In the Hunt | Arcade | Hard No Death 1cc 60fps

Game version : In The Hunt (World)

US version is the same as world version. Japanese version has different order of stages and stage 4 (stage 2 outside of Japan) is a bit harder so a Japanese version should be considered as hardest but by only just a little bit.

Difficulty setting as hard as possible : lives: 2, difficulty 4 of 4 : hard


Played at 100% speed , no cheats , no tools , no autofire , no savestates.

How hard was it for me to do ? 8.2/10

You can play game normally by collecting all powerups but it increases game's rank (dynamic difficulty). At high rank enemies are more aggresive and shoot more often and bosses have more hp - especially last boss has ridiculously high hp. If any of your weapons (main or subweapon) reaches its max level a game goes full rank based on a difficulty a game is played on. I chose to play with lower rank. I collected only two M upgrades for my subweapon and two Green upgrades for a main weapon.
Disadventages of playing on low rank:
you will not be able to switch main weapon or subweapon for the whole game
volcano section in stage 4 will be a bit harder without balloons
annoying silver ships in stage 4 which respawn infinitely that are usually killed by blue weapon by players will have to be tricked to pass
stage 5 is a bit harder without balloons
all not needed powerups will have to be avoided for a whole game which causes many troubles
Adventages of playing at low rank:
enemies will be less aggresive and will not shoot as much
speedrun strats like the first half of stage 5 shown in a video will work for 100% of the time
bosses will be dying faster
most importantly last boss will die much faster and phase 2 and 4 will be much nicer for you (patterns less brutal)
if you go for no death clear it should be more doable this way in my opinion

About a run.
Stage 1 - not bad but it is kind of hard first stage for a game like this , boss is easy - pointblanking with secondary weapon is doing good damage here
Stage 2 - easy stage , speed strat at the start works everytime, boss is a bit hard on hard - he moves quicker so he can kill you by contact sometimes or create some other ugly situations
Stage 3 - hard and busy stage , boss is hard sometimes - 2nd form can create very nasty patterns from time to time, weapon upgrades can fall on that sweet spot on the left side of the screen so you have to control that !
Stage 4 - hard stage , in volcano section you can skip 3 initial eruption spots by going fast.
Annoying silver ships section - kill water snake on the left side of the screen (so enemies on next screen don't activate when he dies) and position your ship on the bottom of the screen and go through path shown on video. It works everytime. That kind of ships will not shoot if you don't use shot. When a first row of 4 yellow enemies jump down just wait a bit longer than I did before moving on because you have to create space to avoid second row of 4 yellow dudes. Boss is easy if you are patient.
Stage 5 - average difficulty and very short, first half is free with speed strats and low rank - works everytime. In second half it is very important to destroy weapon carriers as fast as possible to create space on the left because destroying that violet mines that are in a way takes time. Boss is easy.
Final stage - long, hard but fair stage except maybe a fact that vertical big rockets give rude pattern sometimes. About big rockets - not everybody knows that if you shoot upper part it slows down. If you shoot lower part it starts going up faster. That speed strat that I use before last boss works everytime (first 4 rows of big rockets) - the rest of rockets are random.
Last boss is much easier on low rank.

Emulator used: Wolfmame 0.182 Link to input file below:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/3ojlq9v...

Special thanks to Polish player Zuq who recorded video from input file for me