Battle Garegga

[Icarus]

Goddamnit! Just had a lovely little run, where I managed to get almost all of the scoring tricks on the way - had an accidental quick kill on Mad Ball, but managed to take out Type2's outer and inner rings of turrets without problems, and as usual ignored the medal rails in stage 4 - and beat Black Heart and had 9.5mil coming into stage 6. And then botched up my spare Extend at the wall, and then the last life running into a bullet that evaded my panic bomb just before the first set of turret hatches

Icarus - 9,730,530 - Stage 6 - Bornnam [ABC]

Slow, steady and optimistic progress, with a few errors in stage 6 to take care of. Ibara is proving to be quite a distraction, however

[Vorpal]

Icarus:

and as usual ignored the medal rails in stage 4

Heh, glad to see I'm not alone in that respect. I just gave up on trying to control the way those medals fall.

However, provided I have at least 2 spare bombs (one for rails, one for torpedo-boss-milking) I'll do a ghetto rail-bomb. Aim to kill one of the houses, and the first two rails. You can grab about 50,000 extra points safely with the falling medals, then the rest just ignore and in the process lose some rank :D Then the house will be sitting there with some 10k medals left so you dont lose the chain.

Edit: By the way, are there any replays out there of a player actually beating this game legitimately?. I loved watching the Saturn replay for its many scoring tricks, however I think it's rather obvious it was one of the developers using a slowdown modification, maybe even a save state loader of sorts, and a way to display his rank.

I've heard a few people say they've beaten Garegga, but without some sort of replay I don't believe y'all :P

[Icarus]

Heh, glad to see I'm not alone in that respect. I just gave up on trying to control the way those medals fall.

However, provided I have at least 2 spare bombs (one for rails, one for torpedo-boss-milking) I'll do a ghetto rail-bomb.

Yeah, that's what I try to do now. It usually depends on how many full Weapons I have stocked, but sometimes I aim to take out the tank hangars on both sides, with a couple of rails inbetween, and keep at least one full Weapon to activate the torpedoes.

I haven't quite worked out the behaviour for the medal rail disintegration yet. I first thought that the point where the Weapon makes contact is the first to disintegrate, and then it sets off a chain reaction spreading out along the rail. However, after a few experiments, they either disintegrate at random points, or there is a set pattern to them I haven't seen yet.

So I ignore them until I feel like trying for them

Speaking of ignoring things on practice runs: I think I may have to ditch the Mad Ball2 scoring technique for the time being. Most of my promising creds seem to end either at Mad Ball2 (through stupidity), or at the wall straight after, with the credits that end up going further than the wall being strewn with scoring errors

By the way, are there any replays out there of a player actually beating this game legitimately? I've heard a few people say they've beaten Garegga, but without some sort of replay I don't believe y'all

I'm still in the process of perfecting my strategies, and capturing footage for use on the guide while I'm practicing. I haven't captured an ALL with Bornnam yet - that will come in time, after I modify my Bornnam strat vis-a-vis Mad Ball2 and the wall - but I have a 9.5mil kusoplay, playing up to the first laser cannon in stage 6, if you want to watch me do badly I've also got 1GB worth of footage of practice runs and stuff for the guide.

There's also the Garegga DVD and the Gamest VHS, if you can track them down. The Gamest VHS is an Iron Mackerel replay, 13mil, while the DVD you might already know about - T3-Kamui and DXP-Yoshidaya brutalising the game with Gain, Miyamoto, Shatter Star and Reinforcer. I think Rando said something to me about T3-Kamui's true 20mil ALL on a VHS somewhere, haven't been able to find it myself.

I also managed to grab a Bornnam ALL off hameko.net, the Japanese player got 13mil. The replay seems to have been purged from their archives though.

Let me know if you want any of the .avi'ed stuff. (The VHS stuff is no-go though, not captured to my comp yet, and I only have the Gain replay in avi form from the DVD. The other stuff I have though.)

Please tell me I'm not the only one playing this atm...

[Vorpal]

I'd be highly interested in those replays :D
Though I'm a bit of a newbie when it comes to Torrenting.

And no you're not the only one playing this right now heh. I play daily but I can't beat my previous score, but that is due mainly to me trying to replicate some new (to me) scoring techniques after studying the Saturn replay. I've improved my gameplan by about 2M points so far with the good ol' Mackerel. If only I could survive to Stage 7 again...

