaining to play for score, even if I barely even scratched teh surface.

[BrianC]

I can't believe I forgot about Prop Cycle. It had a unique cabinet and I remember it being a ton of fun.

[Randorama]

The wins just keep coming, congrats Rando.

I cleared Wangan Midnight Maxitune 5's story mode without a loss this weekend.

Thanks! I am busy with the assignment from hell at work, so I had to fall silent for a while. Hopefully I will resume posting...soon?

[chum]

Pretty happy with this goal: Sailor Moon 2 million points! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AP10NXGa3ks
You get 30k points from excess crystals (after your 5th crystal). there's a good deal of static crystal drops in the game, but there's also a good deal of food dropping enemies that rarely drops crystals instead. so how high you score depends greatly on these enemies. There's 14 of these enemy types and the droprate could be as bad as 10% or even worse. I usually get 1 or 2 bonus crystals in a run, in this 2 million run I got lucky and I got 3. that's 90k points and it's really important. If your luck is amazing, you could get 5 or even 6... the 30k crystal difference is brutal and at a high level a single extra crystal is worth so much that you can't possibly obtain that score extra through playing better. I'm not at that point yet, but it's possible to get there. So my goal right now is to get better so that I can score 2.1 million with excellent luck (4 crystals) which would also allow me to get a solid run with 2-3 crystals (2.04-2.07 millions).

As for how to get score from actual gameplay there's various things to keep in mind but thankfully there's nothing in the way of hard strats or heavy memo strats involved. As long as you have the entire game memorized it's very doable to score run pretty much the entire game on instinct and logic instead of memorizing specific strats and setups everywhere.
The main thing is punching enemies one by one as you get score per hit so if 2 enemies share the hit, both take damage but you get the same score, this halves your scoring potential.
Since a lot of the time you are fighting enemies in groups, you need to find ways to isolate them quickly and efficiently. That's where instinct and logic comes into play, by familiarizing yourself with the game's rather strange AI (enemies being very quick, erratic, randomly evasive, randomly aggressive)... and your own kit.

Throwing enemies gives the highest score per health used but takes a lot of time, so the more efficient you are, the more throws you can fit in. Unless there's a specific reason to save a lot of time (which there often is!) then the strat is to throw all enemies on their last hit as you can then score 1000 points from them instead of the 300 points from a hit. The fact that a throw does more damage than a punch doesn't matter if the enemy is on their last hit. The fact that it takes so long for enemies to get up from the ground doesn't matter either since they'll die, so you can move onto the next enemy.

Throwing enemies around back and forth can be done with excess time which you will always have plenty of on some stages. In this case, different enemies have different wakeup speeds, so choosing to throw around the best targets makes sense. Sometimes though it actually makes sense to spend your time throwing around mediocre or even bad enemies in terms of wakeup for reasons. For example, stage 4 has a lot of special tennis enemies that show, up shoot once, and then leave. By picking them up and throwing them around, you can prevent them from leaving. When there's 2 on the screen at once, it makes sense to throw them around because if you just punch one the other one will leave.

Another thing about throws that can be tricky is that it's easy to accidentally throw an enemy into another. Even if you throw an enemy to the left, when there's another enemy to your right, the throw could still contact on the one on the right, which wastes score in multiple ways (enemy on the right loses health, AND it falls to the ground and has to get back up).
But the nice thing about scoring in Sailor moon is that you don't need "routing" just play the game more and you will naturally understand how it is done.

why Venus is the best at scoring I've tested the other girls and she is the best because her throws are the quickest. She is the only character that can easily do the "double throw" technique which some characters can't even do. Double throwing needs a wall, and is usually done by separating enemies up and down enough that you can throw one without it hitting the other, and "warping" the enemy placements vertically with certain grab positions so that they gradually get on the same vertical plane. With quick throws you can throw an enemy, then pick up the other one before the first one gets up, and throw that enemy too, without them hitting each other. but typically you have to warp the enemies to accomplish this.

autofire Double hitting is another technique that can save some time here and there and that Venus excels at. Double hitting is risky but different enemies respond differently to it. Every enemy CAN be double hit but most of them have pretty aggressive counters so you need to be good at it. I've only recently found out that the autofire setup I used was broken and that's why my double hitting was so wonky. I've since fixed it by switching emulators.

To score on bosses, every boss is a bit unique.

The first boss can be double thrown but it seems to be quite luck dependant. Also their healthbars are pretty weird and one of them can take a lot of damage if you throw one into the other.
Still, to finish the boss, you can get some bonus points (like 11k or so?) from throwing the green one into the orange one and killing both. I think this is the only "random points" trick in the entire game.

The stage 2 boss has a lot of enemies to milk and is quite random, but that's why stage 2 is speedran instead of using a bunch of throws. Unfortunately these enemies are super random even though there's a wall for double throwing it's hard to set it up here without getting lucky.

Stage 3 boss is where you need to suicide the only extra life you have in this game to do a full infinite on the next full timer you get (which takes around 105 seconds). For some reason this boss will not transition to the next phase unless sent to the ground.
That's why despite stage 3 being quite low on time, you can fit in some throws because you need very little time left by the time you get to the boss, since you can't damage it too much before you suicide.
Phase 2 is done by milking the enemies.

