[AC] Hacha Mecha Fighter - 1-ALL Clear (26,747,680 to 2-3)

Turn on captions for extra comments. Hacha Mecha Fighter came out in arcades in 1991 and was made by NMK, which were one of the more prolific companies that designed arcade shmups back in the day. Hacha Mecha Fighter loosely translates to "Nonsense Fighter" and the name couldn't be more fitting. This game is truly something special. NMK were the absolute master and king of making some of the most mind-boggling scoring systems to ever be. I swear at some point they were just taking the piss, a lot of their scoring systems sound like a shitpost. In this game the scoring system is... hugging the right wall and avoiding all of the score items. - You get score per frame for every frame you hold right against the right wall. You also get score for just walking on the ground but it's less, but they do stack. Bosses take up to 5 minutes to timeout and you can right wall hug for most of them. - Fruit items are the score items and they give 1k on pickup and 10k each for the stage clear bonus. However if you avoid all of them you get a no-fruit bonus of 1 MILLION on the stage clear bonus. The only time this doesn't give more score is if you collected 91 fruits in a stage, which is basically only stage 1. - There is also an endgame bonus that depends on the last six digits of your score at the time that you beat the game. The endgame bonus is 1 million plus the last six digits of your score. So if your final score was 20,000,001 you actually get 999,999 less of a bonus than when your final score was 19,999,999. Avoiding all of the fruits is actually really difficult to do, the fruits have huge hitboxes and the game is already crazy enough without these things getting in your way. Getting the no-fruit bonus is only really viable on stage 1, 3 and 8 as a result. It's still possible to get the no-fruit bonus on stage 2 and 4, but every other stage is basically impossible. Speaking of, this game is actually crazy hard. It looks very cute but don't let that fool you, this game pulls no punches whatsoever. It's also just complete nonsense because a lot of parts are actually completely impossible to get past without excessive bombing. You move pretty slow, the screen is pretty cramped and the hitboxes are huge. All of this combined makes this game more of a resource management game than anything else. The game has a 2nd loop and what they changed for the loop is actually one of my most favorite things ever. All they did was fix rank at max and give every enemy FOUR TIMES as much health. It's not immediately apparent in 2-1 because you start the loop with max power, but later on enemies actually become nearly unkillable. Some enemies don't even die from two bombs and it's hysterical. In interviews the developers said that they did not playtest this at all and it clearly shows. The game also loops infinitely on top of that. Though every loop after loop 2 is exactly the same as loop 2, so it doesn't get any harder at least. You only get one extend in this game. However there is a bugged score extend at 77,777,777 points. Which is incredibly amusing as you can only get this in like loop 4. The way to get bombs is by collecting flower items. A bomb item spawns on the right every time you collect 5 of these flowers. You get bomb flowers usually as drops from big enemies and you get them at the Halftime midpoint for every stage. How many flowers you get from Halftime actually depends on your current rank. At minimum rank you get 1 flower and 8 at max rank. You can hold up to 8 bombs at a time. The world record for this game is a counterstop that gets to loop 4-6 btw. Involves very silly pacifist strats as you can't kill anything. I know the bugged extend at 77 million is the only thing that makes the counterstop even possible, which is amazing. Currently the only good way to play this game is on the newest version of Mame, which is not great because it has 4 frames of input lag on that. There are also a few oddities with the Mame version compared to the PCB. The biggest difference being that the starting rank is much lower. This has a few implications: - Stage 1 and 2 are easier because rank takes longer to max out (if you milk the midboss and boss the rank maxes out before stage 2 though). - But less rank also means less bomb fragments as the stage 1 midboss can only gives 4 flowers as opposed to the 8 of the PCB. Which ultimately makes this version slightly harder than the PCB. I did notice however, that if I set the difficulty dipswitch to Hardest, I get PCB results with the flowers and enemy formations. So in the future it might be better to play this game on the Hardest dipswitch in Mame for more accuracy with the PCB. 00:00 Intro 00:16 Stage 1 03:27 Stage 2 08:22 Stage 3 11:32 Stage 4 14:43 Stage 5 18:15 Stage 6 23:42 Stage 7 27:08 Stage 8 33:36 Second Loop ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Twitter:   / jaimersstg   Twitch:   / jaimersstg