[Vorpal]

I had an interesting encounter with BlackHeart today. Check out what I'm talking about:

http://webpages.charter.net/bgspencer/bg_bh_oddity.avi
(edit: hold on give me a moment, having a problem downloading).
(edit #2: ISP was deleting it as it exceeded my storage limit grrrr. Sound removed to reduce filesize. And sorry about the fps counter, forgot to disable it).

I accidentally waited too long to fly around that annoying spread-attack after his 2nd afterburner release, and got flustered and died.

However, the interesting part here, is the conical machine-gun attack started sweeping (the way I manage my rank, it never sweeps until the 2nd instance of the attack), and... kept on sweeping counter-clockwise, allowing me to just camp the weak spot for a quick win.

I can't seem to reproduce this effect, as I'm not sure what caused the attack to #1 sweep when normally it only does a quick burst the first time around, and #2 sweep away from my ship.

If someone can figure this out I would give them my firstborn child. It allowed me to kill BlackHeart a good minute quicker than I usually do, and I'm sure a cuckload of rank was saved (not really concerned with milking BlackHeart as I don't feel it's worth the point>rank tradeoff).

[Icarus]

Regarding your question about BH's sweeping vulcan:
I think I managed to answer your question about the sweeping vulcan in the ST thread, so please feel free to check it out, and maybe ask a follow-up question if you have one.

Regarding the replays:
Bittorrent is easy, just go and grab Azureus and install, and you can use .torrent files located at my tracker to download a replay (if there is anyone seeding the full file, of course).

If you grab Azureus, shoot me a PM with a request for whatever Garegga replays I have .avi'ed available, and I'll either add them to the public tracker, or I'll host them off Azureus' inbuilt private tracker for you.

Sorry about using Bittorrent btw, but for replays and collections of this size, it's the only way I can distribute them

[Randorama]

Edit: By the way, are there any replays out there of a player actually beating this game legitimately?. I loved watching the Saturn replay for its many scoring tricks, however I think it's rather obvious it was one of the developers using a slowdown modification, maybe even a save state loader of sorts, and a way to display his rank.

Yasunari Watanabe (WAT) has played the PCB for the videos.The Saturn version is better-than-perfect, as it lacks the wait mode ("slowdown") in most .cases.That's all he did.

I've heard a few people say they've beaten Garegga, but without some sort of replay I don't believe y'all

There are tons of replays around, even if i can't point you out any except for the insanity DVD. Of course, you're not saying that, unless someone 1-credits the game in front of your eyes, you're not believing it, St. Thomas...?

[Vorpal]

Well yes that kinda is what I'm saying, it was meant more as a challenge though, for people to start recording more :P

I guess I'm a bit of a replay nazi, stemming from my days in the Doom speeddemo community... I don't play Garegga unless the film is rolling heh.

[Icarus]

Since I'm taking care of the English guide to the game, I have to record footage for the guide. The only problem is, sometimes I cannot be bothered to load up Virtualdub and capture, so I end up playing without capturing.

And that's when my best runs and tricks appear

I wouldn't mind seeing how other players here take on the game though, wouldbe interesting to compare notes and stuff. I also wouldn't mind seeing a few players use something other than Wild Snail for score records Once I'm done with Bornnam, I'll probably move on to Chitta or Flying Baron, as they are very underused characters.

[Vorpal]

Ok ok, for your sake, I will try mastering (getting better at, at least) the Silver Sword, hehheh.

(Aieeee what have I just gotten myself into?)

[Icarus]

Don't go changing your ship just for my sake That comment before was more of a... passing comment, if anything

I saw a screenshot of a Chitta ALL score on a JPN Garegga site, and the player had about 10mil. I'm actually really curious to see what her potential maximum is. But I have to get Bornnam out of the way first

[Vorpal]

Vorpal - 4,506,840 - Stage 5 - Shatter Star

Not such a bad run for my first try at it, died trying to milk madball 2 (dont think I'll try that again with Shatter Star heh). There's a lot to learn for me, since I used to be pretty much exclusively Reinforcer and recently Iron Mackerel (i.e. armor piercing fiends).

Without an armor piercing bullet, it is very difficult for me to gauge how damaged a boss is, now... as with Iron Mackerel I had a routine down of, "after xx seconds he's been damaged enough so you can start working on xx".

