Darius (Arcade) - ALL Clear 4.18 Million
72Another old replay from 2013.
Route taken: A-C-E-I-M-R-X
The very first game in the Darius series, dating all the way back to 1986. This was originally designed to be played on three screens, which is why it's so wide.
The game still has the multi-branching path system, but instead of choosing the next stage from a menu, you need to manually fly into the top or bottom tunnel at the end of every stage. The game is a bit dated for today's standards, but it's still pretty playable. It's still better than most of anything else that came out around that time.
This was part of the same shmup tournament that the Hishouzame run was from. This game was part of the loser's bracket of games. Although our team never actually got into the loser's bracket, I did test out the water with this game and ended up clearing it.
Like Gaiden and Burst you collect colored powerups to upgrade your weapons. Red is shot power. Green is the missiles (called bomb here), blue is the shield, gold gives you a screen-clear and white gives you a random amount of score.
Once you fully power up the main missile shot, you start upgrading the laser and after that you start upgrading the wave shot. The laser pierces enemies and the wave shot also pierces terrain on top of enemies. This can be blessing and a curse with the shot limit.
The biggest danger with this game is the mentioned shot limit. You can only have 5 shots on screen at once, 3 with the wave shot. Because the screen is so wide, it takes like up to 2 seconds for your shot to travel all the way from the left to the right before it leaves the screen. This means that you can easily find yourself not being able to fire when you want to. To counteract this, you really want to be as far to the right of the screen as possible.
Fatty Glutton is kind of a nightmare in this game, but this is mostly because you'll usually be fighting him with the laser. You need to destroy the little fish it shoots, but the laser pierces through the boss and it takes forever to leave the screen, leaving you quite vulnerable if you miss a shot. I skip a couple of red orbs so that I can fight him with fully powered missiles, which turns the boss from a nightmare into a joke.
One important trick that might not be very obvious: you can 'lob' missiles forward to holding forward. This helps a lot for reaching enemies that seem just out of reach.
Scoring in this game is about destroying formations of enemies for bonus points, which is easier said than done. There is also boss milking and checkpoint milk boss milking, which is not so great.
Octopus, besides having the lamest name in the Darius universe, is also the lamest final boss. It really barely does anything. This route is one of the highest scoring routes too, which makes this double silly.
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