The stage 4 boss can in theory be thrown around, but it's pointless as you could instead use the time for that to throw around normal enemies. So no special scoring.

Stage 5 boss again, there's a lot of enemies but there's not enough time to milk. I've made a strat that works pretty well to no-damage this boss from time to time. There are many key things to keep in mind to make this work.

Stage 6 boss you can in theory hit them separately but I have no idea how to really accomplish this with any semblance of consistency. Seems almost impossible but you could at least try to score a little extra by doing it here and there rather then two full healthbars worth. Note that the stage 6 boss is just 2 stage 3 bosses, so they can still be thrown around when they arent in their flying form (seems like a 50/50 whether or not they will fly when they get up from the ground).

Stage 7 has 2 full infinites on the cats as the cat healthbar also gets stuck after losing 1/3 health. There's an abundance of time on this stage so you can do 2 full timers.
On the final stage, there's a lot of time to throw the enemies around since you are going to finally unleash your crystals on the midboss. There are different bomb timings on teh midboss one timing will hurt both of them, but the timing window is only 30 frames. This is only done for survival, for score we want to kill the girl and leave the guy alive which is another bomb timing.
The final boss can just be punched, I've found no opportunities for bonus points.

Stage 1, 4, 6, 7 and 8 have a lot of time to throw around enemies. But some of these stages don't have many enemies.
Stage 2 needs to save a lot of time for the boss, so sadly there's not much time for throws.
Stage 3 and 5 are rough on time. especially 5 which really doesn't have much time to waste on throwing enemies. If you are very quick and efficient on 5 you can fit some throws in, but then you leave yourself vulnerable to sudden timeouts if anything goes wrong.

Even though both SAilor moon and Pulirula has lucky drops for score, which is bad, I think Sailor moon is better to play for score in terms of the gameplay, because in Pulirula you get infinite time to do everything, but in SAilor moon losing time means losing throws which adds a new dimension to skillful play, it's definitely harder to optimize sailor moon.

Anyways I think it might be possible to get even as much as 200k more than I got from gameplay optimization alone. I'm, not sure but I think that much might be in there if you do absolutely everything possible.
At the very least, 150k more should be in the game. The rest is the crystal rng.

I've gotta be honest I love sailor moon and think it's a fantastic game. I mostly see people saying it's broken, or boring (?!?!) or too hard/unfair or just bad in whatever way. Sure, it's not perfect and has some flaws, but It's pretty damn exciting.

[BIL]

Superb posts ITT! Linking this thread in the R2RKMF index.

[xxx1993]

I finally 1CC’d Virtua Cop 2 for the first time!

[To Far Away Times]

I finally 1CC’d Virtua Cop 2 for the first time!

Nice, that game is quite hard.

[xxx1993]

Harder than the first. Virtua Cop has easy bosses, though, the exception being the Aero-Divers.

[blazinglazers69]

Nothing impressive but finally got into some Classivanias and cleared Super Castlevania IV and Bloodlines on Normal. Undoubtedly preferred Bloodlines. Looks better, feels less janky, more combat driven, more balanced, faster, and better aesthetically. I give SCIV an 8 and Bloodlines a 10.

[To Far Away Times]

I like them both, but Super Castlevania IV is aesthetically one of my favorite games ever. Goddamn I love that audio/visual presentation. The attention to detail, and the sense of the area acutally existing, and the amazing atmosphere. No other 16 bit game feels as lived in, IMO.

Bloodlines has lots of very cool programing tricks and fun gimmicks. Definitely a game where they throw something new and cool at you all the time.

[blazinglazers69]

Yeah, SCIV is unquestionably one of the most atmospheric games I've ever played. Some of the jazzy tunes of the soundtrack in particular are so, so unique. I can see why it's regarded as a SNES classic.

[Creamy Goodness]

I'm looking forward to sinking my teeth into Bloodlines (pun intended), but as good as it is I don't think it will topple Rondo of Blood off of the top spot of my favorite 16-bit CV's.

As for me I just cleared Streets of Rage 2 with Axel. Man I knew it had a great soundtrack, but I forgot how good it was. Just about every track is a banger. And although the game is pretty easy, still had to cheese it kind of hard to get the clear.

[BurlyHeart]

Jitsu Squad 1cc - Aros - Master Difficulty (Hardest): https://youtu.be/msP9uQzpfc0
This was fun,and I think the game will get better with future updates.

Fight'N Rage 1cc - Ricardo - Unfair - Route / Ending F: https://youtu.be/2_CE2nTZ1a4
Really proud of this one. Probably my favorite game and will try it with some of the other characters.

Working on a no death of Mayhem Brawler Legend Difficulty, and came so close last night, but died once just before the final boss.

[blazinglazers69]

I'm looking forward to sinking my teeth into Bloodlines (pun intended), but as good as it is I don't think it will topple Rondo of Blood off of the top spot of my favorite 16-bit CV's.

As for me I just cleared Streets of Rage 2 with Axel. Man I knew it had a great soundtrack, but I forgot how good it was. Just about every track is a banger. And although the game is pretty easy, still had to cheese it kind of hard to get the clear.