Some of the more difficult things I noticed:

I couldn't take out that center propeller on Nose Levagghin. I suppose if I use 4 options next time I could manage it, and ignore one of the side propellers until the center one is toast? That way I wouldn't have to contend with the missiles on the center propeller...

The Flamingo bonus was so pathetic (about 250,000) I'm contemplating using napalm on the rails in level 1 instead, hahahaha.

The 1UP miniboss seems to require my undivided attention, coupled with the utter suckness of the napalm, makes milking the scaffolding a massive, massive chore...

I have no idea how I'm going to grab more than 1 large weapon bullet off the 4-Tank-Attack in Stage 4... What did Yoshidaya/Kamui do at this part with Shatter Star? I guess suicide... I did have plenty of credits but.. I never was able to time it right with Iron Mackerel. Now's the time to learn, neh?

[Rastan78]

I saw a screenshot of a Chitta ALL score on a JPN Garegga site, and the player had about 10mil. I'm actually really curious to see what her potential maximum is. But I have to get Bornnam out of the way first

Chitta's record high score: 16.293.460

I think the MOG site has a Chitta replay or two but I'm not sure right now.

[Icarus]

Lots of good questions and observations...

Ack, I had intended to quickly answer your post here, but the resulting reply ended up being a little too large for a "quick reply" (and something I try to keep out of score threads) so I moved the whole lot to the ST thread, where I also commented on your good observations there as well. Please feel free to check them out. Video clips also provided ^_^

Chitta's record high score: 16.293.460

Wow. I had pegged Chitta as a low scoring character due to her ungainly Weapon and really unusual homing Option shots, but if that's the case, then it might be interesting to see just how well she can score...

I figure that a lot of her points will come from the Weapon trick against Black Heart2, where they stock Weapons and use them against the pointblank grenade attack of Black Heart2's second form. (Gain, at max rank, can get approx. 3mil just from the Black Heart2 battle alone.)

[Neon]

Neon - 5,539,940 - Stage 6 - Golden Bat

[zaphod]

For those who are having trouble passing the self test press right or up on the joystick until it gets past the part it fails at.

[Icarus]

I really have to find a good way past those three large twin-turreted tanks that appear from the left of the screen after the fourth large laser cannon (preferably without using Weapon) Worst thing is, I could have made it further had I not died stupidly on the three large turret planes at the start of the stage, and then at the wall. Losing both my spare Extends really hurt

Icarus - A,404,440 - Stage 6 - Bornnam [ABC]

(If you need proof, I'll pop up a snapshot.)

My Mad Ball2 technique is finally starting to improve. If I can navigate the first five attack patterns safely, I can time a full Weapon to take out the outer ring of turrets, and then suicide immediately and use the shrapnel to damage the inner ring. Makes things a whole lot easier. Beat Mad Ball2 with 8.9mil on the scoreboard.

Defeated Black Heart and started stage 6 with 9.8mil Just dropped my Medals shortly after the wall.

If I had finished stage 6, estimated score at the start of stage 7 would be around B,1xx,xxx (11.1mil, as you can get around 500k from milking the arms of the sixth boss' fourth form, so I'm somewhat on target).

Mmmm, slow progress... (And Mania control setup is working great, no need to worry about rapidly mashing the Shot button, can just concentrate on playing now...)

EDIT: And if you're reading this, Plasmo, I just squeezed ahead of you in the overall standings

[Vorpal]

The only time I ever got past the 3 twin-cannon tanks without using a weapon, was a run in which I didn't even shoot them at all(well, enough to damage them). I think I camped the right side until the 2nd tank was fully on screen, then swooped left and up and just did a lot of dodging while staying above the tanks. It was one of those things where afterwards, I asked myself, "how did I just do that"? Then I died.

If I can navigate the first five attack patterns safely, I can time a full Weapon to take out the outer ring of turrets, and then suicide immediately and use the shrapnel to damage the inner ring.

Hmm this sounds like an idea I might try with Shatter Star, as I've not been able to milk Madball 2 at all with him. First I need to figure out how many revolutions I need to damage him for, though, like I do with Madball 1.

Random sidenote: I watched the Gain replay again, and noticed when he was milking BlackHeart's wings, his points were going up almost twice the speed of any other "passive milking bosses" (i.e. bosses like Nose L. and Earth Crisis where you can shoot "dead spots" to accumulate points). So I decided to try it out, and netted a good 180k points more than I usually get on BH. Therefore, I am no longer of the opinion that milking BH's wings isn't worth the rank tradeoff. I used to think it was like Earth Crisis where it takes like 15 seconds of milking to get 10k.

