MAME ROW #87 - Giga Wing

thelostsoul

I actually forgot the mechanics. Just wanted to note one thing: If you hold shoot button, it does a shield. This shield reflects enemy bullets and charges a meter for bomb I think. It is the mechanic in the game, which makes it unique.

GtBFilms

Wow, this game doesn't mess about with size of the scores!

My best so far - 21,827,301,050!

UDb23

thelostsoul

@gtbfilms Nice start! I hope, I'll get in soon. About the score, with such long scores its typical to code part of it with different colors or just abbreviate it somehow. There was a standard for it in the shmup forum I think. Because if you want compare, you really get lost with all those commas. I would say, for easier comparison use bold font after 9 digits (after 3 commas). In example your score would look like this:

21,827,301,050 (with `)
21,827,301,050 pts (with **)
To reference the points in text, you can just say 21,8 billion (9 digits after first comma).

You can also completely ignore this. When I think about it, its just 1 week. :D While doing some research, I found these

Giga Wing strategy guide: https://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?t=4749 (I start playing without this guide, I usually never use such a thing)
An interesting article about introduction to shmups: https://babysoftmurderhands.com/2011/06/shmups-101-a-beginner’s-guide-to-2d-shooters/ (I think, I already posted it somewhere?)

Btw, did you know here in Germany (and Europe too maybe) the comma and dot are reversely used? I mean, we use dot where you comma use. Thats why it was common to note points as 123'456'789. It doesn't matter here, just wanted say it. :-)

GtBFilms

@thelostsoul

Good idea about abbreviating the score with colour/bold. That will make it a lot easier to quickly compare these massive scores!

I have seen the comma/dot used differently (I'm in the UK), my uncle lived in Switzerland for 17 years and used to use the commas/dots the other way around!

The Europeans also use a strike-through on the number 7 a lot, which I think is a great idea, to distinguish it from a number 1 when hand-written.

The only convention I'll never get my head round is the American date format: MM/DD/YYYY - now that's just wrong to my eyes!

obsidianspider

I've only been able to get to Level 2 once. This game is tough!

A frustrating thing is that when you get a game over, if you play like me, you're still pressing the fire button rapidly, so I've more than once ended up going right past the name entry section.

My high score for now is 78,861,848,830

obsidianspider

I think my best for this week is going to be 97,428,283,350

obsidianspider

MAME ROW #88 is live

pjft

Wow, what a fantastic game! Alas, I made a terrible mistake in entering the high score - I was so eager to skip the continue countdown to enter my name that I just hammered the "shoot" button in hopes it would speed it up.

Alas, it seems it was prompting me for my name then, so it was registered as blank. /fail

Ah, I see it happened the same to you :)

My score was 55,117,755,510 it seems.

Well done @obsidianspider on your score, and everyone. I imagine this game would also have been right down @dankcushions 's alley :)

I'll try it again some other time - really enjoyed it!

thelostsoul

Shame on me, I didn't have (or took) the time to play this little gem. Some cool highscores here, good job guys. Maybe next time, i'll see you guys.

obsidianspider

@pjft The strategy that I ended up finding the most successful was to use the reflection/shield to bounce bullets back at the large enemies that shoot you with huge volumes of bullets because it not only destroys them quickly, but all of the reflected bullets turn into bonus items and it ups your score significantly. The audio cue of "OK" letting you know the shield was ready was really helpful because you're looking at so much going on and can't keep an eye on that gauge.

pjft

@obsidianspider thanks! I'm playing it without sound for now as it's when I'm waiting for the boys to fall asleep, so I missed that audio cue.

Question: are your high scores for this specific game saving across sessions? I just noticed I'm running it on FBA and my score from yesterday seems to not have been stored. Might be something on my setup, but wanted to check.

obsidianspider

@pjft I played on two different Pis, but they seemed to save with MAME 2003.

pjft

@obsidianspider thanks.

I confirm that on Mame they're saved, and that on FBA they're not yet saved as it doesn't support high score saving for cps2 yet. Found this:

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/17274/help-some-arcade-game-high-scores-not-saving-fb-alpha/7

Thanks!