Musings on Geometry Wars 2 Deadline

(tags Geometry Wars, game, Xbox 360)

In order to understand my own performance, I started recording my scores vs how many geoms I collect, in Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 Deadline (GWRE2). Here's a graph of geoms (x-axis) vs score (y-axis in millions), in nice black background. (Generated using OO.org Calc 3.x)

This is a collection of 133 games (5hr) over a period of two days, with no pruning (quitting mid-game). Unfortunately I didn't record the geom count on my current personal best score... :-( Higher is better. Since my geom count is increasing at a linear rate, I expect my score to be exponentially increasing, and it sure looks like it.

The points on the far right are probably the rare occasions that I don't die even once. Although I do recall dying at least once on my current personal best score of 32 million. There has to be some trick to boost my score that involves Gravity Wells. Actually, I've become more cognizant of Gravity Wells spawning in. I hear their sound and I think it's a gift from God, at least the Score God. Huh.

Also my fear of moving around the whole arena, instead of sticking to the area down at the bottom, in the latter half of the game has diminished. I credit this as well for my improved scores. Basically I either run along the walls looking for the Gravity Well, and approach it with caution. At the last possible second I activate it and destroy it, hopefully wiping out the posse giving me a hard chase. I try to approach it at a tangent with my direction of fire swiping it sideways. This should land me lots of geoms and score, because at that point my firepower alone cannot overcome the chasers. I also head towards the middle and bottom as fast as possible after the encounter, since things are probably still chasing me.

I am dancing more with the Spinners (purple homing enemies), which gives me a breather. Shmup dodging skills have seem to improved somewhere. The Weavers (green fancy dodgers) seem to be a managable group now, because I seem to be able to read their movements now. Those Gates are a risky proposition as always, but they also seem to be key to unlocking high scores.

In the beginning, of course I try to grab as many geoms as possible, but I have noticed that aiming for the Rockets yields better cost/performance, because they drop high concentration Geoms (+5?) and they have predictable movement. I notice the first Gravity Well then appears at T-2:3x. I bet that directly correlates to my Geom capture count, grab 80 then the first one appears. I then notice that around T-2:00 my score should be passing the 1 million mark. Around T-1:00 the score should be around 10 million. I try to limit my movement to the middle third, near the bottom wall, since I should be vacuuming up more and more Geoms and not just trying to shoot down stuff.

I really do hate those Snakes, though. They block my score-accumulating shots. Ugh. Sometimes when I die, I try to stick to the wall to kill the closest spawning enemy with my shield. If it is a Rocket, I quickly move away and kill it for the Geoms, but anything else, especially a Snake, is dangerous.

My reflexes as of late feel like they're on the fast side (like a biorhythm). I think its because of all the Rubik's Cubing I'm doing, 30 minutes a day every day. But more on that later. For now, more GWRE2. Can't stop. :-]