Game:

Star Soldier (1986)

Duration: 29:24

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3

Since I will play the Star Soldier GC remake for Shoot the Baguette 4 ( Schedule here by the way : https://horaro.org/stb4/schedule ), I had to go back, and derust for the event.

My previous PB from a few years ago ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klp05lI4aDU ) was at 9.999XXX million points lmao, but I knew that playing better would allow me to get past the 10 million threshold, and in some of my practice runs I actually did do that. What I did not expect though was to then get beyond 11 million as well!

Several factors allowed me to get even better at the game, such as better quick-kills overall as to generate more waves, but also a much cleaner survival aspect too. Since a death can reset the score value for Z tiles within a stage and IIRC said tiles are worth lots of points by the end of the stage if you destroyed them all, I was able to get some nice score boosts by simply not dying. The only death I had in this run was to a cocky power recovery strat on the last boss that failed and backfired, which is inconsequential for Z-tile bonuses since those only penalize you for dying in a stage section.

Bonus-wise, I also managed to get almost all the fixed secret bonuses (that I am aware of) in the game. Only one set of simul-kill eye statues was failed, which is a bummer but not too bad either. Some of these bonuses are worth ~100k if not more so that's very good to have.

There are some little discoveries that probably helped as well, though not as tremendously. I learned by looking at the Strategy Wiki page for the original Star Soldier ( https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Star_Soldier ) that the yellow big eye enemy that shows up in pairs will have both of the enemies die as soon as you kill one, so I stopped trying to simul-kill them and focused on one for some faster speedkills. It's a tiny boost but it's something.

I also realized mid-run that shooting the invincible bubble ennemies gives you tick points apparently! I would rather erase them with the powerup item becauer them staying on screen is annoying, but this can be handy for scoring. One last thing I didn't even know (or knew but forgot a looong time ago) is that boss 7 has a special form if you destroy all the parts. Most of my practice runs only killed the bottom parts at best so I had no idea you could trigger that new phase. The parts themselves seem pretty lucrative too so good thing I decided to destroy all of them for basically 100k more than usual.

It also seems like enemies killed by the powerup bomb do not give points? I don't think I tried to take this into account by avoiding using the items on busy sections, but maybe that can be useful too. There are some sections like the end of stage 9 where said bombs are hella handy to ensure safer setups on the eye statues though.

All of those improvements allowed me to get a big score jump! Since my initial goal before my training montage was 10mil and this was smashed, I think I am pretty happy with the score, though I would still like a run with all secret bonuses if possible.

One other thing I realized in those practice runs is that the very final phase of the last boss can be annihilated if you have a twin shot and fire at the boss before the hexagons come out and block your shots lmao. Since the bosses can summon enemies and this is also the case for this one, maybe there's more points to be gotten with boss milks ewwww. But I don't really want to think about it for now. I haven't even tested if the game has boss timeouts actually lmao. Please lemme stay ignorant and happy hahaha.

Played on Dolphin, recorded with OBS Studio, used antimicro for rapidfire
#shmup #STG

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