Cleared the game again, this time with five misses.  The stupid death of the run happened in Stage 4 where I ran into a bullet quite literally from all the way across the screen. Didn’t watch where I was going.  Three deaths against the final boss, the last one happened like half a second before it died.

The remaining death happened at my possibly last remaining trouble spot outside the final boss: The fifth boss’ purple homing shots. Actually, he shoots them two times, once in both his forms. I’ve figured how to destroy the first form fast enough so that he doesn’t get a chance to fire them, but the second form is a bit more problematic in that regard. There is a way to do it, as shoe demonstrates here by reflecting the boss’ drill back at him with a charged gatling shot. But it’s very, very hard to pull off. After some practice I was able to do it once, but you’d have to do it three times in order to destroy the boss fast enough. I checked my video capture footage and discovered that the window in which you have to fire the shot to reflect the drill is only 4 frames. Too soon and you hit the boss without reflecting the drill, too late and the drill has already hit you. It’s too risky a technique to use in full-game runs (unless somebody’s looking to squeeze every single point out of the game), so I went for the safer option – figuring out how to dodge the purple homing lasers.  Since they’re homing it’s all about moving at the right time and I think I got a good pattern for them now.

And in the process I also revised my Stage 5 strategy to give some more points while also providing more safety, so it was a very good day for practice.