[1cc] Hacha Mecha Fighter - 1-ALL - 23,658,480 pts

Great game. 00:00 Intro 0:19 Stage 1 3:03 Stage 2 7:02 Stage 3 10:05 Stage 4 13:20 Stage 5 17:08 Stage 6 22:37 Stage 7 25:57 Stage 8 31:23 Ending 32:24 Loop 2 There are several versions of this game and I have to play a bootleg (which I'll call "old version"), because sound isn't emulated at all in the official one (which will be called "new version"), apparently. This is still an issue in the latest MAME versions last time I checked. You can tell the versions apart on the title screen: Old version has a small "NMK" logo, whereas the New version has a big one. Rank increases more slowly in this version (one point every 34 seconds, whereas it's every 17 seconds in the regular versions). However, it will still quickly reach max value in any version if you don't die (pretty much at the second midboss). So, unless there are other changes I'm not aware of, this would only change the first 2 stages of the game, and the 2 minutes following a death, since the rest of the time you're already at max rank anyway. In fact, you may even want the rank to increase faster than it does, as it would mean more bomb items, and as a result, a common strategy in the early game is to stall on purpose against some bosses and midbosses just to let rank increase (and get some points from hugging the right wall). I do it a little, I could have stalled even more but it would get really long. Scoring in this game is a little weird but not hard to understand. You get points by hugging the right wall, as well as being at the bottom of the screen if there's solid ground (you can combine both). It's even more lucrative than killing enemies, so the general scoring strat is to ignore enemies as much as possible and stay on the right. You also get points by collecting fruits, but you can also get 1 million points at the end of a stage instead if you didn't collect a single fruit in said stage. This means that unless you collect more than 90 fruits (which I think can never happen), it's technically better to avoid all fruits. However this is extremely hard to do outside of Stage 1 and 3, as well as the final stage which contains no fruits. There's also a clear bonus depending on the digits of the high score (not your score, but the best stored one, which for most people would be the same thing anyway). Said bonus is 1 million + the last 6 digits of this score. As a result, if you're milking against the final boss (which is the recommended way to beat it anyway), it's best to be careful, not milk all the time in order to not overshoot. Indeed, if you end the loop with, for example, 20,000,100 points, your bonus would be 1,000,100 pts, whereas a player finishing with 19,999,990 pts would get 1,999,990 bonus points, and end up with a better score after the bonus has been factored in. Ideally you'd want to stop close to XX,999,990 pts. Remember that you get around 1.4 million points by hugging the wall while timing out the final boss, so plan ahead to see if you can keep milking for another million, or stop at XX,999,990. Bosses and midbosses generally take several minutes to timeout, which means that if you want to score you have to avoid killing them and hug the right wall for 5 minutes, which is worth a lot, but is also extremely long. You can get bombs by collecting the flowers dropped by some enemies, as well as the ones you get at the midpoint of a stage. The higher your rank, the more flowers you get from this midpoint. Collecting 5 fragments will make a "Big" item appear, which are bombs. The bomb itself is very useful, as it gives you a very long invincibility window. Ressource management is paramount in this game, as many parts are extremely hard, and can be considered impossible without bombing. You can panic bomb from time to time, but most of the time your bombs will be planned for very specific parts. Pretty much every bomb I used was planned, aside from the one in Stage 5 where I got cornered. If you get to the final stage the clear is pretty much in the bag since the game will throw a lot of bomb items at you, and you only need 1 to enter a safespot against the final boss. I guess they expected you to bomb against that boss a lot because of how hard it is without the safespot. You need to hug the right wall while in big mode, and when the bomb wears off you'll be slightly off-screen thanks to a bug. You can also use this to enter a safespot against the 4th boss and it's worth a lot of points, but it can sometimes fail. Second loop is insane and I don't think I want to attempt it. Rank is always maxed out and every enemy has 4 times more health. The game loops infinitely, but every loop after that is the same as loop 2. The game counterstops at 99,999,999 pts, which can be reached during loop 4 if scoring effort was done. Because you have a very limited number of lives, reaching the counterstop would require you to play pretty much perfectly, not waste any bombs, and take a ton of risks due to inflated enemy health.