Time to put RF2 on the shelf.  I got the top score on the US Live leaderboards for Arcade difficulty.  It has a bit of a feeling of being the only guy at the track, but it comes at the right time.  My love was waning fast.  The game really has long stretches of not much going on, even into stage 6 and 7. I never quite crossed into the zone where playing felt like work, but I could see the signs at the border off in the distance.

It’s an improvement of over 5 million from my previous best.  The gain came from an unexpected quarter.  I’d been hammering away at stage 3, thinking a few of those flatbed tank miclus would be the key to a big jump in my score.  There are four or five of those, each worth a million points and I’ve been within 3 million of the top score for weeks.  Harder than I thought; I never did get them all in a run.

The actual breakthrough was avoiding my common chain breaks at the end of st3 and throughout st4.  I bombfested through 4 to keep my medal chain intact.  I did accidentally discover a miclus on stage 5 that I was completely unaware of for a little gravy.

Jet is next, I think.  I need to learn stage selection conditions, but I imagine a no-score clear should be just this side of trivial.