RQ: Salamander stage 4 boss

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elbarto
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RQ: Salamander stage 4 boss

Post by elbarto »

Yeah, that one..

Can someone please re-post the safe spot information?

I've only made it past this boss once, when for some reason it decided to hardly spit any orbs out at all and was ridiculously easy to destroy the cores, heh.
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Zach Keene
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Post by Zach Keene »

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MJR
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Post by MJR »

Hey that is brilliant! I remember being able to one life all up until this point.. got to try that one soon..
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elbarto
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Post by elbarto »

:shock:
I've almost got that to work a couple of times, but mostly it ends in disaster. The (s)hit detection doesn't help matters either, heh.. :oops:

Isn't there supposed to be a safe spot along one of the walls? I tried quite a few spots out, but nothing seemed to work.
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Zach Keene
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Post by Zach Keene »

There's another one in the top left corner, but it's actually an even bigger pain in the ass (since not only do you have to poke your nose into the wall but your left wing as well, and if you're so much as one pixel too far to the right you're screwed.)

If you do it right the leftmost generator will fire orbs that bounce straight up and down without hitting you, while the other orbs will just bounce around harmlessly inside the boss itself.
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Plasmo
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Post by Plasmo »

The easiest sweet spot for this boss is in the bottom right corner.No orb will hit you and you can shoot the cores if you position your options correct.
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Zach Keene
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Post by Zach Keene »

I've seen that done, but I've never been able to get it to work consistently.
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Post by AWJ »

Is it just me or are shields absolutely shit useless in this game? They erode to nothing in moments if you fly just one pixel too close to a wall or asteroid, because unlike Gradius their hit area doesn't shrink as they take damage. Not to mention that so many of the hazards in Salamander aren't blocked by the shields to begin with--asteroids, solar flares, blue orbs, bosses who prefer to ram into you than shoot at you...
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captain ahar
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Post by captain ahar »

i should take this advice well in hand. this boss tears me apart when i can manage to clear to him these days. my Salamander skills aren't what they used to be. i used to be able to one life to him no problem, now i always die on the way due to some dumb thing.
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Post by zaphod »

If you di eon him, and get to him next game he won't fire the orbs until he's vulnerable, and will go down very easily. I've never gotten nay safe spot to work either. Once I got him to not aunch orbs for many games in a row, but i haven't been able to reproduce this since.
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Zach Keene
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Post by Zach Keene »

AWJ wrote:Is it just me or are shields absolutely shit useless in this game?
I've always wondered if they could cover all four sides like they do in Life Force, but they don't last anywhere near long enough to find out.
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Post by AWJ »

Damn, is the hit detection in Salamander/Lifeforce ever fucked up. Here are some bugs or "features" I've noticed as I've started to play this game seriously:

Powerups, of all things, actually erode your shields! To pick up a powerup safely when you have shields, you have to fly into it from a direction where you don't have a shield.

I've found that if you shoot an asteroid/"kidney stone" with a missile, it becomes partially "deactivated". It still absorbs bullets (including lasers and pulse lasers) and erodes shields, but missiles will now pass right through it without being stopped. As will your ship! I should check and see if any other indestructible sprites (like non-target portions of bosses) can be "deactivated" this way.

I could swear I've had shields that were "duds": bullets seemed to pass through them (and erode them as they went) without stopping.

Other weird stuff: The point sum you get for the stage 1 boss (the brain) is a funny non-round number, and I suspect it even varies from game to game. Once or twice I've glanced at my score at the start of stage 2 and found it suspiciously high. The inconsistent behaviour of the stage 4 boss from game to game has already been mentioned. I bet the programmers forgot to initialize a variable or two...

And speaking of odd scores, you apparently get no points for the stage 2 boss. Or at least I didn't, the one time I was paying close attention to my score at that moment of the game.
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Post by Zach Keene »

None of the bosses give points that I can recall, other than Golem (which as you noted varies from one game to another.) IIRC you'll get points for any undestroyed ground hatches when the level 4 boss goes, but the boss itself is worthless.

And I'm glad I'm not the only one whose shields get eaten by powerups. :?

Edit: I came across a Japanese site awhile back that stated that Golem could be worth 0, 6000, 11300, or 16600 points. I can't recall ever having gotten a 0 point Golem though.
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Post by AWJ »

Zach Keene wrote:None of the bosses give points that I can recall, other than Golem (which as you noted varies from one game to another.) IIRC you'll get points for any undestroyed ground hatches when the level 4 boss goes, but the boss itself is worthless.
The stage 3 boss is definitely worth points--6000 points, I believe. I've only beaten the stage 4 boss once and I didn't have the luxury of watching my score as I did so.
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Post by Zach Keene »

Whoops. Guess I ought to double check the others then.

Edit: Played a few games today and yep, Invader's worth 6000 points. Tetran and CenterCore are worth 0, and Golem is always 11300 or 16600 for me. Then I kept choking on stage 5 so I couldn't recheck Death or Zelos.

I got two games in a row where CenterCore fired no orbs, though. :?
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Zach Keene
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Post by Zach Keene »

This seems to work better: stick your nose into the wall just to the left of the rightmost core. That'll get you orbs from the leftmost core that bounce around harmlessly, and at worst the orbs from the right will bounce straight up and down. (Occasionally they won't appear at all.)

I saw this in a movie I stumbled across somewhere; I'll try and dig up the link...

EDIT: Here it is. It's the third from the last link in the first table; second to last is a demo of the post-final boss speed zone.
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Post by mulletgeezer »

I used to play salamander a lot when it was first released, and there were quite a few good players at the local arcade. The odd thing was that nobody wanted to be first to play, and for good reason: when the fourth stage boss is first reached it will spit blue balls. If the boss is defeated then for any subsequent games before the machine is restarted the boss is very easy to defeat - bomb the centre hatch within a few seconds of it appearing and the boss will not fire a single ball. Lots of points can now be harvested via the multiples that pop out of the bottom hatch. There are those who say that the boss can be stopped from firing on the first attempt by also bombing the uppermost 2 hatches (which will always be closed after the first game) though i've never seen this.
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BIL
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Re:

Post by BIL »

Plasmo wrote:The easiest sweet spot for this boss is in the bottom right corner.No orb will hit you and you can shoot the cores if you position your options correct.
Here's a screencap if anyone could use it. I've found this method to work consistently, provided I get into the safespot immediately upon reaching the boss. Tarrying will influence the spheres' trajectories, leading to a risk of the safespot failing. Use the ship's blue trim within the dark patch of background as a guide for positioning - you want their respective outlines to overlap. I find hugging the bottom of the screen while nudging into place helpful.

edit: the method at the very top of this topic is working really well for me now... totally consistent and lets me actually kill this damn thing. Just a matter of luring the left and right cores into wasting their shots lengthwise across the boss, then ripping apart the cores while their spheres bounce uselessly back and forth. You don't need to move too far into the center core's recess for it to work, and even if a few spheres get out, it's still easy to prevent the screen-choking nightmare random dodging produces.
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MJR
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Re: RQ: Salamander stage 4 boss

Post by MJR »

I can confirm that PSX version of salamander indeed has the same feature as the arcade - in the first game, the cores will kill you dead, but if you destroy them they will be much easier on further games.

May be "great" idea in the arcades, but for a home port it's quite awful. Then again, nice to see such an accurate port.
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