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Frozen Bell
Started by Lance Way at 02-23-2006 12:33 PM. Topic has 9 replies.
  
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 02-23-2006, 12:33 PM
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Lance Way
Joined on 02-11-2006
England
Posts 148
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So Kraken, any tips? :)
What would really help is a bit of advice for Courses 2, 3 and 4, because my top scores for them are noticeably behind the known best (roughly 10,000 points each), which means I must be missing something at least fairly important.
If you've time to explain, what I'm most interested in is:
- How many laps are you doing on each course?
- What's your strategy for breaking the Ideya prison?
- What's your strategy for the "bonus time" laps?
- Are there any really tricky tricks I should know about?
I'm already at 590,000, so even a rough outline would probably be enough to show me what I'm doing wrong and put me over 600k...
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02-23-2006, 7:12 PM
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Kraken
Joined on 01-30-2006
Posts 94
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Ah. Well, I dont have any specific numeric info, such as laps and such.
However, I can give you a general outline of my strategies on the last
3 mares.
Mare 2: There are two keys here: the first being the series of bars,
and the second being the loop ring. The former is more important. The
vital thing there is to drill dash through the bars and create a series
of loops and links that get you through. It's hard, though....let's
see....advice for that would be to go up-right towards the bars while
you have the 15-link ball still. Grab the 32 link ball and finish off
the last 2 links of the first link ball. Drill dash through the two
Ideya chips and there should be a bar directly ahead (you're still
travelling up-right). Drill through the items near it, stop, turn
around, and drill dash to create a paraloop. Quickly turn down-right
and snag up some stars as you go. From there, go up-right, and there's
some bars with stars between them going vertically. Drill dash
vertically, snag them along the way, and paraloop the 8 chips to your
immediate right next (remember: ALWAYS try to drill dash through the
bars. You dont want to grab them). That'll be a large link.
Now, the stunt ring, I usually begin by going up inbetween it and the
booster (dont touch the booster), going through it, turning left and
down, and doing the two downward stunts (down-l and down-r). That
should give you 3 stunts right there. Keep that going. Afterwards, you
may want to consider spending your first lap killing the 4 enemies for
a free 1.6k points. The farther laps might be spent going near the
ceiling, down the booster through the stars, loop left and travel
through the rings, turn back around at the chips and attempt a
paraloop, and keep that link going.
Mare 3: After the snowballs and the link ball, head straight downward.
There's a small gap between the hill and a floating ice block. Go
through it and drill into the Ideya cage and ricochet off the ground
and through the spike loop. Turn a SHARP up-left here and paraloop the
ideya in the snowball ring. Head left and get the Ideya. Afterward, you
remember the loop series arranged in a paraloop resulting in an emblem?
Grab that next, and draw as MANY of the snowballs into a paraloop as
you can. It's an insane link. From there, go as normal. No real tips.
It's really just luck.
Mare 4: The 8-link ball is essential. My strategy is like this:
Go through the trench. Hit the first boost, miss the second, hit the
third, miss the fourth. Grab the link ball and direct yourself towards
the chips.
Chips 1-2, dont mess with the controls. If you did it right, NiGHTS'll go right through 'em.
Chips 3-6 are hard. Tap left REALLY quickly between the first two chips
and the next two (chips 3 and 4). You'll get 3-6 if you did it right.
Chips 7-8, tap left really quickly again.
It takes practice. Hope that helps. =)
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02-26-2006, 2:10 PM
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Lance Way
Joined on 02-11-2006
England
Posts 148
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 Kraken wrote: | | Ah. Well, I dont have any specific numeric info, such as laps and such. |
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No worries, though you might find as you go for higher and higher scores that it's useful to keep a track of things like laps for yourself - in fact, "number of laps" was exactly what was wrong with my strategy in Frozen Bell, it seems. ;) Basically, I was doing lots of extremely fast laps in courses 2, 3 and 4, whereas the better strategy seems to be to take them slower and collect more items along the way.
For example in Course 2, I was ignoring the stunt ribbon entirely and just doing more laps opening both link balls each time - which gives a good score, but not as good a score as if I do one less lap but incorporate the stunt ribbon each time. On Course 3, I wasn't doing the huge paraloop to collect all the stars from inside the snowballs at the beginning, instead opting for more laps again. And on Course 4, I was forcing five laps by using most of the speed-boosters in the bobsled run, missing loads of items (and links) in the process.
Anyhow, after much retrying I've finally managed to get 616,000, though it's mainly my sucky Course 3 score pulling that down; my best for it is at least 7,500 below your best, though re-reading your post just now I think I was misunderstanding your advice, so I'm going to have another go at it now...
| Kraken wrote: | | (remember: ALWAYS try to drill dash through the bars. You dont want to grab them). |
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That's interesting: this is something I'd already worked out for my old strat, and I actually *do* grab several bars along the way. :P I can open both link balls more or less without fail, though I'd probably need to resort to a diagram to explain which bars I do and don't grab, as it'd be a bit fiddly to explain...
