https://peertube.linuxrocks.online/videos/watch/073f2416-fe34-433c-9f6c-46b9f7cf0ada Route: ACEHLQV Score: 12,044,100 Too many videos of Darius Gaiden on the internet feature blatant rapidfire cheats. You really are missing out on much of the depth--part of the thrill that the game was originally designed around--when you use rapidfire in Darius Gaiden. At the very least, the game certainly was NOT designed around the insane fire rate accessed as a cheat in the SEGA Saturn port. This scoring run demonstrates how to deal with everything on the route ACEHLQV without bombing and how to milk bosses safely without rapidfire abuse. Darius Gaiden has an adaptive difficulty system which makes the game harder as you destroy boss body parts. It also increases when power-ups are collected at max level (5000pt bonus), every time the shot button is pressed, and by some other factors, but most of these are minor compared to blowing up boss body parts. As the difficulty increases, bosses and minibosses control orbs gain more health, bosses fire larger and faster bullets, enemies in general fire more bullets, and enemies appear in larger waves. You may have heard the myth before that shot power level also affects the adaptive difficulty, but this is incorrect. You may still want to regulate your shot power to make capturing minibosses easier, however. White bullets do more damage than the green, penetrating ones, which also pass through control orbs and damage the minibosses' bodies. This makes a huge difference for the minibosses of stages 6 and 7. Why does all this difficulty stuff matter? When you're playing for score, minibosses are important because they're worth 200,000 points apiece when captured. Boss body parts are worth 30,000 points apiece. When the difficulty is too high, miniboss control orbs have too much health, and in crowded stages it can become impossible to dislodge the orbs without killing them. It turns out that you can get far more points by skipping trying to capture the miniboss in the final stage and instead destroying as many boss body parts as you can. It is possible, though extremely difficult, to capture Zone Q's miniboss at its highest rank level. However, on any other stage 6 Zone but Q, it's pretty much impossible to capture it safely when it has that much health. As a final scoring secret, Neon Light Illusion's tentacles give more points when you destroy them closer to the body. The very bottom tentacle, in particular, goes from a paltry 100 points if you destroy it at the tip to a whopping 204,800 points if you destroy it at its very base. The top tentacle is worth 51,200 points at its base (it is even possible to destroy it one segment closer for 102,400 points, but this is extremely difficult and requires pixel-perfect precision and some luck). Together, that's an equivalent of FIVE maximum-value gray point medals! As the tentacles do not count as normal rank-increasing body parts and are non-optional targets, it is very important to get as many points as you can from them. In this run I have destroyed as many boss body parts as I could without increasing the rank so much that the stage 6 miniboss is too difficult for me to capture consistently. After that, I milk the final two bosses for all their worth, destroying as many body parts as possible. I unfortunately missed one of Risk Storage's ribs (the final two are ridiculously difficult to destroy) and didn't quite destroy Neon Light Illusion's top tentacle at its base (25,600 lost points). I also had below-average gray medal luck in this playthrough. When I find the motivation to record this again, I will be getting a much higher score (250,000 extra points at least, 350,000-ish if lucky). Recorded in MAMEUI 0.141u2 using the ROMset found in the PC version of Taito Legends 2. Darius Gaiden © 1994 Taito Tue, 07 Jul 2026 06:30:44 GMT https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html PeerTube - https://peertube.linuxrocks.online https://peertube.linuxrocks.online/client/assets/images/icons/icon-1500x1500.png https://peertube.linuxrocks.online/videos/watch/073f2416-fe34-433c-9f6c-46b9f7cf0ada All rights reserved, unless otherwise specified in the terms specified at https://peertube.linuxrocks.online/about and potential licenses granted by each content's rightholder.