Sonic Wings 3 ソニックウィングス3 - St2-1 (1-ALL) - Chaika&Pooshka - 1.551.800pts
Another Sonic Wings 3 first loop clear, this time with Chaika and Pooshka! While most non-Diabloon player avatars are kinda eh looking, this ship makes up for it with the wide shot and the forward Xmas trees lol. And the twin Russians girls are cute too hehe.
Okay actually the latter is the main reason I went back to the game lmao, but the ship itself is definitely quite fun in its own right! The max power wide shot lasts for a while (way more than Diabloon) and has good coverage + strength. The ship still has a few downsides but not a ton either. It has somewhat unreliable bombs that don't give you iframes, can cancel and prevent bullets but not immediately, and randomly stay on screen longer or not. Well, maybe player position matters, but if so I haven't cracked the exact behaviors.
And the other challenge happens whenever you get powered down, as the difference between max power and second-to-max is extremely noticeable. It's not as bad as Diabloon default power but way worse than Diabloon second-to-last for sure. At least it only takes like 3 items to power up to max so deaths aren't as brutal as with Diabloon. But still.
With all these tools and the previous experience with the game, I assumed the clear wouldn't be too bad. And it really wasn't. The first run of the session was actually very close to clearing, but died at the end of the first loop's last boss. And a few other runs shared that fate. Maybe I should have switched gears and gone to the space stage for the finale, but I stuck with the devil I knew, for better or worse.
Another point of contention for me is the London stage and boss, and here I even died a dumb death with 3 bombs in stock oops. Following my Diabloon strats, I tended to very liberally bomb bosses to skip fighting them as much as possible, and here I knew I could bomb the end of the stage too if it got too hectic. Alas, I didn't pull the trigger with my finger, a rookie mistake.
Following a no-death squid fight that lasted an eternity for Sonic Wings standards, I felt I had enough resources for the final stage, even though it was never guaranteed. 3 lives sounds good, right? I expected to lose a life on the midboss but it was very generous this time around and I beat it unscathed whoa. That gave me leeway for the final boss, but even having tons of bombs isn't safe with the sisters because you can die during the bomb, and you have to wait until the bomb is fully deactivated before firing another one. Dying with bombs in stock is thus more likely than with most other characters. This is actually what happened once here, as the laser sniped me even with the matryoshka dolls on-screen.
But thankfully my life buffer was enough to go through this crazy final boss. My loop 2 showing was a liiitle bit better this time around and I could get them building coins for points at least. But the boss predictably destroyed me.
Fun little game. I don't know why Strikers et al. never really grab me all that much during Calice, but this one was more motivating and enjoyable. Must be the cool car, the cute girls, and the groovy music! None of which are in Strikers AFAIK lol.
30Hz rapidfire
Played on MAME 0.259, recorded with OBS Studio
#shmup #STG