Starting each new round back at the pea shooter is a shame and makes the initial start of stage 5 rather difficult as it takes a few screens to get to a new weapon.
At bosses it really is important not to die, but finding a death in stage is not too big a deal as long as there are still weapon pickups left to get.
The getting through levels faster for score vs trying to score as much as possible in level is rather interesting factor for sure. Especially since you get 500 points for the green “defender” heads which a kill is likely better than saving a second or two.
Wish I had a way to practice the bosses outside of the main game. I expect when I finally get to stage 6 I will game over at the boss due to having no experience of fighting it yet.
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That’s the exhilarating part, I felt the same way about the stage 4 boss. And the pick up and play nature of Alien syndrome makes me want to jump back in and play just one more credit to see how far I can get. I love it.
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Day 1 score. Got to the 4th Boss.
Just had a couple of quick goes before work and finally beat stage 5:
Lost most my lives trying to beat the boss of stage 5 but now got his pattern almost down I feel I should be able to beat him most times going forward.
Sadly lost my final life in Round 6, trying to be overly cautious as no idea of the map/layout of this level yet.
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Slight improvement. I finally made it to the round 6 boss sadly with only 1 life:
and died…
For some reason scoring much lower overall this run but still an improvement:
Really hoping to beat this game by the end of this challenge.
Just the round 6 boss to beat and then one final Boss.
Managed to get to the round 6 boss a fair few times now but keep dying at it.
I can not seem to find a single way to damage it with the pea shooter unfortunately so having extra lives is kind of pointless.
Seems when you kill all the enemies on screen you can move faster.
Remembering the game can only spawn four enemies on screen at once plus two defenders is useful to keep in mind and if the map on screen is divided in two you only get two enemies on each side. Also seems that each alternate map section will always switch between the two types of enemies in that round so you can easily tell what you will have to prepare for in the next section of the map.
The only caveat appears that the higher the round you are on the faster the enemies re-spawn.
New High Score:
Edit:
Well okay then… I had 30 minutes spare before I needed to pack up and get ready to go into work so decided to have one last go today and well:
I am well chuffed that I managed to beat this much faster than I anticipated!
Slightly better High Score:
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Wow nice work! I need to find some time to play some more. Suffice to say that this competition is now more of a time attack than score battle haha
If my calculations are correct, the fastest person to beat the game should have the highest score. I should start timing my runs!
Got to stage 6!
Stage 5 boss looked impossible at first and killed me a few times until I figured it out. Ended up getting lost in stage 6 and running out of time.
Got to the stage 6 boss this time! I only had one life left though, and he killed me in like 2 seconds.
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Making good progress as well I see @raskulous 
Had another attempt this morning but unfortunately I died at the final round 7 boss so lost out on about 10,000 points but got this score:
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Yeesh, and here I thought I might catch up!
You should try and record a good playthrough and stuck it up on youtube so I can see your strategies (after the competition). 
It is a shame I still don’t have a good recording or streaming setup.
I do have an older capture card that can accept RGB but of course my PC is in a totally different room to my gaming setup which means I’d have to move the desktop PC into the other room temporarily to record the video feed directly. I also have no webcam or microphone, but I can record directly off the CRT using my Sony a6000 I guess but quality will not be so good.
If you are still struggling with the Round 6 boss it is probably because you are trying to handle him head on as I was originally.
Instead I am purposely moving diagonally up to the upper left corner to lure him to the top of the screen while just dodging projectiles and then quickly run underneath him so you can simply aim upwards at his head from a pretty safe vantage point.
I also found you can make the boss move forward in a straight line if you position yourself just above his laser spit and if you are close enough to him he will also not fire out the 3 bullets but finding it rather difficult to get into this position without dying and is likely the best place to be for a super fast kill assuming a weapon can hit him from there as the pea shooter simply can not.
Think I just broke this score battle with a score wrap:
Edit: I was mistaken.
There is no space between the “Player 1” text and my high score of 1024300 so it looks like a higher “11024300” score which it actually isn’t.
Also of note at 9999999 you seem to stop getting given extra lives as a score bonus.
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Wow, that’s an amazing score! Congrats!
Shame I died at the Round 6 boss. I wanted this to be a completion run using the scoring theory I had come up with which indeed works but then severely limited for extra scoring after going past 999999.
I kind of expected some crash or odd glitching after 999999, however nothing happened.
Are we allowing score farming? 
Without abusing the scoring system I see 60,000 per level as a easy goal without ever revisiting the same room twice apart from when it is unavoidable due to a dead end required to save a hostage.
The score farming above requires you to be able to score over 100,000 points within the levels time limit to be able to keep going. Which requires a fair bit of concentration as you have to play very dangerously with all enemy spawns requiring to be killed the instant they phase in and then abuse the increased frame rate of having no other sprites on screen to speed along to the next room more quickly.
Which is similar to how I started to play anyway outside of letting myself time out at round 6 a couple of times in the boss room to bump up to over 999999.
If I did this seriously not sure how high exactly you could go. Maybe another 500000 or so and whatever you get for killing the bosses of round 6 and 7 on your final life.
Also yeah happy to have the score above not included. I just wanted to see if the game had any weird behavior after rolling the score over 999999 and experiment with the fastest methods to score based on my previous plays through the game.
Yeah I found about that 58k mark to be about as high as I could get with speedrunning levels and only killing what would increase my score further.
I did test out a strategy I figured out for one life, and you can get 160k+ per life, in the first level, with a pea shooter, making an infinite score possible if you’re bored enough.
It is sadly a failed completion attempt but the upside is I discovered a secret regarding the Round 7 Final Boss.
Under normal conditions you start this Final Boss with only the awful Pea Shooter weapon but for some odd reason I started Round 6 Boss with the Laser Weapon instead.
Not sure on the conditions or if it is just random…
Made plenty of stupid little mistakes including forgetting to pick up one hostage which caused me to have to do a slight back track.
This is focusing more on speed and collecting all hostages and most power ups (for the extra score bonus) apart from a few that just aren’t worth going after due to warping you back to locations that are too out of the way.
Tried again and got a completed run on video, however only Pea Shooter at the Final boss as normal.
Did I miss something or is it completely random?
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Is this score a legit only run, or is there score manipulation in it?
