Mushihimesama Maniac Mode

Lately I’ve been doing more cabinet maintenance and improvements than actually playing any games seriously. I’ve swapped all of my boards in and out to check how they looked after recalibrating my monitor, and after playing a few credits of everything I have I’ve decided to leave Mushihimesama in the cab.

Now, I previously 1CC’d Mushihimesama Original mode, however that’s the easiest mode of the game. The scoring is really simple (don’t die) and it really wasn’t too challenging to get the 1CC.

Maniac mode has bullet patterns that are a lot more dense and interesting. On top of that, the scoring system is also more complicated and has the potential for huge scores. High level players get scores in the BILLIONS. Scoring is based around chaining enemies and pushing counter values higher. There are multiple counters that you need to monitor and use different attacks in different scenarios to push the counter values up. This thread does a good job explaining the different attacks and when to use them. Usually I don’t like chaining based scoring systems but the incorporation of the shot types and child counters make for interesting gameplay.

I recently got a tripod mount for my iPhone so I recorded some games to test it out. I was able to capture my best game of Maniac mode yet, which I have posted to YouTube. The quality is surprisingly good, however the sound is a little quiet. Score: 77,916,281.

As long as I don’t go overboard with trying to do crazy scoring tricks, which I am very prone to do, I can reach stage 4 consistently. Stage 4 and 5 are pretty rocky, mainly because I haven’t been able to play them much. This is one disadvantage of playing on a PCB: no practice modes!

However, Mushihimesama was recently ported to iOS as ‘Bug Princess’ for portable on the go gaming action. Practicing can now happen pretty much anywhere! You have to crank the difficulty up to ‘Hell’ to get the arcade bullet patterns, but all the bullets are there. I counted.

Seriously though, ‘Bug Princess’?!