Progear - best pilot/gunner combination for easiest 1-ALL?

[bcass]

I don't suppose there's an option to view boss health in any of the official releases? Or maybe a MAME hack exists to display it? It's the only design decision I'm not too keen on in this game.

[donluca]

As far as I know, Jotego managed to implement wait states properly for his 68k core.

So all 68k based arcade boards should be virtually indistinguishable from the real PCB, as long as you set the video options right on MiSTer and have a screen that, as a consequence, can handle offspec refresh rates.

[Jonpachi]

I don't suppose there's an option to view boss health in any of the official releases? Or maybe a MAME hack exists to display it? It's the only design decision I'm not too keen on in this game.

No, not that I know of. I'd love some M2 gadgets for this one. Rank is especially mysterious to me, and is only really noticeable during boss encounters. Stage 4 boss (Gypsy from MST3K) is a good example, where it's either super easy or just comes out looking to wreck my shit, and I always go into it low-key holding my breath.

[bcass]

Yeah, that's something I am noticing with the bosses, but I don't think it's related to rank? When I save-state practice at a boss, it seems to be random as to what attacks they use against you?

[BareKnuckleRoo]

When I save-state practice at a boss, it seems to be random as to what attacks they use against you?

Sort of. Some boss phases randomly select from a pool of attacks, but they're generally balanced to all be about the same difficulty, and the phases with a large number of attacks (S2 Phase 1, S3 Phase 2, S4 Phase 2) generally have enough health that you'll see them all at least once, or maybe miss one attack out of the set. It seems to pick them so that it uses each attack once before re-rolling the pool of attacks. So in practical terms, the randomness doesn't have that big of an impact on the difficulty or scoring, it just spices it up and you have to learn to prepare for any of its attacks that phase coming up.

S1: Boss has a number of attacks it picks from at random, none are particularly overwhelming but attack rank goes up considerably as you break off parts.

S2: Randomness doesn't have much impact in Phase 1 and Phase 2 as it has enough health for you to see pretty much all variations each phase. There's basically no randomness in terms of which attacks you'll see, only which order you'll have to deal with them. Learn them and then react accordingly as it fires each one.

S3: Phase 2 is pretty dangerous, the orange grenades it can launch that fill the screen with bullets is much harder to deal with than the blue or green ones I think, but it has enough health that it'll use 3 out of the 4 colours most of the time.

S4: Phase 1 has a couple variations which affect how it moves but none are terribly noteworthy, they're all about the same difficulty. Phase 2 has enough health that you'll cycle through all attacks at least once, but what makes it nasty is that after it's used each attack once, it uses a higher rank version of them from then on in the cycle, and those higher rank ones are very dangerous. Generally speaking if you're dealing high damage, you'll kill its second phase after it uses one or two higher rank attacks. Last phase has no variations (but the bullet spreads are random so you'll have to dodge by reacting each time).

S5: Final boss has nearly no random variations except for a small one in is second last phase where the aimed yellow missiles it fires either fire rings of bullets (similar to how the last phase's explode) or fires bullets out in a kind of spiral as they launch at you.

Note that Loop 2 considerably tweaks all bosses so they're basically brand new fights, often with entirely new phases added such as an extra final phase on the first boss and on the final boss.

[Jonpachi]

Damn Roo, thanks for all that! What are the loop conditions again? NM/NB?

[BareKnuckleRoo]

1) Single player only. If you're playing in cooperative with 2 players the loop will never trigger. I tested this in Progear and Dodonpachi with savestated NMNB runs, and I assume Ketsui is the same. The only CAVE game which loops when playing multiplayer is Donpachi because it has no loop requirement and always loops.

2) 1CC the 1st loop / don't use any continues.

3) Beat loop 1 with 2 or less bombs used total. Number of deaths or lives remaining when you beat the final boss doesn't matter.


Generally, because bombing really hurts your score, if you're looking to loop the game you'll want to try to use your 2 bombs as late as possible (such as on the final boss to cancel its nastier attacks). Dying actually doesn't hurt score as much as bombing does:

• If you die, you lose your max bomb bonus if any, you lose a bit of your ring value, and you're back at 3 bombs.

• If you bomb, you lose your max bomb bonus, you lose a lot of your ring value (as the bomb gets extended time on screen in exchange for meter) and you're at 2 bombs. This means that you will not get a ring meter bonus and the x2 max bomb bonus next time you grab a bomb. Ouch.

If you're just looking to 1CC, if you can get to the S3 boss without bombing, it should be safe to use bombs from there, you'll have enough score meter to get the next few score extends.