[PC-98] Atomic Punker - ALL Clear 374,360 (No-Miss, No-Bomb)

Epilepsy warning.

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Atomic Punker is a really absurd PC-98 doujin shmup from 1995 that really pushed the PC-98 to its limits.

Made by Promisence Soft, this game was first submitted to the Dai-1-kai ASCII Entertainment Software Contest, which was basically a game jam for the PC-98 where ordinary people could submit little games they made for the contest.
Then this 18-year old kid comes along and just absolutely blows everyone else out of the water, including everything that was being commercially made for the PC-98 at the time.
It cannot be overstated what a technical marvel this game was. The levels of smoothness, effects and sprites on screen in this game was rivaling those of arcade hardware at the time. This being on PC-98 was ABSURD.
Needless to say, he won the contest.

From what I gathered, this was using a similar trick that Cho Ren Sha 68k used where the background was kept really plain in order to boost everything else.

This being a game jam game, it's quite short and doesn't really have anything else to it besides the three stages. No menus, no options, no ending, no start screen. It's basically a proof of concept more than anything.
This proof of concept this kid made for a game jam is still better than any shmup that was ever made for the PC-98.

System
You have a shot and bombs. It takes three P items to reach max power. Dying makes you lose all your power but you can pick up your lost P items back immediately. I-frames are short though, so it might be annoying to get them back without dying again. The game gives you autofire which is nice.
Bombs do a screen filling explosion that damages all enemies and gives you i-frames. You get an extra bomb by picking up B items.
You get extra lives via score extends.
Hitboxes aren't huge but they're not small either.

Survival
The game starts you off with 13 lives so the game is not particularly difficult to clear.
The patterns themselves can be quite tricky though. You have to be really aggressive with your enemy killing to not get completely overwhelmed.
Pointblanking does significantly more damage since your shot is quite wide. You really need to pointblank a lot since some enemies have very high health.
One particular nuance this game has is that most enemies spawn on the opposite side of the screen that you are on. You can use this to manipulate where enemies are going to spawn. Some sections can be quite silly because of this, because if you hug one wall all the enemies spawn near the other wall.
The game is fairly consistent as a lot of patterns are either aimed or static. Some enemies shoot random patterns though and they are definitely the worst.
Trouble spots are the two big enemies that shoot the random lines in stage 3 and the random spam pattern of the final boss.

Scoring
No real scoring in this besides enemy destruction and shooting down destructible bullets and missiles.
Some enemies are worth quite a few points so you definitely don't want to miss them.
You probably want to use your bombs for score to get more enemies since there is no end-game bonus.

I don't know why the stage 1 boss has like ten times more health than it should have.

00:00 - Stage 1
02:09 - Stage 1 Boss
03:34 - Stage 2
06:07 - Stage 2 Boss
07:40 - Stage 3
10:25 - Stage 3 Boss

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