I say finish, because it took me the equivalent to about 7~8 continues to beat it.
There's 25 stages total, and trust me, from about stage 18~19, shit gets serious. Pretty serious indeed.
![Mr. Green :mrgreen:](./images/smilies/icon_mrgreen.gif)
After playing it fully, here's my more refined opinion.
The need for pixel perfect positioning when trying to go through a narrow opening gets aggravating later on.
This is because those narrow openings are usually placed in locations where there are enemies all around, and if you fail to get into them for too long, you risk losing a life. Again, it's nowhere near game breaking, but a little smoothing on this aspect by the developers would have helped quite a bit.
The game also does have a knack for positioning enemies close to narrow entrances/passages, and in several cases (especially later on) it gets pretty though.
Also later on, one needs to be especially careful of eating enemies. As I said before, if you eat them, they will respawn tougher, and they will eat the bombs, so if it happens to be a place that you'll have to cruise by again, you might be in trouble. This may spell trouble, because having the standard enemies get stuck to the bombs can be very helpful.
In several situations, I found that it was much better to just stun them long enough for me to do my business, and hightail it out of their way. There's definitely a risk/reward thing here (especially if you're playing for score).
Also figured out the scoring. Every thing you encircle (enemies and pellets) have a base point value (usually around 1000 points) and 2 multipliers. One of them is based on how many items you encircle at once. The default is x1, if you encircle two things at once it is x4, and if three are encircled you get x6 (couldn't get anything besides that).
The other is based on how many body pieces you have when you encircle things.
If you have all the body parts in the level, the multiplier is x1. Then for every body piece floating around (that you don't have) the multiplier is incremented by 1. The maximum I got was x6 (5 body pieces less than total).
I'm still not quite sure about how the multiple exits afect the game, but I think it may have something to do with the number of enemies. Can't say for sure though.
I said before that after you use up all the continues (there're 3 each time you start), you get a password that you can use to return to that level. On the last 5 levels (from level 20 onwards), there's no password, so you need to finish them in 3 continues.
I don't wanna spoil the actual levels and bosses for you, so I won't comment on those.
![Laughing :lol:](./images/smilies/icon_lol.gif)
Overall, it's a great game, and I'm definitely interested to go for the 1CC.
EDIT: As a comparison, the encircling mechanic is like what it would be playing Pokemon Rangers with a D-Pad.
![Laughing :lol:](./images/smilies/icon_lol.gif)