Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams 1cc

Описание: A 1-credit clear of Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams. Arcade game played via MAME 0.202. Final score: 901,710 ending on stage 2-3. No external autofire used.

Overall I like Cotton, it's a solid if dated shmup. It's got unique enemy and boss designs and good level design including a nice mix of scrolling directions. My biggest complaint is that recovery from losing a life is really tough. Perikles and the Japanese STG wiki give this a low-ish difficulty ranking, but I'd say this is as hard as R-type. Maybe the difference is that I didn't use external autofire. Cotton doesn't require quite as much memorization as R-Type...but the execution is more tricky.

Notes on a couple of non-obvious strategy points:

3:37 Each of the 6 main levels has a mid-boss and and end boss...and after the level boss comes tea time! Grab teacups to get points. Or dodge 100% of them to get a big SECRET BONUS.

7:11 The stage 2 boss is a spooky scary skeleton who sends shivers down your spine. Here I'm blowing up the two arms first, because the undead are not protected by the 2nd amendment. Once the arms are blown off, then we damage the body until the head pops off. If you just attack head on, you have to deal with the flying skull, and the arms, and the body, and it gets out of control.

10:31 The stage 3 midboss was a brick wall for me at first. He's got a lot of health (lots of enemies in this game are very tanky). The strategy here is: Don't micro dodge through the fire, macro dodge around the whole mess. Duck in to his left after he touches the left side of the screen to do damage, then dodge away when he charges.

12:45 Stage 3 boss is pretty easy. Hang out at the top left corner for two cycles. On the third cycle, focus fire on the seeker shot and dodge STRAIGHT down (don't move right). Then focus fire on the seeker shot. Then repeat the whole process. This doesn't work quite the same on the second loop, though!

15:16 Stage 4 midboss fires spiraling shots toward you. Approaching from directly to the left makes the pattern easy to deal with, you just have to scoot right and left.

16:59 The stage 4 boss has two stages, and the first stage has a safespot. Move forward to where the tip of the broomstick is just touching the cleavage of the sphinx. Then move straight up, to where the tip of the broomstick is about level with the bottom of her hat. If you're positioned JUST RIGHT, you won't get hit by any of the black bugs, and your attacks will take out the dwarves before they fly into you. If you don't use the safespot, it's hard to dodge, and also hard take out all the dwarves, and that makes the second stage harder.

33:13 You have to put in another quarter to play the second loop, which is weird. So technically a 2-all run is a 2-credit clear. The second loop basically just adds a lot more health to enemies, so it's a lot harder, but not in a really interesting way.

39:25 The easy cheesy boring way to beat this boss is to dodge his first pattern 20 times, then his timer runs out and he self-destructs.