DoDonPachi SaiDaiOuJou (Arcade) - 1CC (B-Laser)

Played on MAME 0.256
This is the last entry in the DonPachi series, the most popular series done by CAVE, CAVE being the people who kept arcade shoot em' ups in life support for about 10 years until they eventually left the arcade market after the release of this game.
You can play with Type A, Type B or Type C. Type A is the fast speed/narrow shot, B is similar but it has a bigger spread and the options shift when you move left or right and C is wide shot/slow speed. You can choose Shot, Laser or Expert type ships, these will enhance your weapons and determine your maximum bomb capacity. For Shot it's 6 bombs max, Laser has 4 and Expert has 2 but it enhances both shot and laser, although Expert is it's own different mode much harder than playing with Shot/Laser ships, basically if this game had a second loop it would be Expert.
You also have the option to use Auto-bomb, this activates a bomb (assuming you have any in stock) when you get hit. Sounds useful, but there are some caveats to this mechanic and why I didn't use it in this case. Auto-bombs always eat up your entire stock whenever they are triggered, bomb capacity doesn't increase after dying and the bombs themselves have a much shorter duration than if you used them manually. For Laser types unless you are very consistent being stuck with only 2 bombs per life is fairly horrible.
By pointblanking, collecting stars and picking up bees you charge up the Hyper gauge. Hypers boost your firepower and chain hits earned according to the level used, but as a drawback the rank (difficulty) will increase. They also grant invincibility for a brief moment allowing you to get out of a pinch but sometimes they can still put you in a bad situation, usually during bosses where their patterns tend to become harder when a Hyper is active.
Speaking of that, this game is actually pretty hard. A big reason (pun not intended) is your hitbox is somewhat large and more often than not you'll die when trying to flail or micrododging. Many bosses require a lot of pointblank otherwise they'll start doing really nasty patterns, and other patterns can be nasty in general like the boss 4 opener. You also don't have that many resources, only 4 bomb drops in the entire game and whatever bomb stock you have in total depending on your ship type + auto bomb combination. For a long time a problem for me were the visuals, the sprites are prerendered and detailed while bullets have this neon glow surrounding them, which sounds cool but the game itself runs at a blurry 240p resolution (the OG arcade version at least) and this results in a weird combination that can be hard to look at.
In this run I make it through the first 4 stages without dying, then I get to stage 5 and fuck up a lot lol. Stage 5 is very strict and very long and honestly I didn't have much of a route for many sections. I was really worried I'd die suddenly with a full bomb stock when doing too much dodging so I just went bombs away on anything that looked dangerous lol, was cheesy but it worked.

[@AlexKarel-bh3yy]

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[@speedymatt1236]

You may have beaten the normal game with 1 credit, which is impressive alright! But… if you’re truly dedicated enough on that game, and if you’re able to fulfill certain criteria, you might end up facing whoever that silhouette is…