Why not bump this thread? It's fun seeing newbie me and uh, me-me together in the same thread - we are practically different people now! It's nice to finally 1cc this game after being curious about it for all these years. It's a stop on my Sonic Wings journey as of late!
Route: Mato Grosso > Alps > Ural > New York > Panama > Another Dimension
MaoMao
EmperorIng - 2,370,100 - ALL - 1P - Yes - mameui248
I even got the joke tank boss from SW3 on my first time, heh. I am pleasantly surprised this cleared, especially since my playtime in mame is clocked as pretty large so I didn't expect a 1cc yet. It feels like most of that time is spent redoing stage 1
I'm not "wasting any time," I am using MaoMao and going straight for the high scores!
Unfortunately my gal has her share of problems, the chief of which being is that her shot does almost no damage so everything takes forever to kill. This makes the game's many tanky enemies and bosses a real pain to deal with, despite her scoring supremacy thanks to the time bombs.
Using her time stop bombs and some of Gemant's ARCA guide mentioned here, I have been tinkering around in this game and seeing what I can do.
I have actually managed to get over 500,000 points in stage 1!
I have recorded it for posterity (and you can note that I had to throw this run away because of the random paris stage selection
). This is done using two time-stop bombs: once during the city section after the initial building with the power-ups, and right before the bonanza of the 9x medals before the boss. As far as I can tell, there is no other way to get to 500k without using two bombs here, but there are so many medals it is worth it - about 14% of your total score!
I learned that even if you time-out bosses, you still gain the points from killing them (even if you do not gain the points from any boss parts left alive). This is handy for the few bosses you actually want to milk (like the stage 1 boss, or the Mato Grosso boss).
I am experimenting with one bomb in Mato Grosso before the boss in order to get the 7 medals + P and B items before the boss. Right now, in New York, a bomb seems necessary just to grab the snake of power-ups as well as have some breathing room for the annoying midboss spamming bullets everywhere. Then, following the ARCA guide, I use 3 bombs to get two "snakes" at max value in Panama plus the other medals on the canal. I use an additional bomb during the boss for the snake of power-ups there too.
Unfortunately in this run I died during the Ural midbosses, the two gunboats, so I couldn't make it to Osaru. However in some savestate experimentation I have gotten as much as 3,070,000 points by the end. How to bridge that gap with another 800k is currently beyond me. It must be down to luck, and to different bomb usage. I would love to see a high-scoring replay of this game with MaoMao, but alas.
EDIT: with savestates my best pre-Mars score is about 2,000,000, so I hopefully am close to figuring out where to make up that final 200k before the monkey milk.
Using a rough machine translation from deepl, Gemant's notes on Sonic Wings Limited are as follows:
In contrast to the other chapters in the series, bonus items have an increasing value in relation to screen time based on these values: 200, 500, 1,000, 2,000, 4,000, 10,000 points. This scale is valid for both bonus items and
for all power ups (P, B, F).
The procedure for getting the best possible result involves accessing the Mars special stage in which a leeching pattern can be practiced based on recovering 6 sets of 6 full powers worth 10,000 points, interspersed with a seventh full power of 60,000 points released by boss Osaru through a special pattern that requires Mao Mao's time-stopping bomb.
To be precise, there is no 60,000-point full power up in the game, but rather these are 6 items stacked into one. The time stop bomb is the only device that possesses this property to be carried out in the 3 minutes allotted for the clash.
There is no ranking differentiation by plane probably because Mao Mao's time stop bomb advantage is too substantial
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The match and a complete from no lives lost until the end of stage 6 which allowed the requirement to enter the Mars stage special to be met. Against Boss Osaru the lives were sacrificed all but the last, practicing consistent leeching. The score achieved before reaching the special stage, the second requirement of which dictates that after stage 6 you must make over 60,000 x6. At The Panama stage a total of three bombs were used to collect two if 12x 10,000 while the 12x 10,000 set was taken again during the Boss Flying Craft. Random stages 2 and 3 were Mato Grosso > The Alps, respectively. At the completion of Kyoto stage a total of 500,400 points and 36 x 10,000 points was archived. By one estimate, the maximum fillable score could be just over 4 million.
