#high score bonus stage

[yourfavelistenstostreetlight]

Joel Dawson from High Score Bonus Stage listens to Streetlight Manifesto!

(requested by @paulstarrunner)

[juney-blues]

i think gamers dismissed the notion of keeping score in non-arcadey titles too easily i think. some games are a lot funner if you try to play them with score in mind

[do-you-ship-it-polls]

Do you ship it?

tag: @maxball

[shrimpfriedthis]

Potential bonus stage/high score oc...? If I actually follow thru on her being an oc for it then idk maybe she'll be a love interest for phil (bro needs love man, just look at him /j), her name is Charlotte :>

[boombip789]

Bonus Stage fans, I must know your thoughts on this topic.

Was Andrew real? We know Cassidy was since Joel says he's known her since high school, but there's like no mention of Andrew existing outside of bonus stage. So I wanna know,

[sparkleinjection]

UPDATED REGAN REF I LIKE THIS 1 A LOT MORE \(^_^)/

[pointpilot]

he’s a little confused but he got the spirit

[lucyfeur1999]

Guys give me your bonus stage headcanons I'm really curious to see them /gen /nf

[jayandfreakybob]

Meet the bonus stagers

[al3x-xxxx]

WHO EXCITED FOR BS EP 90 !?

[callmearcturus]

hellsinker: hello! welcome to hellsinker. would you like to learn how to play?

me: sure!

hellsinker: alright, so first things first, this is a bullet hell shoot'em'up with three unique playable characters: DEADLIAR, FOSSIL MAIDEN, and MINOGAME, plus one unlockable character. hellsinker has a unique emphasis on strategy and problem solving with a special scoring system and different routes.

me: cool!

hellsinker: you have a weapon, which can charge, a subweapon, and a special move. there's also a slowdown button. you can combine and time these to do different special attacks. when youre holding down fire you'll also have a SUPPRESSION RADIUS around you where some enemy bullets slow down and you can even delete some! if you get close to an enemy, you can SEAL them, which stops them from firing.

me: got it!

hellsinker: on the left side of the screen, you're gonna see a bunch of HUD info. let's break it down. first, you can see how many lives you have left. you can also earn more lives. pretty self explanatory

me: right. so if i lose them all it's game over?

hellsinker: yeah. well no, you'll get a chance to continue. but it's not like a normal continue, you only get one and it changes the game significantly, and you can lock yourself out of a continue. anyway let's get back to the bars. next from the top is SOL. SOL determines the strength of your main shot but is also your DISCHARGE gauge, so you have to balance that. LUNA just below it determines how fast you fire.

me: alright

hellsinker: okay so next up is STELLA. the more STELLA you have, the more bullets enemies will fire. your score will also scale with STELLA. you can increase and decrease STELLA with item pickups, or by aggressive/defensive play respectively, that kind of stuff. you can acquire APPEASEMENT that will help you decrease your STELLA if you graze the requisite number thus spawning two OLD RELICS

me: hm

hellsinker: finally, TERRA starts at 240. you lose TERRA if you die, but also if you avoid LIFE CHIPS and stuff like that. oh, also, it goes down if you finish a level. if it hits zero, as the next segment, you'll be sent to the Shrine of Farewell

me: what

hellsinker: on the other side of the screen, we have at the top your autobomb status, which can be set to ASPIRANT, SOLIDSTATE, or ADEPT. as a reminder, your DISCHARGE and Subweapon will behave differently based on whether you're holding the fire button down, the state of your gauges, etc. after that, you have the Spirit score, one of the three separate scoring systems in hellsinker. it's represented by three bars which represent the base 10 decimal digit values of your Spirit score. you can get a BREAKTHROUGH at 5200 Spirit, unless youve triggered the other BREAKTHROUGH in Kills, in which case it takes 6200.

