Yuan-NangBattletoad - 909,400 - 2-2 - 1P - Yes - Steam
https://imgur.com/b26Plx1Yes! Finally finished the first loop with any spare lives (even two of them) and reached stage 2-2 for the first time.
Thankfully stage 2-1 was the castle stage, so probably an easier one of the bunch.
I mostly feel comfortable with the first loop now. I just suck hard at the dragon boss, never killed him without throwing at least one bomb AND losing at least one life. I roughly know what I have to do, I just can't (yet).
I'm really happy with this run and score though! I'm probably going to 1-ALL it with Marion and Tetsu as well some time. Ash is crap.
EmperorIng wrote:
nice work! How does the steam port feel to you?
Thank you!

It plays absolutely fine from what I can tell. And it feels awesome on my rotatable PC monitor. The steam port is probably just like the Switch port (which I haven't played, but others say so), with added online leaderboards.
I don't know about input lag, it seems to be fine/minimal. Depends on your setup of course. Only a few times I died thinking that I had panic-bombed just in time, but that could simply be me getting older. ^^
There is some weird stuff like the options menu being in YOKO even when you're playing the game in TATE. And the separation between normal mode and score attack is a bit odd. Score attack is where you have to achieve scores for the online leaderboards. It plays like normal, it is just fixed on default difficulty 5 and no continues allowed. If you get a new highscore on normal mode, you can't upload it to the online leaderboards in hindsight - even when playing on default difficulty and without continues. But otherwise I have no complaints at all.
A practice mode would have been nice, but the game is so short that it doesn't bug me much. You can still creditfeed the later stages to play them over and over again.