1 to shoot, 2 to bomb. You have a power bar like 1943; this is recharged by picking up the Capcom "Pow" icons. Sometimes when you're hit (no clue if it's random or not), you will lose a powerup, which will start bouncing around the screen quickly. Any powerup, whether it's a lost powerup or a new powerup, will disappear after a while. Holding down A causes a "CHARGE" bar to appear; when this is full, you fly up and become big (because of POV), shooting bullets at a faster rate than normal shot (even with autofire!), which in turn makes the slightly stronger than normal; you are invulnerable during all this. If you have Side gunners, they rotate from forward-facing shooting to about 95 degrees (turning away from your ship). The entire charge shot sequence lasts about 5 seconds. Afterward, an "OVER HEAT" sign will appear, forcing you to wait a bit before charging again. If you only charged part of the CHARGE bar, upon releasing the 1 button, it will stay at where you stopped, but will slowly decrease. Tip: Never ever try to hold down the shot button to charge again once you're in OVER HEAT, it lasts too long for that. Just keep shooting.
Side gunners shoot forward. Supposedly there are also laser side shots as opposed to the normal shot variety (as in the shots you shoot), but I can only find these on starting other rounds (loops). Collecting Side gunners when you already have 1 or 2 will put the remaing number on reserve (much like Musha/Dennin Aleste) to a max of 9.
=Difficulty, Loops, and Settings=
Standard CPS 8 difficulty range. Ability to change number of bombs, and how much vitality you have (less damage, not longer bar). You have the ability to turn on whether you can select the stage (stage 1, 6, 11, round 1, 2, 3) after you put in a credit and press Start. You also have the choice of 1 full game play (16 stages) or Endless play, which as far as I know, loop difficulty maxes out at 3 loops (I figured this because Stage Select only allows you to select the first 3 loops =/).
This game is more about speed of bullets than amount, though there can be quite a few bullets to put up with on later levels. Your hitbox isn't very small. It seems to be a little less than wing span in width, I think the same with height.
=Scoring=
- Pick up excessive powerups for 10000pts each.
- Pick up gold for 500pts each, cherries (which give you 2 gold pieces) for 1000pts each, and large gold (which give you 10 gold pieces) for 5000pts each. At the end of certain levels, your total amount of gold is tallied and multiplied by 10000 (30 gold=300000pts).
- Picking up Side gunner icons reduce your total gold by 10. However, I think that gold is exchanged for Side gunners to begin with...
- End-level, 97%, 98%, and 99% shot down will give you 80000, 83000, and 86000 respectively, but getting 100% will give you 100000 instead.
- Bombs give you an end-level bonus of 50000 each.
- The ingame highscore board denotes whether you started at stage 1, 6, or 11, and counts how many loops you did.
Anything I'm missing that's blatently obvious, I blame on my allergies acting up again. Even though I really can't.