Maybe someone might actually find my Last Resort notes from TRP-STGT 2017 useful, so here are some things listed in no particular order.
Last Resort uses a basic "kill things for points" system, so your score will naturally increase as you clear the game. The next major source of points is milking the final checkpoint with all of your remaining lives as there's no end-of-game bonus.
But if you really want to squeeze out all those points (and hopefully don't fall asleep during the process), there are a number of variable point sources throughout the stages.
General/Miscellanous stuff
You've probably noticed that there's a lot of slowdown, especially if you use the Grenades ("G" powerup) and combine it with autofire. This can get really annoying but luckily the Laser weapon is overall useful in every stage except for 1-5/2-5.
Speaking of autofire, I've found the default MAME 3/15Hz setting seems to work well for me. If you set it too fast, the game might interpret this as a hold during slowdown and will start charging your pod.
Also on autofire, at least for your main shot it doesn't look like enemies take extra damage. You can observe this by using autofire against a large asteroid toward the Stage 5 end and compare it to slow manual tapping; you'll be able to destroy the asteroid with less shots. I guess enemies have some invincibility frames of sorts...
More on damage, I could be wrong but it appears that a charged pod attack will deal more damage if you launch it while closer to your target.
All bosses
When you fight a boss, you'll notice an orange enemy that spawns on the right as the fight drags on. It's rather durable and it slowly tries to ram into you, but grants 300 points when killed. Up to 4 of these will spawn for a total of 1200 points per boss. Kind of annoying to extend the boss fights, especially considering that you can speedkill almost all of them before the first of these enemies even appears. However, it's a potential 10k+ points in total...
Stage 1
The cars at the bottom give points. In 2-1 you should be fast and powered up to kill all cars and the popcorn ships in the beginning of the level, but 1-1 you may need to skip a few cars to make sure you kill the ships that drop powerups.
Both of the midboss's turrets can be destroyed for a few hunded points. The big turret is easy to hit, but I find the smaller one to be tricky; the best way I've found to destroy it is to move the pod over it and hold down autofire.
Stage 2
There are structures that spawn planes, 1 at the beginning of the stage and 3 close together in the middle. You'll want to destroy as many as possible and then destroy the gate before it disappears off screen.
After the first plane spawner are flying worms that grant 1000 points each. Each worm can appear on a random side of the screen. If you're fast enough with charged pod attacks, you can kill up to 3. I'm not sure if every possible random combination will let you kill 3 worms fast enough, but some are definitely easier than others (ex. all worms that spawn on the right side of the screen).
Stage 3
The submarine in the very beginning will rise up to 4 times, and then simply retreat if not destroyed. As long as the cockpit is intact, enemies will jump out, each worth 300.
The boss's leg is worth 1000 points. If you don't destroy the leg in time, you'll lose out on those points and it'll enter a different attack phase where its upper body hovers around.
Stage 4
Near the beginning are laser turrets that can only be destroyed when their armored shells open up completely and they prepare to fire. Each of these turrets are worth 500 but you may need to create a specific route to make sure you kill all of them.
There are 2 large spheres surrounded by turrets, one after the laser turrets section and one before the moving platform obstacles. You'll want to destroy all of the turrets before destroying the sphere for maximum points.
After the moving platforms are robots that lay down red turrets, each worth 100 points. You'll want to keep them alive as long as possible, but these turret-spawning robots are also mixed in with "regular" robots that shoot at you.
After the turret robots, you'll enter a section with turrets that move along the top and bottom walls. Destroying the big middle turret first will also destroy its surrounding left/right smaller turrets, but you'll lose out on points. The smaller left/right turrets are 500 each.
The boss has green turrets attached to its top and bottom core. You'll need to let the boss chase you around the room for a bit to get it to reveal the entire top and entire bottom set of turrets.
Stage 5
When you reach the top of the battleship and descend into the area with the destructable ceiling, you can milk the enemies that spawn here. If you leave the ceiling intact, the spawning enemies will fly outside of the hatch and can be milked further. You'll need to damage the ceiling just enough so that when you move back above the ship, you'll destroy as many enemies as possible and finish off the ceiling before the screen scrolls off of it.
The ceiling can be destroyed above the ship using the Grenades sub-weapon, although the positioning is somewhat tricky. You can see a possible position at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P40VhFbipa0&t=16m23s
When you reach the bottom of the ship, you'll want to milk both the enemies that spawn at the ceiling and the missiles that launch from the bottom left. You'll want to destroy the missile bay after it's launched 3 volleys. The ship core in the middle has a lot of health and only grants 1000 points when destroyed, and it'll destroy both the missile bay and ceiling, so you may want to skip the hassle of routing this.
After the ship, you'll enter the last checkpoint, containing and asteroid field, moving turrets that are easy enough to kill, and then the final boss. On the first loop, you'll want to milk the boss, but don't suicide here; I believe the enemy spawn rate is less than the 2nd loop so you'll get less potential points. On the 2nd loop, this is where you'll want to trade in all of your remaining lives to milk the checkpoint for around 50k points on each attempt.
To keep track of when the boss will time out, I like to count the number of lasers fired after the 4th red enemy spawns. At this point, the boss suicides after 24 lasers on the 1st loop and 30 lasers on the 2nd.
Replays
Here's a vid that falls short of 800k:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P40VhFbipa0
I also found this replay that scores 933k. It says World Record in the description, not sure if it's legit but could give you some ideas (mainly the aggressive boss milking from what I've looked over):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fb6lMZi6Ao4
GD: Last Resort
Re: GD: Last Resort
Thanks for the notes, I question the sanity of anyone who tries to push this game so far but they're much appreciated anyway!
If it's anything like the other replays on the same channel, it's a TAS, but humanly doable unlike some more blatant tool-assisted runs.Kyper wrote:I also found this replay that scores 933k. It says World Record in the description, not sure if it's legit but could give you some ideas (mainly the aggressive boss milking from what I've looked over):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fb6lMZi6Ao4
