Flak Attack arcade 1cc

A 1-credit clear of the arcade game Flak Attack [flakatk], played with WolfMAME 0.264. Score: 606,700. Cleared 2 loops (10 stages in all) of one of Konami's lesser-known arcade shmups, for a 2-ALL!
This isn't a terrible shmup. The bosses (particularly the third and fifth) are fun and challenging, the music is more than adequate. But it's still pretty bad: The difficulty is low to the point of being boring much of the time (like stage 2 during the volcano eruption, or the very silly stage 3 midboss). Difficulty spikes up unreasonably high at other points (like stage 2 during the random lava-spawned rocks). The same enemy formations keep showing up, and big portions of each stage feel like filler. I think this could have been trimmed and tweaked to a better, shorter game. As it is, it's hard to recommend given how many arcade games are a lot like this but better. Twin Cobra and Sky Shark are more dynamic takes on the military vertical shmup released around the same time, and oodles of later games like Raiden or DoDonPachi cover similar ground. This is still better than true kusoge like Arbalester, but it's not great.
Flak Attack was also released in Europe as "MX5000" - a generic-sounding name for a generic game.
Some tips on the game, if you decide to play it after my very muted praise for it:
- This game has autofire - sweet, blesed autofire! You generally want to fire bombs manually since they have a very long reload time, and you sometimes want to shoot the main shot manually to avoid leaving gaps in your fire stream that enemies can slip through.
- You can bomb the anti-air guns shooting the pink circles on stages 1 and 5. This gets you a little closer to a power up and stops them from firing again. You can still die on the pink circle after blowing up the target!
- Volcano rocks on stage 2 are the first big difficulty spike. I didn't come up with a safespot or get to the point that I was totally consistent. Trying to stay about 2/3 of the way down the screen seemed to help. Firing and bombing constantly help keep you safe. Mercifully, the rocks are slower if you die and rank down.
- The LIGHTNING BOLTS are a horrible bit of level design - they come without advance warning and they're hard to react to. There's a set in stage 3 after the first group of guns, two (one right after another) after the first plane group in stage 4, and one after you reach the cracked ice in stage 4. Sitting in either the bottom left or bottom right corner is safe.
- For the stage 4 boss, bombing from just above or to the right of the target seemed to be fairly safe. Don't hover over the spots where little planes spawn, lest they destroy you as they spawn. The boss's main gun fires bullets that burst into a bunch of smaller shots (I guess that's the titular flak attack!) and you need to run away if the shot is going to explode nearby. I was very nervous fighting him on the second loop with no bomb power-up - bosses seem to get ANGRIER over time and it took a while to do enough damage to finish him off.
- For the final boss: Blow up the bottom two gun turrets then the top two. Hold down fire to send lots of lasers up the screen, then turn a lot and tap fire to shoot down little planes. Once the four gun turrets are down bombing the boss should be easy.
- Don't get discouraged if you die - recovery is hard but doable, given that the game ranks down a bit, and over the course of the game you'll get many extra lives. Recovery is easier if you start the new life with a mostly-full PLANE or TANK upgrade-o-meter - not really something I could plan for but I savored it when it happened.

[@MohamedBalde-wi5hx]

😂😂😂😂😂