me: wait

hellsinker: there's also a Kill score, which can also trigger a BREAKTHROUGH at 2500 or 5000 kills. BREAKTHROUGH will reset the threshold of LIFE CHIPS necessary to earn an IMMORTALITY EXTEND (80+40n pts) and sets said bonus to 200. Below that is Token score, which is like the other two but has no BREAK, and is earned by collecting LUNA DROPLETS (which have inverted gravity mind you), which also slightly increases your LUNA, and DROPLETS increase in value arithmetically.

me: uh

hellsinker: okay, so remember TERRA? so the Shrine of Farewell is a bonus stage boss rush but you get infinite lives. STELLA is constantly rising. there are four bosses, and one extra. your Spirit score drops to zero though. oh, also, BOOTLEG GHOST doesnt work while you're here.

me: bootleg ghost????

hellsinker: because your Spirit score is reset (m=0) you're probably worried about your score, but don't worry, you get the chance to earn your Spirit back in the Shrine of Farewell by collecting Crystals. after this, TERRA is disabled for the rest of the run, so make sure to maximize your spirit-to-crystal ratio if you're chasing a Spirit based high-score route, but its also useful if you're going for survival. hard limit of segment 7

me: wait but

hellsinker: as i’m sure you inferred by now, along with executive fire, the primary engagement of HELLSINKER regardless of which GRAVEYARD EXECUTOR you’ve selected (and agnostic of MISTELTOE configuration) is one of: α) management of SOL (DISCHARGE when necessary), LUNA, and SUBWEAPON gauges by destruction, collection, and timing β) safely managing proximity between mutable projectiles while evading needletype and other immutables γ) proximity protocol beta applied to adversaries to reduce production of danger δ) judiciously balancing STELLA with RELICS and transubstantiation of mutables into STELLA, in order to synthesize needs for evasion and for Spirit/Kills ε) maximizing destruction (Kills), Spirit, and Token ζ) achieving IMMORTALITY EXTENDS through BREAKTHROUGH (5.2k(+1k)m || 2.5k(⋅2)d) and LIFE CHIP acquisition η) again, doing all this while evading and using the proper attack protocols contingent on your EXECUTOR and/or MISTELTOE θ) managing TERRA reducing actions in order to deploy the visit to the Shrine of Farewell strategically, such as to maximize Spirit (m) prior: 1 Crystal (i) = 0.5% m1, upper bound of n = 424i (disambiguation: non-summated) ergo maximal execution miΣ(n424) = 2.12 * pre-Shrine.

me:

hellsinker: alright! that just about covers the basics. ready to start playing?

me: i'm still working on the left side of the screen

user vehemently's review of HellSinker on Backloggd

[yourfavelistenstostreetlight]

If sending more than 1 character is allowed, then could you do these two? :D

Phil Argus from High Score Bonus Stage listens to Streetlight Manifesto!

[theofficialpresidentofmars]

okay so Zuko would be so into (if he isn’t already) competitive improv/theatresports.

like this is the guy that for two seasons straight threw himself at the Avatar with no plan. no nothing. entirely just the hope that he would think of SOMETHING, at some point.

this is Zuko ‘… yes. I juggle.’ and not only that, but this is Zuko proceeds-to-attempt-to-juggle-with-the-skill-of-a-travelling-actor-with-no-prior-experience-because-he-cannot-help-but-yes-and-a-prompt. and he justifies his immediate failure as well.

this is also established Theatre Kid ‘They butchered Love Amongst Dragons every year!’ Zuko. he’s no stranger to the stage.

