Jail Break Caravan Mode - 118,900 / マンハッタン24分署 キャラバンモード
4Rather than watching a 1CC video when the game was announced a few hours before release, I went to dig up old Gamest articles to share instead. That definitely cost me as having looked at a 1CC video now, there is a lot of score available at the very start of stage 3. There's a boat with windows & each of the window enemies can give the 5000 point bonus. Oops. That'll be where the best scores in the 200K range came from. This was good enough for 6th place & my goal was 100K, so I'm happy enough with how it went
My basic strategy was just to advance quickly & destroy all of the barrels as they can contain the 5000 point Batman as well as the window enemies who can become the 5000 point lady. Most of them are fixed locations but there can be some 'randomness' too. I'm not sure how much is truly random or if it's tied to how many lives / weapons you have or whether dying & restarting at a checkpoint gives a new pattern?
The game's pretty tough as enemies can shoot in near unlimited directions whilst you have a more limited range. Your firing angle doesn't change immediately either, so whilst this allows you to shoot in more than the 8 canon directions, it also slows you down when you immediately want to shoot at a certain spot. Standard Konami controls of the era
If you stay still for any amount of time more enemies spawn in randomly which makes things get out of control very fast. However, the basic enemy locations are essentially fixed & you can manipulate them based on your location on screen. So by going upwards at the very start, enemies spawn in the bottom of the screen, away from the hostage. By then moving down, the next enemies spawn at the top of the screen, away from the 2nd hostage & so on. So it's possible to make some kind of basic route through a stage in order to minimise risk. Hostage spawn locations are also fixed but if you keep certain areas on screen, more female hostages can spawn but at the expense of getting more enemies too. You also need to advance the screen a little in order to save them, so it doesn't last long, increases the risk of dying & increases the risk of shooting a moving hostage & losing all of your weapons. So not worth doing