Shmups where tick point milking and/or bullet destruction is the main source of score

[mycophobia]

The only examples I can think of off the top of my head are Sky Adventure, and Pink Sweets (I think?)

Any other notable ones? It's a hard thing to search for lol

[BulletMagnet]

When you say "bullet destruction", do you mean stuff like, say, Espgaluda? Cave in particular made a bunch of titles where the idea is to let the screen fill up and then erase everything for a load of points, though something tells me you're referring to something different.

[mycophobia]

yeah this is kind of an imprecise topic huh. hmm. i'm thinking more along the lines of milking, like getting as many points as you can out of enemies/bosses before they're destroyed or leave the screen or whatever. whether it be eating their bullets or destroying respawning enemies or ticking non-destructible stuff or what have you. i guess i'm just describing most yagawa games, except Pink Sweets seems to be by far the most milk heavy. i guess i dont really know what i'm asking i'm sorry!

[BulletMagnet]

Hm, if it comes down to "make boss fights last as long as possible to get as many points as possible", Psyvariar comes to mind, as you want to graze lots of bullets rather than destroy the enemy early. Giga Wing and Mars Matrix might count too, since you want to reflect lots of attacks and earn lots of shinies rather than shooting them, for the most part.

I imagine there are relatively few titles that fit the bill when you specify milking as the "main" source of points; plenty of shmups will give you some extra points for allowing a boss to live, but most of the time it's more of a way for experienced players to squeeze as much as possible from a fight as opposed to something central to scoring as a whole.

[guigui]

Radiant Silvergun has a lot of boss strategies that involve letting them live to milk levels for your weapons and points for you score.

Also Dodonpachi has "tick points" in the Maximum Bomb bonus system. Though I think those tick points stop on bosses, so maybe not what you're looking for ?

[Stevens]

Didn't ESP Ra.De. have something like this? Tickle the boss with sub weapon?

[Mero]

Zed Blade, nearly all your score is tick points.

[mycophobia]

Zed Blade, nearly all your score is tick points.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4a2vMzfd-bo

well. that sure is something lol

interestingly i had once asked if there was a shmup whose scoring was based mostly around speed killing and i got thunder dragon 2 for an answer. NMK 2 for 2 in providing a monkey's paw answer to my "this scoring system would be cool" wishes. though td2 is actually alright tbh

[mycophobia]

I guess what I'm really thinking about is what games have scoring systems that don't require a whole lot of thought in and of themselves, but just add a lot of risk. milking comes to mind because obviously the longer you leave something alive the more you have to deal with its attacks, but the mechanics of "shoot things more/cancel more bullets = get more points" are really simple and seem like an obvious extension of a standard no-frills dodge/shoot shmup.

Similarly when I was asking about games based around killing things fast a couple years ago my thought is that in basic survival play in a typical shmup you want to kill stuff as soon as it's on screen, and the more you memo the game the better you're able to do that, hence speed killing would be the most natural scoring system as it's rewarding what you're more or less already doing, just on a finer scale. In the case of this topic I guess I'm thinking about this "natural simple scoring" thing from the other angle.

Just idle theorizing really, I'm not exactly desperate for something new to play or anything.

[PC Engine Fan X!]

The Atari 7800 isometrical-based stg of Desert Falcon (circa 1987) allows you to hover in a safe spot and blast the enemies that the end-level Sphinx boss shoots out at you basically "milking it for free points endlessly" -- I'd tape down the fire button on my 7800 Proline controller and find something else to do then come back periodically to check the score. The score would easily be in the six-figure range but would be lost if the 7800 ProSystem console was "powered down for the night" (as there was no high score saving functionality available). A grand total of 512 different hieroglyphs combinations are possible to earn various power-ups, extra points, warps, and even extra lives with the 7800 version of Desert Falcon indeed.

The background music of 7800 Desert Falcon was used in the the Atari Games arcade game of Hydra circa 1989 (that used the same arcade cabinet shell/build from both Return of the Jedi and arcade laserdisc game of Firefox circa 1984) which was a nice little touch/tribute towards that particular 7800 stg game title.

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[Lethe]

My first post on this forum was asking for games which do the Guwange catspider thing in the sense of "you can drag the boss out for ages milking but the patterns get increasingly difficult over time until they become impossible".
I didn't get any answers then, and I still don't really know of any. Rolling Gunner is kind of close I guess? You'd think a straightforward shoot all, don't die game would be best for the idea.