[Icarus]

The only time I ever got past the 3 twin-cannon tanks without using a weapon, was a run in which I didn't even shoot them at all(well, enough to damage them).

Every time I get to that point, I'm usually so busy hoarding Weapon bullets I forget they're coming. Several good scoring credits have ended right there

Hmm this sounds like an idea I might try with Shatter Star, as I've not been able to milk Madball 2 at all with him. First I need to figure out how many revolutions I need to damage him for, though, like I do with Madball 1.

The trick to beating Mad Ball Type1 and Type2 is to hoard at least half a full Weapon (about 20 bullets) and suicide once when the boss appears, using the shrapnel to damage the outer ring of turrets. Best time to do this is when the arms extend out, so you can damage the connecting pieces as well. Then wait until the inner ring of turrets has activated - usually after five attack cycles - and then use Napalm at close range, just as it's about to open up.

With Mad Ball1, you only need one full Weapon plus shrapnel damage to destroy the outer ring. Mad Ball2 you need at least one and a half plus shrapnel damage. Be careful though, as unlike Wild Snail you have to use Shot and Option to destroy the inner ring, although it is worth it, since you get 30,000pts per inner ring turret destroyed with Shot/Option.

EDIT: Actually, just tested out that theory. You need one full Weapon and one half Weapon, plus suicide shrapnel damage to destroy the outer ring of turrets on both Mad Ball Type1 and Type2. There is an element of positioning for Weapon usage as well: if Mad ball is too close to the top of the screen, your Weapon will not damage the turrets that are at the top. So it is best to wait until Mad Ball moves lower down the screen before attacking. Risky

Random sidenote: I watched the Gain replay again, and noticed when he was milking BlackHeart's wings, his points were going up almost twice the speed of any other "passive milking bosses". So I decided to try it out, and netted a good 180k points more than I usually get on BH. Therefore, I am no longer of the opinion that milking BH's wings isn't worth the rank tradeoff. I used to think it was like Earth Crisis where it takes like 15 seconds of milking to get 10k.

Earth Crisis isn't worth the milking in the long run, since you need four Options and a stupidly fast Shot frequency to get anywhere near 100k.

With Black Heart, however, it's wings are damageable just like Nose Lavagghin's, and I think you get 1,000pts x 8 times, over three tiny sections between the wing tip and the booster. Thats roughly 48,000pts, or five MAX Medals. Add to that the huge amount of "tickle points" - points for your Shot bullets connecting with something - and you can get an extra 150k-200k just by milking.

Add to that the destructible missiles it fires during the first form. each missile is worth 1,000pts, and if you have MAX Medals, you can pick up around 100k is you get destructible missiles for all three phases before the second form. The appearance of the destructible missiles phases seem to be random, or based on rank, but they can be welcome if they appear.

On a good day, I can score an extra 400k from Black Heart, just from milking and the 100k from destroying the boss.

[Vorpal]

Vorpal - 5,606,790 - Stage 6 - Shatter Star

Botched that game with way too much rank... switched to the 6-way shot for the first large-weapon-bullet-tanks in early stage 4... I think I'll just go with the 3-way from now on.

Oddly enough, Nose Levagghin mk II seems to be the hardest boss for me (pre stage 6 of course) as Shatter Star. I'm just not good enough to kill the wing propellers in a timely fashion. By the time I kill the first wing propeller, the missile launcher has been activated, and then getting rid of that last one while dodging missiles consumes so much time that he usually floats off screen because he gets bored with me :P

[Icarus]

Oddly enough, Nose Levagghin mk II seems to be the hardest boss for me (pre stage 6 of course) as Shatter Star. I'm just not good enough to kill the wing propellers in a timely fashion. By the time I kill the first wing propeller, the missile launcher has been activated, and then getting rid of that last one while dodging missiles consumes so much time that he usually floats off screen because he gets bored with me

Nose Lavagghin is definitely tougher the second time around, especially with non-piercing ships. If anything, the best way to attack the side propellors is from directly below, using the slight piercing capabilities of the Shot. To do this, you must completely destroy the section of the wing that is below the propellor, and go almost pointblank with Options set to Front Form. Be careful of the alternating encloure/spread patterns that the propellor fires.

