Shepardus wrote:Thanks for the commentary LordHypnos! One question I forgot to ask: Does Mars Matrix have rank? I know Giga Wing does but I've never heard of anything like that in Mars Matrix.
There's what's called "Local Rank," but it's really quite different from rank. It just means that sometimes if you kill enemies fast enough more will spawn than if you killed them slower. It's notably a thing in old Hudson caravan games, probably Star Force, and for newer stuff Dangun Feveron, however it's not a too important for scoring in Mars Matrix, though it's probably the reason why my 3 million exp clear is lower score than Kollision's 2.6 million or whatever it is on the forum leaderboards, either that or he's using the Piercing Cannon more than me on some enemies, or just killing more enemies. I think I briefly mentioned it in the commentary, but I probably could have said more, really. It's not as big of a part of scoring as it is in Dangun Feveron or Hudson Soft caravan games, I don't think.
EDIT: Yeah, I really should have said more about that in the commentary, now that I think about it. One good example of it is during the really chaotic part of stage 4, new big enemies will spawn as you kill them, but if they scroll offscreen they'll stop spawning. They are worth a lot of points, like most big enemies, so your score can vary a lot just based on that. Moreno's tactic there is the best for scoring (and also used by for example Rob and SFKhoa in their videos), mine is okay, but it's much lower risk, and if I'm playing it in score attack mode and thus am not very powered up in that part, I don't kill even as many as I would in a real game.
Hope that helps. Also if you ever have specific strategy questions about Mars Matrix, feel free to PM them to me, and that really goes for anyone. Or post them in the Strategy Forum (and maybe also PM me), because then we might get a nice bit of discussion started and indexed for the future. Also, I'm sure this thread would be cool to ask questions until the next game to be covered is announced.
Also I wanted to thank Softdrink for how excited he was about doing the Mars Matrix episode, because it made it a lot of fun, and I think being able to watch and comment on the low score video was a lot of fun as well.