I reckon he’d be really good at the bonus-point high-pressure games (Story Story Die, What Are You Doing, etc) and his strengths would lie in having all the game techniques perfectly memorised (and being able to give effective feedback at the end of each round), being willing to throw himself across the stage for a bit, and NEVER backing down from an offer. he’s also unintentionally hilarious because he’s an intimidating looking guy and he can’t always commit realistically to all character types but Oh Boy can he get himself into Situations. and he just says the darnedest rich kid things onstage when he’s not trying. he would also have Opinions on the judging and make small comments about the other team’s scores (‘that story was NOT a seven. they didn’t even get establish that the rocket got back to the gummy worm queen!’)

he’d make for a really good Director (three years captaining a ship does that to you), and i reckon he’d probably be adept with the book in Actor’s Nightmare. the ideal position to put him in Space Jump is first and you’ll get the best offers from him when you’re playing New Choice and you New Choice him juuuust enough so that he runs out of sensible things to say and panics and says perhaps the craziest thing that both of you are just now hearing for the first time.

anyway theatresports Zuko when

[totem-but-shark]

let's break down what made foolishs fruit mountain technique so effective because there's actually quite a lot to unpack here. -From a doozer who's been following his fruit mountain escapades from first playing the game to developing his strategy to winning this tournament.

The diagrams two best strengths are it's simplicity and speed. It's a very repetitive technique, there's a pattern to it that when followed everything else falls into place. It being so simple cuts down significantly on time needed to assess the plate, deciding where to place and throwing your fruit as though obviously theres manual input and adjustments needed for poor placements or unlucky fruit spawns, most time and energy can be dedicated to following the systems rhythm. Foolish has become confidently fluent with this pattern and seemingly gets faster every time he plays it through, he doesn't need to spend ages judging exactly what placement would be most efficient when he knows if he continues to follow his system the fruit will continue to build and combine. This of course only feeds into his speed, which beyond being able to rack up high scores in such a short period of time and quickly catching up to opponents even after resets also has a hidden bonus, combo multipliers.

The way his system functions incorporates a lot of chain combinations, the fruit are laid out in such a way where Foolish places each fruit beside its next combined stage so that when one combines they all chain together to create one huge fruit which by itself already creates a high combo multiplier. However following the pattern of his strategy foolish doesn't need to wait to reassess the plate even after such significant reshuffling, he can immediately continue to keep placing left to right and combining, further boosting the combo multiplier with quick combines. Using this technique i've seen him reach almost a 2x point multiplier on several occasions, this would mean that even if he and an opponent were placing the exact same fruit in the exact same spots making identical combinations he would still have a higher score using his speed.

It may seem random or like pure luck that he always seems to be getting the exact fruit he needs but that's simply another trick of the diagram. Whilst there is certainly luck involved, placing left to right it allows him to quickly sort through the fruit spawns to get the specific one needed whilst also allowing room for multiple options and improvisation if it's just not working out by accommodating for this random chance element. This gives his technique a strong consistency to it that isn't present in many other play styles for fruit mountain that are often more dependant on lucky fruit drops. He makes decisions that may appear illogical, ignoring opportunities to combine or shoving a lone fruit to some back isolated corner of the plate but this is because he's following his system and prioritising creating a fruit chain that'll lead to a cleaner board and higher points from larger combines. You can put an isolated apple in a corner when you know you can simply continue to sort through the fruit for another three for an easy combine whilst the smaller fruit build up their own larger foundations on the left without needing to worry about being wedged between any bigger fruit needing to combine.

^ my recreation of the diagram

It's all in the layout, how you're able to structure the plate and getting into the flow of placing small fruit on the left and large on the right without getting too caught up in it and slipping up by missing opportunities or misplacement. Progression is clear and linear keeping the plate as clean as possible combining from one fruit to the next with a clear goal and structure for each step towards a watermelon. As consistent as this system is it isn't flawless and significant player input is required, you have to think quick and adapt on the fly. Beyond this technique Foolish is a skilled player on his own and I have to give him credit where credit is due, especially for coming up with this system entirely independently. The tournament was a blast to watch and he's more than deserving of the win.

o7 KOF (king of fruit)

[shrimpfriedthis]

WITH DEDICATION I put Charlotte thru every bonus stage style I know of! I hope i did alright cause replication is hard and who knows maybe I'll do different styles in the future!

[boombip789]

Bonus Stage but it ends with the original credits song or something idfk lol