R-Type [Irem, 1987] - 2-Loop Clear / 2-ALL (2/2)

"The momentous first contact with beings from another planet was met with a quiver of anticipation. Everyone was filled with excitement at the prospect of space travel."
A one-life clear of both loops of the original R-Type, Irem's immeasurably influential horizontal shooter, which introduced the revolutionary Force device, an indestructible satellite that provides both protection and vastly increased attack potential, and which can be attached to the front or back of the ship or fired off to act as an independent drone. This addition, coupled with the stage designers' penchant for crafting intimidating and labyrinthine gauntlets, created a more methodical and considered kind of shooter; doing well at R-Type necessitates both studiously memorising the stages and learning when and how best to use or situate the Force pod.
This isn't necessarily a scoring run*, though breaking 1 million is good enough for me, and it's a bit sloppy in places, but it hopefully demonstrates a mixture of both scoring strategies and safety- or efficiency-oriented methods. I'm playing the Japanese version in MAME on default settings. No autofire was used.
For the most part, my routes through the first and second loops are essentially the same - a fair bit of re-routing work was required when I started learning the second loop, but I quickly began to apply much of what I'd learned to the first loop, too. I do change up my approaches to some of the boss fights in the hope of keeping things interesting to watch, though.
The most striking differences in the second loop, aside from the increases in enemy aggression and occasionally health, appear in stages 2 and 5; stage 2 requires you to focus on crowd-controlling all of the little flying spores (which are now deadly snipers) along with the Metroids (which are now total tanks), and the stage 5 boss, Bellmite, has become both faster and less predictable, as its movements are determined by RNG and rarely influenced by anything the player does. This boss battle is where most of my attempts an all-clear have come to an end. It's generally recommended to grab an extra speed-up so that you have a better chance at outrunning its projectiles, but having an unwieldy ship makes the following stage vastly more difficult, so I tend to just take the risk and hope that it decides to behave itself. Thankfully the hardest stages, 6 and 7, are almost completely unchanged.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the video! Apologies for the footage looking a bit jerky at times - I'm not sure what's caused that. And thanks to exmosquito, whose stage 1-7 safe-spot I pinched. :p
*Playing for score in earnest largely involves milking the stage 1-7 boss, crashing before it dies, repeating this with most of your remaining lives, then recovering and finishing the rest of the game. I can't be arsed with that and probably couldn't pull it off, tbh.