Raiden Fighters 2 (Arcade) - All (Aegis IIC, 103 millions)

Played on MAME 0.256

New PB in Raiden Fighters 2 with this ship.

The key behind this score update is 'grazing' the bullets, among other strategies like the "defended the tanks" bonus in stage 1 and some Miclus (Micluses?) appearances I didn't get before but the big part is the grazing.

When you are close enough to a bullet a unique sound effect and you increasingly get points per-frame until a certain cap. This means that you don't necessarily need to hoard a huge amount of bullets for a significant gain, even 1 bullet will do the job as long as you are continuously grazing it.

However for slow ships like the one I used, as the game progresses and difficulty increases bullets start to outrun you making it harder to earn points from them.

Overall the grazing in this game is pretty hard because your hitbox is fairly big, it's a bad idea to try improvising it because it's prone to going wrong a lot, the safest approach is to have bullets coming down in a straight line. You can still graze bullets moving sideways or in other directions but it's more awkward to do.

Also, I used the 2P side for this run as the graze hitbox is larger vertically compared to 1P apparently.

Another reoccurring thing is stretching the boss fights to get more score from them, except for the desert boss because fuck that boss lol

I was a little nervous going into the final stage with some close calls in it. I ended up dying during the second phase of the fake final boss because it kept spawning tanks from annoying places lol. The plan was to use one more bomb and proceed like I did, so that I enter Red Eye with 3 bombs (enough for pretty much all I wanted to do with it), then die on the third phase and bombspam the rest. You can milk graze in the third phase when it does that rotating attack but honestly fuck doing that lol way too scary.