So which bosses do you guys use for high scoring at the moment? Which boss do you find it easiest to beat, and which would you recommend others to try if they're finding it hard to get 2.0s consistently? Which bosses would you say are the hardest to get a 2.0 on?
I've used Clawz pretty much exclusively for my high scores, as once you get the hang of what you're meant to do he seems fairly undemanding to me. Although, I'm working on Christmas NiGHTS at the moment so I'm forced to wrestle with Gillwing in order to get scores, and he doesn't seem too bad either - using the tactic shown in tabitha's video, at least:
http://www.scoreattack.net/bossvideo.html
Personally I find Gulpo and Reala the hardest, I think, because you seem to need very exact timing to 2.0 those too. But what about yourselves...?
Strange, I always found Puffy to be the easiest, and I always use her for getting high scores.
True, if you don't do it just right, you can kuss anything over 1.3 goodbye.
I almost never get anything lower than 1.8, but if I she's able to hit me even once, it pretty much destroys my self confidence for the rest of the fight.
Basically, as soon as the fight begins, I dash straight at her unterside and throw her through the wood, its extremely important not to rush to the point where your aim is off or she will probally bounce right back at you. Also, never grab her when shes right next to a solid wall. Let her bounce into it and come farther out so that you have a better shot at the breakable bits.
Other than that, theres no real secret to defeating her, I guess Puffy just takes Practice.
NiGHTS_91 wrote:I almost never get anything lower than 1.8, but if I she's able to hit me even once, it pretty much destroys my self confidence for the rest of the fight.
Yeah, it's kind of harsh that if you get hit even once on any boss, you're effectively screwed. (Though saying that, I think it's possible to 2.0 Wizeman even if you get hit.) I think that's why some people are reluctant to use Puffy, because although what you have to do is really straightforward, there always seems to be a little bit of risk even when you get good at her. At least, that's why I don't use Puffy myself. :)
I can give an extra little tip for good Puffy scores, though: even if you don't get hit at all, the thing that'll slow you down the most is having to "aim" Puffy after you grab her, because NiGHTS is quite slow at rotating her around. To minimise this, you need to always try and grab Puffy from the correct angle so that you can immediately throw her through the next wall, without NiGHTS having to spin her round first. This wasn't something I was consciously thinking about in the past, but this was how I managed to beat Puffy with 100 seconds left a couple of days ago.
Kraken wrote:and Clawz usually starts with 117 seconds rather than 120. Ouch.
Are you sure that's not 119 seconds, Kraken? I'm pretty sure that's what it should be, and as I mentioned above, I only really use Clawz for high scores myself - my top five scores on every level all have a 2.0 with Clawz (!). I always kill him with exactly the same amount of time remaining, too (103 seconds), so I don't think the start time can ever be anything different from 119...
Nick R wrote:The only reason I continue to fight her is that I never really knew how to get a 2.0 on any of the other bosses; I knew that the Gillwing trick exited but had no idea how to get it to work.
I know what you mean, until I went back to the game about a year and a half ago I really didn't know how you were expected to get 2.0s on some of the bosses - Gillwing, Gulpo and Clawz leap to mind. The UK Saturn mag only printed a few 2.0 strategies in their NiGHTS guide, and when it came to Clawz I couldn't find an explanation of how to get a 2.0 anywhere on the net, which is slightly shocking. I assume the Japanese NiGHTS player's guide books explained how to do these things, but it didn't look like any English-speaking players had properly worked Clawz out, or at least, no one had recorded the strat anywhere.
In the end it took me an embarassing thirty or so attempts before I realised that you could paraloop Clawz' explosive mice, and that this could help you win the battle more quickly. Ironically it was kind of worth it though, because I use Clawz for all my high-score runs now and all my best level scores have a 2.0 with him...
Incidentally, tabitha, do you know how to get 103 seconds on Clawz as opposed to 102? There's a slight tweak you can make to the strategy to make it a second faster, so if you don't know about that already I'll try and explain it (I thought you might like to know before you attempt your Clawz vid...)
tabitha wrote:I thin you paraloop the mouse above and to the left before the level gets going?
Actually I don't think I've ever tried doing that. :) Does it help? The "103 seconds tip" I was going to give is that, when using the "normal" 2.0 tactic, you don't need to paraloop the second unlit mouse on the bottom row; by the end of the battle, it'll be too far away for Clawz to jump to and is therefore basically irrelevent. Taking that into account, the overall strat would be:
- Dash right, drill-dash the first lit mouse- Paraloop the mouse to the right of that one- The mouse to the right of that one should be lit, so drill-dash it- Ignore the mouse to the right of that one, fly over it- The next mouse should be lit, so grab it and drill-dash-bounce off it to the left, heading towards the top row- Moving left, dash the first lit mouse on the top row- Loop the next mouse- Dash the next mouse- Loop the next mouse- Dash through the last mouse, grab Clawz and drill-dash him.
I seem to remember noticing a small "risk" with this strat though, in that if you go too fast, there's a point where Clawz will skip over two mice quickly without lighting one, which throws the whole process out of sync and can waste you more time than you'd save. At least, I think that was the problem; either way I don't actually use this strat for normal high-scoring, I just use the "full" version of this approach instead (where you paraloop that unlit mouse instead of ignoring it). The full version only ever gets you 102 seconds, but it seems more reliable.
tabitha wrote:The penultimate post from Gori Fater would seen to indicate that he loop ClawZ himself somehow?
You can kill Clawz by either grab-dashing him or paralooping him, and it's possible to paraloop him at times when you can't actually grab him (in fact, you can only grab him when he's sitting on a mouse with nowhere left to run - if you touch him at any other time you'll just get hurt). As far as I know though, in order to force Clawz into coming close enough for you to paraloop him, you need to have sufficiently narrowed down his options by destroying most of the mice anyhow, and then you have to time the loop perfectly to catch him as he's passing between two mice. I actually have killed him with a paraloop to get a 2.0 in the past, but I haven't found a way of doing that quite as quickly (or quite as reliably) as the normal 102 seconds strat or the 103 seconds strat above.
tabitha wrote:but would you mind if I snagged your strat description?
No problem. :)