Marvel Land arcade 1cc

A 1-credit clear of the arcade game Marvel Land [marvland], played with WolfMAME 0.277. Score: 730,680. Draconic Prince Paco defeats an evil mole to rescue Princess Luxcie. Paco can get shadow-clones which can be whipped around to damage enemies, and he can get dragon wings to allow high jumps and gliding for a limited time. We journey through an amusement park including some dangerous roller coaster rides and plenty of carnival snacks. But we also visit volcanic caves, and an ice level complete with slippery floors. Along the way, there are TONS of references to other Namco games, ranging from super-famous characters (like Pac-Man) to very obscure ones (like Beraboh-Man). At the end of the game, the cave starts to collapse (King Mole is a load-bearing boss!), and you have a single chance to escape. I'm glad I got reasonably good stalactite RNG - you have very little time to hesitate or react during the escape.

This is a playthrough of Normal course. The easy course (   • Marvel Land arcade 1cc - EASY course  ) features just a few of the levels, and easier versions of them at that. Don't let the colorful cute art style, happy music, or amusement park theme trick you into thinking this is an easy game - difficulty is extra spicy. A neat thing about arcade games is that how grim or cutesy the theme is has no correlation with difficulty. If the local arcade has a DemonFist II cabinet right next to Li'l Bippo's Grand Day Out, it's anyone's guess which game is easier to finish.

Some tips for anyone crazy enough to try to clear this:
Having a route is crucial - it makes for a (relatively) low risk path through each level. For instance, you'll notice that I don't even need to move around much on the roller coaster levels. A lot of points in the route use very particular timing (like when to jump and glide on stage 3-4, to float safely past the medusa heads)
The rock-scissors-paper mini-game requires quick reactions or a bit of luck. You can hit the button to attack, or move the joystick to block. Attacking wins you a point if your symbol wins, otherwise it gives the opponent a point. Blocking is always safe, and OCCASIONALLY the opponent will attack when they don't have a winning symbol, and thet'll give you a point. You'll have the winning symbol in at least one of the three games. So if you've blocked the first two, you can mash attack for the last. And if you have a lead, you can afford to just block the remaining rounds.
The tug-of-war requires good mashing. In addition, your opponent will get bursts of strength every so often. When they get a burst of power and start pulling you toward the pit, you should push the joystick down (and you can stop mashing), then as soon as their power-meter starts dropping again you need to start mashing again. World 3 tug-of-war is harder than world 2!
There are two score-based extends (at 150K and 450K points), and 2 hidden 1-ups you can collect - one in 2-5, and one on 4-3 (which I didn't bother with, since I couldn't come up with a low-risk way to collect it). The bonus lives give you some margin of error for a very difficult game.
A lot of score comes from extra lives (100,000 each), so an optimal scoring run would reach the end with 6 lives in reserve. Using the shadow clones to pick up lots of full-size stars on the bonus levels is also a big score factor.