Created some guides for the Arcade games.
Galactic Wars
List of power-ups:
- Dual Shot. Looks like =. Recommends this. Unleashes a lot of shots in a focused area. Can be difficult to hit projectiles with it, however.
- Spread Shot. Shows three shots. Spreads too late for personal taste. Also consumes a lot of firepower. Recommends avoiding this, even if you do not have Dual Shot.
- Orbitals. Looks like a blue star. Circles around you. Recommends avoiding this also. Eats up some of your firepower on unfocused shots.
- Speed. Looks like a lightning bolt. Increases your movement speed. Begins at 1 Speed. Increases up to 3 Speed. Does not seem to affect your firepower (or at least, very little). Managed without it for a high score. Should be fine to get, though.
- Infinity. Looks like a green infinity sign. Allows you to attack without regard to firepower...sort of. Limited its duration by how many times you fire, not time.
List of ships:
- Pink ships: Fires a swirling pink mine. Perishes to a single shot, unlike all the others.
- Gray ships: Fires missiles.
- Green ships: Fires a green cloud. Cannot shoot down the cloud.
- Beam ships: Fires a beam. Tends to be the last one to die. Do not stay directly above or below it. Moves one of those directions after firing its beam.
- Boss: Appears in Wave 15. See the top banner of the game for what it looks like. Fires a beam from the top and bottom of the ship (not the center, as the banner shows). Shoots missiles in the middle area between the beams. Also contends with swirly mines coming from the right edge. May be a good time for Spread Shot?
Main strategy: Carve out a hole somewhere. Prefers the center. Deals with the beefier enemies first that way.
After clearing out the enemies in a small section,
be patient. Wait for your firepower to return. Also wait for the other ships to be as far back as possible. Seems to move up more often when you are in front of them. Fly in a little bit, unload all your fire power, then return to your safe space.
For beam ships: Speeds up every time it exits and re-enters. Usually re-enters in the same rough area, though. Launch all your fire power where you think it will appear. Do not linger there. Exercise patience, as always. Waited through 5+ re-entries plenty of times.
Earns an extra ship for every 3000 points. Awards a x2 score multiplier if you have full lives. Jumps to x3, x4, and so on if you are still at full lives at the next breakpoint. Loses this multiplier upon dying. (Pretty sure on that, anyways.)
Toss It!
Drag items to their proper places. Earns +1 point and +3 seconds for doing it right.
Loses 1 point and 3 seconds for putting it in the wrong spot. Circled the item and where you put it below.
Book -> Bookcase
Phone, Keys -> Purse
Sock, Bra -> Wardrobe
Can -> Refrigerator
White...wrapper? -> Trash Can
Deals with strange things in the house too: a moving office chair, wardrobe door, toilet paper, blinds, and a spider. Click them to stop it. Earns +10 points for doing it.
The final mechanic: panic. Occurs upon getting close to one of the strange things above. Runs erratically around the house. Stops dropping items. Reduces your score and timer while panicking too. Click them to calm them down.
Becomes very difficult to stop panic the deeper you get, even with spam-clicking. Loses a half-minute from panic regularly towards the end, if not more. Flies around the house at light speed. May be able to increase your odds, however. Watched them panic for a bit. Did not capture every possible path or run point. Looks something like this:
Goes through certain chokepoints in places. Circled the rough area. Spam-click the closest area and wait for them to come to you. Does not guarantee success, though. Slipped through the clicks a few times.
A general priority list:
1. Stop panic
2. Stop moving objects. (Also not a bad idea during panic. Could became panicked immediately after calming down, if unlucky. Only go for the closest ones, in this case.)
3. Return items. Drops items very quickly later on.
Hyper Jump
Cannot say much on this one. Be ready to jump, especially at the edges. Surprises you with a log pretty easily there.
Some of the hazards:
- Log: A line. Moves from one edge to the other. Indicates where it will come from based on the arrow along the edge.
- Bomb: A stationary, flashing ball. Explodes after a while.
- Grenade: Bounces in, then explodes.
- Shooter: Aims a few shots at you, then fires all of them in order. Speeds up and fires more shots over time.
- Laser: Fires between two edges after a slight delay. Wiggles a bit.
- Rotating Log: Log, but now at a slight angle.
- Homing Bomb: Bomb, but now following you. Explodes quite quickly.
- Splitter: An orange grenade. Splits into two normal grenades after a few bounces
- Homing Grenade: Splitter, but now following you.
- 3 pc Laser: Laser, but now between three edges. Forms a triangle.
- Homing Bullets: Shooter, but with bullets curving towards you. Managed to completely circle around and return to the play area sometimes.
- Star. Spins around for a little bit. Fires beams out from its four corners (while spinning).
Breakdown
Edit: Now with video here
Leads with mechanics first. The first most important concept: deleting balls. Deletes a ball by filling in a block as the ball enters it. Try to get a feel for the timing without going for a high score. Can be a bit finicky sometimes. Focus on one block and eliminate as many balls as possible.
The second most important thing: Time Stop Bombs. Earns them by filling in every block. (Turns your wall shiny when every block is filled.) Activates a Time Stop Bomb with 'C'...but never do that. Receives 500 points per Time Stop Bomb. Winds up being the majority of your score. Adds only 50 points to your score for each remaining block. Probably lost points overall, even when considering the value of having every block filled for more bombs. (Feel free to give it a try, though. May come up with an even better strategy.)
Now, the actual strategy. First of all, do not wait for each block to fill. Mash X to fill blocks as fast as possible. Try to fill in the bottom two rows before the first ball hits your blocks.
With that much filled, prioritize removing balls. Fill in the third row (from the bottom) as able. Advises waiting to fill the top row until one ball remains. Provides more opportunities to remove the other balls.
Ideally creates a full wall. Keep it shiny as long as possible. Let the top row deteriorate if 2-3 yellow balls are hammering your wall. Delete the balls, then return to your full wall.
Recommended ball deletion priority:
1. Red. Tears through blocks. Spam X where it will first hit. Might stop it before it does big damage.
2. White. Explodes. Usually hits a top row block, in personal experience. Stop it if you can, though.
3. Yellow.
Ends on one final note: randomness. Seems to contain a stupid amount of it. Went on long stretches of silence for the current high-score. Failed to get a full wall in the game right before. Felt no difference in execution. So, do not feel defeated if you are struggling. Yell at the game and try again.