I'm struggling with Rondo!! Feels a lot harder than SCIV and Bloodlines since I feel like the whip has a small hitbox I think. With those games, as long as my whip is lightly above or below bats and birds I can hit them. With Rondo, it has to be spot on and with out any diagonal option with the primary weapon, I really need to better learn to whip/jump more effectively. I'll stick with it for sure--it's easily tied with SOTN as the most aesthetic Castlevania IMO.

Yeah, SoR2 fucking rules. While the gameplay of SoR4 is my favorite, I like the aesthetic and OST of 2 more. It's actually my favorite Genesis soundtrack and it blows me away. The bass sounds like a legit club track coming out of my subwoofer. And yes, the first time I cleared SoR2 I spammed grand upper like a motherfucker lol. No regrets, it was fun. I've cleared with everyone on normal I believe. But yeah, the soundtrack is so good I'll sometimes mute the SoR4 soundtrack when playing survival and play tracks from 2 instead.

[Creamy Goodness]

Interesting. I found Rondo to be relatively tame for a pre-PS1 CV. The parts I found to be on the hard side were the Ghost Shop stage, the second Shaft fight, and Dracula. The rest of the game seemed managable. For CV4 I found it didn't really get hard until the last couple of stages, but from the little bit of Bloodlines that I played it seems to get spicy pretty quickly. Watching speed runs of these games helps in finding little tricks to make these games easier.

[it290]

Rondo is cake once you get the hang of it. Which is unfortunate, because it might be my favorite Castlevania game otherwise, but it just lacks the challenge that the series is known for. It's an utterly beautiful game with loads of attention to detail at every point and the play control is unrivaled... just wish it were about 50% harder.

[To Far Away Times]

Streets of Rage 2 is really good, but I think Streets of Rage 4 is even better honestly. The soundtrack doesn't slap as hard in SoR4 (SoR2's soundtrack is an alltime great...), but gameplay wise SoR4 is everything I wanted and then some. Between SoR4 and Sonic Mania, Sega was fucking crushing it with their retro revival sequels.

[BurlyHeart]

Streets of Rage 2 is really good, but I think Streets of Rage 4 is even better honestly. The soundtrack doesn't slap as hard in SoR4 (SoR2's soundtrack is an alltime great...), but gameplay wise SoR4 is everything I wanted and then some. Between SoR4 and Sonic Mania, Sega was fucking crushing it with their retro revival sequels.

Just to add, SOR4's DLC is one of the best DLCs ever made imo. 3 great, varied & interesting characters, a fun survival mode, new animations & moves, and an extra hard difficulty. It was cheap too.

Looking to the new update patch that's coming out.

[Gamer707b]

Streets of Rage 2 is really good, but I think Streets of Rage 4 is even better honestly. The soundtrack doesn't slap as hard in SoR4 (SoR2's soundtrack is an alltime great...), but gameplay wise SoR4 is everything I wanted and then some. Between SoR4 and Sonic Mania, Sega was fucking crushing it with their retro revival sequels.

Just to add, SOR4's DLC is one of the best DLCs ever made imo. 3 great, varied & interesting characters, a fun survival mode, new animations & moves, and an extra hard difficulty. It was cheap too.

Looking to the new update patch that's coming out.

Couldn't agree more with the both of you. Played SOR 1 and 2 and still thought SOR 4 was better. Beat it plenty of times and still would gladly play it again and again. Heck, I even got the complete edition with all the dlc on Switch that I haven't opened yet.

[blazinglazers69]

Happy to see the SoR4 love here. It's clear that the developers shared our passion for the series. Really hoping that TMNT Shredder's Revenge nails it too. It's also being published by Dotemu and from the looks of it we should be expecting another banger.

[BurlyHeart]

Mayhem Brawler 1cc (one death) - Legend Difficulty - Dolphin: https://youtu.be/kP2tSR_nalY

Was trying to get a no death, but alas, I failed. I've been very sick this past week and couldn't play, so have decided to move on. The one death was so close to the end too.

[BEAMLORD]

A no-death clear of Batman (NES). Joker is the ultimate barrier in this game to a tidy clear. As much as I struggled previously with the rest of the game, after a decided effort to git gud it becomes fairly quite a breeze. Joker though, that's probably the most aggressive final boss I've come across in my (so far limited) NES experience. Much as the rest of the game though, he can of course be bested with the hit-box cancel and some careful positioning.

Probably preaching to the perverted here, but if any fair-to-middling skilled player like myself is looking for an eminently achievable first no-death run (it was the first time I've one-lifed a game), I can recommend it.

[BIL]

Good stuff. While its AC-tight runtime banishes drudge, and as you say, there's a lot of advantage that won't be apparent without a little digging (like the devastating power of optimally-ranged fists and boomerangs), nailing it all down to a 1LC is still a tidy little coup. Especially with that knowingly punishing final stage and dual nightmare endbosses!

[BEAMLORD]

Cheers BIL. I actually watched one of your replays as part of my learnings. I've nicked that wall-jump gambit you deployed at the start of the Joker fight, hope you don't mind