G-Darius (Arcade) - 55.3 million points 1CC (Omicron route) by HARUKA

NOTE: GAME DOES NOT START UNTIL A LITTLE OVER 2 MINUTES IN.

Here's a classic that somehow hasn't been uploaded on here already, with Japanese player HARUKA obtaining the highest score on video for this game. Much thanks to http://www.super-play.info for hosting this!

As you can tell from the video quality, this is pretty darned old. I don't know exactly how old, though - Super-Play says 8/16/2006 but I'm pretty sure that's just the upload date. At that time this was the world record on this game; since then another Japanese player (L2A-大明神) has gotten a hair over 56 million, but I don't know of any video for that one.

First things first - yeah, that's autofire alright. I know it wasn't in the original arcade version (which this seems to be) but the shmup community is cool with it. Gaiden & G-Darius are beyond ridiculous without it, so I can't say I blame them.

This game has quite a deep scoring system, especially for Darius, so I'll try to give a quick & dirty summary:

- You get score multipliers for killing enemies in ways besides standard shooting. These include 2x with a captured enemy's attack, 3x by detonating a captured enemy, 4x with a normal alpha beam, and 6x/8x/10x/12x with each successive level of counter beams. Note that a captured miniboss allows you to fire a single counter beam without actually countering anything. Also note that the only times you can get a quad counter beam are the Queen Fossil and Fire Fossil fights, and Queen shows up in this run. Finally and oddly, not every stage in this game has a miniboss (though this was changed in the arcade Version 2).

- A number of large score bonuses are awarded at the end of the game. These include 1 million for each extra life remaining, 300k for each miniboss captured, 200k for each boss killed with a normal beam, and 400k/600k/800k/1mil for each boss killed with each successive level of counter beams.

- Hidden silver orbs can be revealed through shooting, and they seem to give you a random amount of points. I've seen as low as 100 points and as high as 51200!


As for other things worth mentioning...

Since captured enemies give you more points than normal with their attacks and are needed for the even higher-scoring beams, it is key to plan your use of capture balls from beginning to end. Generally the later stages have more & tougher enemies along with bosses who fire multiple beams at a time, which means better scoring opportunities.

Interestingly enough, you only lose a capture ball if it actually captures something, so it can be freely used as an attack on asteroids and other things that can't be captured!

Captured enemies can be destroyed and have varying amounts of health, so HARUKA uses an interesting technique to save them sometimes. If you begin to charge up a beam but let go before the enemy fully disappears, it will return to normal; during all "transition" periods, the enemy is invincible.

The Omicron route is by far the best in the game for scoring purposes. For reference, the world record on the Nu route ("middle" route leading to the Embryon) is 37 million, and the top score on the Lambda route (uppermost & easiest route) is 31 million. Part of this is due to Omicron being the toughest route and thus having more & harder enemies than the others. However, the much bigger reason is something that doesn't become apparent until the end of the game. Bosses vary quite a bit in terms of how much score can be milked from them, and Great Thing in particular is just ridiculous, as this run shows. Roughly half of the total score comes from the Great Thing fight alone! No other boss comes remotely close in this regard.

In fact, Great Thing is so lucrative that it's well worth it to kill yourself after running out of capture balls! Your count always goes back to 3 on a new life, allowing you to beam more turrets and rack up far more than the 1 million the extra life is worth.

Finally, just a bit of speculation - I wonder if this couldn't be improved further by playing even lamer vs. Great Thing. Specifically, I'd be interested to see if it would be better to ditch one or more of the counter beams - you'd be trading a 6x or 8x multiplier on the turrets for 4x, but you'd also keep him alive longer for further milking. This run ended with a couple lives to spare, so that side of the equation is obviously fine.


Well, that's about it. Hope you enjoy, this game needs more love!