[AC] Super Dimensional Fortress Macross II - Beginner Course ALL Clear - 3,46 Million

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Played for La Calice Cup Winter.

Macross II came out in arcades in 1993 and was the sequel to the first arcade Macross game. Macross II was made by NMK and was published by Banpresto.

The Macross arcade games are actually very good games, which is not something you'd normally expect from it being based on a licensed and popular anime series.
In terms of gameplay the two games are completely different from each other.

Macross II is very unique when it comes to arcade shmups. It was one of the only arcade games made that revolved purely around scoring and nothing else. You have infinite lives and you only ever game over if you don't meet the par score at the end of a stage. The game is also fairly short and has a lot in common with Caravan shmups.

The game has three different courses; Beginner, Medium and Expert.
The first three stages are all different between courses, but the last stage is always the same.
From what people have told me, Beginner is actually harder than Expert, so that's something.

The game has two types of shots and two types of missiles. You switch between these by picking up the corresponding powerup.
For shots you have the Fighter and the Gerwalk. Fighter is forward-focused while Gerwalk is more wide. You move faster with Fighter.
For missiles you have Missile and Homing. Missile moves forward while Homing is homing like the name implies.

You get more bombs by revealing and collecting hidden Minmay items. After collecting three a bomb item spawns.

Player 2 has faster movement speed than player 1. That's it.

Scoring in this game has quite a few factors:
Speedkilling is very important because the next enemy wave spawns as soon as you dispose of the previous wave.
The game has tons of secret bonusses all over the place that give you big score bonuses. The conditions are all different per secret.
Medals increase in value the more you pick up to a total value of 10k. They reset if you get hit.
10k per bomb remaining at the end of stages.
Small and big point items you get for shooting down enemies and enemy waves.
Tick points.

Clearing this game is mostly only difficulty in the sense that getting hit makes you lose all your power. You're pretty screwed if that happens in a place where you can't quickly recover.
You should clear automatically if you know where all the secret bonuses are.

Optimal stage 3 iceberg destruction requires a different autofire rate than 30 hertz, iirc it was something like 12,3 hertz.

Shmupmame and Retroarch have an emulation issue in stage 3 where the powerups become invisible underneath the battleship layer.
Newest Mame fixes this but the game has a stupid amount of input lag on it, so pick your poison.

This game has the trademark NMK programming jank.
The 50k secret bonus in stage 4 for destroying two red mechs at the same time is incredibly bizarrely programmed. The way they did it was that they cloned the mechs underneath the mechs when you're destroying them and the clones also make clones. This causes a glitch though where you can trigger the bonus multiple times even though you're not supposed to. At max you can trigger the bonus like 4 times but it's like a pixel and frame perfect setup or something like that. This is most likely where the secret score from the world record comes from.
Sometimes score bonuses don't get added to your score even though you triggered them and they show up on screen.
You get more tick points on certain pixels for some bizarre reason.

Stage 3 was a bit sub-optimal. I could get like 980k there.

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