If you are totally confident, though, lure the propellors to fire down the screen, then nip into the gap to the side of the propellor you're targeting, and use Trace Form to attack. You do faster damage this way, but you need to be totally mindful of NL2's movement pattern (quite easy to remember since it's movement patterns are identical to NL1).

Speed is of the essence here. Alternatively, you can just attack the main core directly, and bypass NL2 quickly (safer if you're not too confident on taking out NL2 for score).

------------------------

EDIT: Slowly improving my overall strategies up to stage 6. Lately I've been getting at least 9.5mil after Black Heart quite consistently. This past credit, I had 9.8mil after Black Heart, and I would have been well into the 10mil in stage 6, had a Medal not fallen right on top of one of Black Heart's afterburners when it switches to it's second form (XVID - 3MB) Was killed going for the Medal, and subsequently, dropped both the Medal and the spare Extend

[Icarus]

For shits and giggles, here's a snapshot of the exact place I died, on my latest comedy run:



Icarus - 6,899,180 - Stage 5 - Flying Baron [C]

Died trying to avoid the fast spread attack on Black Heart's third form, and a shade away from the next Extend too I have the trip through stage 5 captured and encoded, if anyone's interested...

This much under-used ship is actually really good fun to use, but extremely difficult to get some scoring sections with:

• I didn't realise you can use multiple Weapons, and as such I came out of the flamingoes section with about 1.6mil.
• Mad Ball and its Type2 bro need to be attacked in much the same way as you would with Wild Snail - suicide, then use invincibility to get on top and attack with a full Weapon. The only difference being, that you have to time it perfectly so that the arms of the outer ring of turrets are fully retracted -_-
• The stage 3 railtrack has to be taken from the top downwards initially, as opposed to Wild Snail's bottom upwards. And you need a few Weapon bullets to be able to attack a good chunk of railtrack.
• Lord only knows how you get the stage 4 Medal Rails -_-
• And ditto that comment for the stage 4 boss torpedoes...
• Stage 5's platforms are tricky, you need at least three Weapon bullets to be able to destroy the propellors. Thankfully the missiles are autohoming, so they seek the propellors upon firing.
• The green bomber before Black Heart needs a lot of Weapon bullets to destroy the armor. And at least half a full Weapon to get the shrapnel from the cockpit when Black Heart escapes.

I think I'll forget about Chitta and learn the Baron instead, once I'm done with Bornnam. Had loads of fun on this run.

[Rastan78]

Rastan78 - 6,664,180 - Stage 6 - Gain [ABC]

Just had to post something even if it's a pretty weak score for Gain.

[captain ahar]

black hearts undulating fan shot (the one that makes you swing with it) makes me happy (i'm giggling now just thinking about it). i cannot wait for this game to arrive on the week end. i will reply shortly thereafter with my first score post for this highly anticipated game. the punishment is going to be so very sweet.

[Vorpal]

Vorpal - 6,254,930 - Stage 6 - Shatter Star

Lost my medal chain at mid stage 5 :(

Though, I one lifed the wall of death with Shatter Star for the first time :)

[Neon]

Might as well remove my score, I'm back at school and limited to mame - can't adjust to the lagging controls, getting above 3 millions is an achievement. Using the slower Iron Mackerel helps, but not enough.

Maybe I'll be playing Garegga again regularly next summer...

[charliechong]

I started playing this a bit in the evening the past 2 weeks and i've been obliterating my old best score which was just under 5 million .
i used to have a score a bit below that one on the old board under the name prinsecharlie
i never used to try harvestin the medals on level 4 but after practice
its quite easy to get the majority of them and it's added a lot to my score.
i leave the ones on the bridges just before the boss tho

best new score is
charlie chong- 6091860-stage 6-rust champion


not messing with the best of youse but with the improvements i've made the last 2 weeks i can definitely see myself improvin more.
need to get more on flamingoes and mebbes try some of the blackheart
tricks.
also on the saturn how do you consistently pick golden bat. i always try
the button combination mentioned but always end up with wild snail or rustchamp

[captain ahar]

exclusive to Edit Control mode in the options menu, i believe, there is a button set to A+B+C.

[Icarus]

Rando, check your scoretables. You've listed my Flying Baron record under Wild Snail ^_-

[Randorama]

Fixed -_-;