Raiden Fighters 2 (Arcade) - All (Aegis IIC, 86 millions)

Played on MAME 0.256

Raiden Fighters 2 doesn't change many aspects from its prequel but I find it to be a huge improvement. The stage design is full of secrets (medals, fairies, miclus, etc) with pretty much never a wasted moment, particularly the beach and sky stages which are pretty much non-stop scoring tricks the whole way through.

You can also graze bullets for score, already present before although quite hard and there weren't that many good spots to do it. RF2 on the other hand, watch any high level replay and it's everywhere lol I barely try it deliberately though since it's still really hard.

If there is one small complaint is that some of the CG/prerendered stuff doesn't look very good in my opinion. The valley landscape in the sky stage and the city background in the final stage look like heavily compressed satellite pictures (which is probably what they are), not a huge problem and after a while I stopped paying attention to them.

Back in RF1, Aegis was easy to get the hang of since it had good movement speed and shot, despite of that it was one of the weakest ships as it simply lacked good firepower (you basically had to pointblank everything with missiles if you wanted stuff to die quickly).

In RF2 however, one of the secret ships is the "Aegis IIC" with the big difference (besides the absolutely sick color scheme) being that both missiles and laser have a higher fire-rate. The laser in particular for some reason does absolutely ridiculous damage when you're right on top of something (you can instakill the stage 2 boss with it for example) and this is helpful many times throughout the run. This ship also starts with 3 bombs instead of 2 which is a nice bonus.

The final score in this run is about the same range I was reaching during practice. I accidentally took a death halfway through the desert stage and missed a Miclus appearance: at 15:40 you have to hover over the tank that rises from the platform (similar to the secrets in the train stage). This run would have been a no-miss without that death but not a huge deal.