anyway, question for Mr Icarus:
you stated that you can achieve 8 million by the end of stage 3 which i would assume is achieved by a limited amount of catspider milking, i wonder how long you do it for and do you have any handy tips? i'm fairly comfortable with doing this now but if i try to go for more than 3 or 4 rounds problems occur, i either die or leave myself with little energy which gives a great risk of death before the 4th stage worm health recovery. what i need here is a safe method of scoring some points from the boss. with kosame it does seem to be possible to stall some bullets from the nasty spread and then quickly sweep across the screen to avoid most of the bullets, i'm not sure if this really works yet but i don't fancy doing it the way yusemi does as it's too dangerous by the third time the nasty spread appears.
How quick are your reactions? ^_-
There is no easy way about milking the third boss, and I very rarely do it for a prolonged amount of time. Most of the time I start the battle with 5mil on the board, and without milking finish with about 6.5mil. If I go with the milking, I go for about four rounds at maximum, as any more and it starts to get uncomfortable.
If you haven't noticed already, the fast dartspread is partially aimed. That means that there is a way of leading it around the screen for safety - if you place your Shikigami on the catspider's head and start quite high up the side of the screen, you can stall a couple of patterns, then release the Shikigami and quickly move to the corner, stall again, then move to the bottom middle of the screen. Keep repeating this pattern if you can.
Also, you can use the chain that connects your Shikigami as a quick guideline for positioning your character, which is very handy if you aren't going the bullet-stalling way, as you can keep an eye on the dartspreads and their direction of movement, and can use the chain to instantly determine your character's current position and can adjust accordingly.
As for the pods themselves: they always have two attacks. The first attack is an aimed cluster of bullets that should be easy to dodge in the early stages. The second attack is when the yellow pod trail explodes, either by you destroying a pod, or by the pod self-destructing. When the trail explodes, two sets of knives are released in a lateral direction from the movement of the trail - if the trail was travelling straight downwards for example, the knives will be travelling straight left and right.
The most difficult thing about dodging the knife trail is that the pods don't always move in straight lines but rather bounce all over the screen, causing the knives to go all over the place. You can however make it slightly easier on yourself by attacking only one pod at a time using short bursts of fire - they seem to take less damage the closer they are to you - and also if you move so that you are in-line with the pod trail, when the knives are released they should miss you.
The best way I guess to stay alive is to just keep moving. If you are aiming to milk for a minimal amount of time, during the yellow pods phase, just hold down autofire and aim for the pods - this will slow the screen down giving you an extra second of reaction time, and will also shorten the milking phase to three cycles through sustained damage to the boss.
Here's a pattern practice replay as an example of how I usually go about milking when I decide to do it. ^_^
http://bigcore.rsdio.com/icarus/catspider.avi(This isn't a scoring replay BTW, and I do take a single hit during the practice, but it does give you an example of how quickly you have to move and position yourself during the milking run.)
Right now I'm skipping over milking the third boss unless I am properly equipped to do it, and going for the big chain in stage5 and 6 which should be worth a lot more in points. I'm expecting at least one big ALL score from the Cave specialists, which means that a likely top-place score will have to be a new forum record.
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By the way, since there's rules in place disallowing the sharing of complete soundtracks at shmupsforum, I'll pop this up here. Its a doujin release of a Garegga remixes soundtrack called "Battle Garegga Anthology". Just picked up the disc today in the mail, think you guys might like it. ^_-
http://www.sendspace.com/file/3pyv6u