But of course went south at the Stage 3 end boss where I lost two lives…
Feeling like going in using the E weapon only to erase the dust particles is the way forward but trying to get a good sense for its hit box is taking a while.
So started Stage 4 with 6 Lives due to an extra life awarded from the score:
But then died a couple of times due to hitting walls. Really think having full speed here is a death sentence and maybe intentionally losing 1 life to slow down isn’t a bad idea. The mid boss downed easily enough and found another hidden “S” shield power up:
Getting past all the ground based enemies abusing the G weapon worked and wasn’t until the final set of sorcerers that I lost another life and got to the Stage 4 boss with 5 lives:
You only can attack his heart and his projectile patterns are something else to try to dodge…
Tried using 10 seconds of shield to go through the boss to attack the heart from the rear to see if a quick kill might be possible but that just ending up killing me, so probably not an option… although the boss died quickly afterwards so perhaps there might be something to doing that.
Started Stage 5 with 4 lives but severely powered down:
Still struggling a bit with the Stage 3 boss but almost have the Stage 4 end boss down now.
Sadly Stage 5 is really kicking my behind and even trying to practice it using the level select (Hold down A button when highlighting the control options) I just can not get much farther than just after beating the mid boss.
Managed to get to Stage 5 with 7 lives left, which is my best so far and finally managed to reach the Stage 5 end boss for my first time ever with 2 lives remaining:
Had a quick couple of recorded goes before needing to get ready to go into work this morning and finally made it into stage 6. Looks like you are re-fighting all the mid bosses at higher difficulty settings:
Made so many stupid mistakes like dying in stage 2 of all places from a stray bullet I had already dodged and then backed into… 2 deaths on the stage 3 boss and 3 deaths in stage 4…
Putting it mostly down to it being really hard to trying to suppress a cough while recording so not at my normal pace. Happy to upload the run if anyone wants to see it but would rather just give it a few more attempts after I get back from work later this evening.
Made it to round 5 with 6 spare lives, ended up losing all of them midway through the stage. Dying in stage 5 is brutal when you respawn with a much weaker shot. Just need to practice it more. Game is really satisfying when you learn it.
I’m not finding Stage 5 that difficult now and have several tactics I use depending on if I am powered up or not that seem to work fine. I just need to stop making stupid mistakes in earlier levels now.
Nice seeing we are mostly all around the same place in the learning curve for the game.
Edit Just got a better personal High-Score while live streaming on twitch:
Made so many silly mistakes and had to make most of it up in stage 5…
May stream a couple more runs after grab something to eat.
Managed to beat the game again but ended up dying much earlier in the second loop.
I decided to use continues which resets your score (I really wish every game did this!) to just check out the differences in the second loop and barely managed to beat it using up almost all of the continues.
There however doesn’t appear to be any differences in the ending and I didn’t get a third loop.
Small improvement. There is still a ton of room for more. I haven’t had time to play back to back sessions, which is where I think you can really get going on shooters.