Submission #8211: PearlASE's Arcade Raiden Fighters "maximum score" in 26:56.12

Raiden Fighters is an arcade shmup/STG released in 1996 by Seibu Kaihatsu, taking a spin on the very popular Raiden series from the early 90's, Raiden Fighters is a more bullet heavy game and focuses more on extreme precision in its' scoring systems rather than memorizing where one specific tank spawns so it doesnt insta-snipe you frame 1.

MD5 HASH : f90324bf855acf8f02418e8b231f99db

All defaults.

Raiden Fighters runs on a specific type of arcade board that compresses it's audio.

When first running the game, you have to sit through a 999 "second" countdown as the game uncompresses it's audio.

When the timer reaches 0, set the DIP Switch of "JP1" to ON.

Restart the game, and then you can start the movie.

Raiden Fighters takes place within 7 increasingly difficult stages full of secrets and scoring opportunities. On stages 3, 6, and 7 is what the game calls "Missions" which follow a slightly different scrolling approach to the rest of the game. There are also plenty of ships to choose from in RF, a total of 7 unique ships are available to select, as well as the "Slave" being the 8th ship. The slave is normally a power-up you collect, it follows you around and blocks bullets. Picking the slave as your main ship gives the player a very small hitbox and a rather large "graze-box" which will be covered later. For this TAS I am using Slave, specifically the Judge Spear variant as it is the fastest ship in the entire game.

The stick moves the ship as you would expect.

Button 1 is your shot, you have a max fire-rate that is pretty attainable by aa human, so no autofire shenanigans here. However, I still use autofire so that way I don't need to manually tap the button every certain amount of frames.

Button 2 is your bomb, a very powerful limited resource that deletes bullets in it's path. You are not invincible during the bomb, which is very important.

Oh baby now we got the good stuff. Raiden Fighters is a pretty unique game for 1996, almost all of it's scoring techniques are secrets that you need to dig through the stages to find and optimally route. Enemy kill values are rather low for this reason, a lot of your score will come from knowing every secret and executing them perfectly, let's start with:

Medals. The primo scoring method most players will encounter when playing this game. At first, silver little medals will spawn; ranging values from 10-90 points. When you collect a slave powerup, they spawn as blue medals, ranging 100 to 900 and when you have 2 slaves, the value ranges from 1,000 to 9,000 points.

When all 3 "tiers" are maxed out at 9,000 points, large gold medals will appear from now on, giving 10,000 points regardless of slave stock. HOWEVER! there is a big secret with these big boys.

If you get 9 large gold medals onscreen at once, they will all explode and disappear. Putting you into a permanent "100k medal mode". In this state, gold medal value will chain from 10,000 points to a whopping 100,000 points. If one medal escapes the screen, the value will then reset to 10,000 points. This is a very big chunk of this movies score so please enjoy the shiny things.

Now the real chad bonuses appear.

Through every stage are various text based secrets, when you accomplish a certain action, you're awarded score and text will appear on the top of the screen. Let's cover them all in detail!

"QUICK SHOT!" When you destroy certain marked enemies fast enough, you are awarded a good sum of points, ranging from 10k to 100k.

"DESTROYED AT A TIME!" Certain targets, when destroyed within about 60 frames of eachother, will award you 100k.

"DISCOVERED THE FAIRY!" Throughout every stage, doing certain actions (such as destroying all parts of a tank and letting it almost escape the screen) will spawn a fairy! This fairy will float around and give you a free bomb. Collecting the fairy will give 100k.

"KILLED THE FAIRY!" When shot enough, the fairy dies and makes a sad sound. Gives 10 points, and is never done in this movie.

"DISCOVERED THE MICLUS!" When you hover over certain vague spots of the stage of perform specific actions, this little guy will pop out from the background. Shooting him will spawn 9 medals and give 100k when fully depleted. In total the miclus at most gives 1 million points.

"DEFENDED THE HOUSE!" In stage 1 ONLY, the big boss tank will shoot it's cannon at background houses. This isn't just for show, those bullets have a hitbox! If you can despawn the bullet you're awarded 100k points.

"DESTROYED HOVERSHIP FIRST!" In stage 3, if you destroy the hovership before the tanks reach it, each tank will give 10k points when destroyed.

This is a simple one but someone will get mad if I don't mention it: Collecting powerups or slaves at max stock/power gives 5k.

Hoo boy, graze. Any TAS of a shmup with graze is bound to be rather hectic, and Raiden Fighters is no different; because it has "Graze Chaining"

Now some of you may have seen the previous Touhou TAS'es here, graze every bullet as it spawns for big score right? Raiden Fighters works differently. There are two player states, grazing and not grazing. It does not matter how many bullets are in your graze hitbox, you're only awarded score for being in the grazing state.

Now how does graze score work? Well, in a game with lightning fast bullets and a very fast player character, Seibu decided to do some trolling. When you are in the grazing state, you are awarded score per frame, starting at 10 points and increasing by 10 every frame, maxing out at 1,110 points per frame. If you stop grazing for a few frames at 500 points, then start grazing the next frame, your value will be 510. It does not bleed over time that you're not grazing, with one exception:

If you don't graze for 30 frames, the chain will reset back to 0 and you need to spend another 111 frames grazing to max it out again.

This creates some very interesting routes where I skip out on grazing for 15 frames to dash across the screen to tag a single bullet to reset that timer so I can keep grazing at 1,110 points. It's all about the long term score gain rather than the short term!

On Stages 3,6 and 7; you're awarded a bonus based on the destruction percentage and the medals you've collected in each "chunk" Since I get 100% on all 3 mission stages, every medal I collect is worth another 10,000 points to my total.

When 1CC'ing the game, you get 1,000,000 points.

About 80% of grazing I do in this movie cannot be performed by a human. the amount of frame perfect taps one would need to do is astronomical. As a whole, this is a movement heavy movie, so you'll see heaps of inhuman dodging to maximize graze.

Throughout this movie, there are surely places where I miss a few frames of graze here and there. This amounts to a small amount of score in the long term, but shows this movie is not fully maxed out. I don't think it could reach 76,000,000 though.

This score surpasses the WR of 56,192,730 points, ending at 75,319,350 points.

The real WR was set in December of 2015, played by Japanese player SOF-WTN.

Please play this game! It's a wonderful one and is extremely fun.

feos: Claiming for judging.

feos: Trimmed a bit of empty input at the end.

Here's a movie that generates the correct SaveRAM for this run (not necessary to run it, just a confirmation). Though I didn't need to set the DIP Switch of "JP1" to ON for the game to start upon reboot.

Great work, accepting.

fsvgm777: Processing!