Monthly Archive

For STGT 2019 week 3, the game is Mars Matrix. I’m rather terrible at MM, so instead I’ve been doing a Darius score attack duel with a friend of mine’s.

I finally found a way to overcome Fatty Glutton, the ever-so-annoying boss of Zones G through J (basically, the 4th Zone on any playthrough). Normally at this point I have maybe a level-2 or 3 laser. The laser, while useful on stages for shooting through lines of enemies, quickly becomes total crap on bosses; their pass-through property makes them fire even slower than the missile. So instead, I keep my maxed-out triple red missiles; not only does this make fast work of FG and its annoying sharpnel fish attack, it’s also useful on stages because it’s a pretty wide shot.

I was able to blitz through Zone K just fine, when I started to notice something odd. At one point in the stage, my ship, for no reason jerked to the right. Thinking of it was maybe a stage feature, I ignored it. But when I got to Zone P, things got worse. Due to the stage being tight I ended up involuntarily upgrading to laser; not really bad considering the waves of enemies (coming from front, back, and below). And then my ship jerked again, this time into a wall. I lost my remaining lives this way.

Was it the ROM itself (I was using the World version, not the Japanese one)? Or my emulator? Or my Seimitsu-modded FSTE? I’ll have to test what’s causing this problem later.

At any rate my high score stands at 2.6 million, nearly 1 million higher than my previous best. Hoping to see a counter-record from my friend soon.