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02-27-2006, 9:03 AM
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tabitha
 
Joined on 01-22-2006
Posts 536
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So are you planning on submitting any of these scores? :p
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02-27-2006, 9:51 AM
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Lance Way
Joined on 02-11-2006
England
Posts 148
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I'm planning to submit them all when I decide I've finished with Frozen Bell for the time being, for no better reason than I'm too lazy to keep typing them up. :) I do seem to be improving at the courses constantly now that I'm using that advice from Kraken, though the improvements are generally about 1,000 or 100 points at a time; when I feel like I'm hitting a limit, I'll let you know.
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02-27-2006, 7:18 PM
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tabitha
Joined on 01-22-2006
Posts 536
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Good stuff. Looking forward to that.
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03-04-2006, 1:38 PM
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Kraken
Joined on 01-30-2006
Posts 94
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Good luck. Congrats on breaking the 600k mark, by the way. =) If
you get much closer, I may have to go back into Frozen Bell and truly
optimize the score. >=p
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03-07-2006, 4:20 AM
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Lance Way
Joined on 02-11-2006
England
Posts 148
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OK, here's the new Frozen Bell Course 2 tips I've come up with, as I mentioned in the score submissions forum:
The best approach I've found for Course 2 is to do a full five laps, open both bonus balls each time and bypass the stunt ribbon completely, which allows you to get a score of over 100,000 without too much trouble. I'm guessing that'll be enough of an explanation for some, but here's a more detailed run-down for anyone who'd like it:
- From the start, fly right, collect the bonus ball, go through the rings, paraloop the items beyond and get up to the rungs without losing the link.
- Go through the rungs, opening both bonus balls in the process (see below for my approach to this).
- Beyond the rungs, follow the orange rings down to the speed-booster, which shoots you down towards some yellow and orange rings closer to the ground. Don't bother with the stunt ribbon and other items above, just stay low-ish and continue going to the right through the orange rings and chips.
- When you get to the final formation of four stars and a ring before the Ideya Palace, do a tricky paraloop: collect the two stars below the ring, do a U-turn, collect the two stars above the ring, then head right through the ring itself. (Or, do it the other way around so that you collect the stars above the ring first.) By doing this you should complete a paraloop that snags some of the items in the background, allowing you to carry the link on as you dash to the right over the palace.
Explaining how I tackle the big rung formation would be... tricky, so I did a diagram instead: [Link] ...blue circles represent chips, the yellow circles are stars, the orange circle is the bonus ball, the grey circles are the rungs and the red line is the course I fly myself. Where the red line becomes a scribbly circle, that indicates I'm grabbing onto a rung and spinning around it to collect the relevent items, and where the red line becomes purple, that indicates I'm dashing so as not to accidentally grab any rungs (which NiGHTS won't do during a dash). Where the red line goes through a bunch of items without grabbing a rung, it means I'm just passing through those items to keep the link going, and I don't really mind which items in the group I hit (so my actual movements are never as exact as this diagram looks).
The key to the rungs is that, after grabbing and spinning around a rung, NiGHTS won't grab onto any more rungs for several seconds. During this time you need to pass through other items in a controlled way so that you reach another "item heavy" rung at precisely the time when NiGHTS is ready to grab it, and that's why this approach weaves a fairly drunken course through the whole rung formation: the flightpath is arranged so that NiGHTS will only grab onto the necesssary rungs, i.e. the ones that tend to have a lot of items clustered round them.
This approach lets you collect a large amount of items while going through this part of the level - comfortably more than you need to open the bonus ball - and after some practice I can do it pretty much every time without losing the link. However, I quickly noticed that this method was causing me to miss one or two chips from the middle of the whole rung area, because I wasn't spinning around the rung they were clustered around (as you can see from the diagram). Unfortunately, you need every one of these chips to free the Ideya on the first lap, and with that in mind, I came up with a modified version of the strat for lap one: [Link] The main difference is that I dash past a rung early on to make sure that I grab the rung with the chips instead. The other approach allows you to collect more stars though, so I only use this one for lap one where chips are more important.
Anyhow, it seems there are only two places during a lap where you should lose your link: immediately after finishing the rungs (before you reach the orange rings), and immediately after going through the speed-booster (which is after those orange rings). In practice, I've noticed you can sometimes keep the link going in the former situation, but not in the latter. So when your link breaks at the end of the rung area, you should have a 70 to 80 link if you're doing well.
Wow, that was an awful lot of explaining. :S It's a bit of a fiddly level though, so I hope that's of some use to people. EDIT (01/02/2007): broken link(s) fixed.
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03-07-2006, 9:38 AM
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tabitha
Joined on 01-22-2006
Posts 536
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That was a very helpful tome of info. I have linked it from the front
page again if you dont mind. The diagrams were imensely helpful. I am
going to crank up my Saturn in a moment to try and improve my scores a
little.
One thing I would observe, I think it isnt too hard to connect the 8
chips to the orange rings, and I have a very kind of vague idea that it
MIGHT be possible to ling from the orange rings to the yellow rings via
the booster by snatching items out of the background. I am going to
have an experiement with this also. I will post more about it a little
later.
How are you doing your Level 3 by the way? Im not quite clear on that.
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03-08-2006, 2:01 AM
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Lance Way
Joined on 02-11-2006
England
Posts 148
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| tabitha wrote: | | One thing I would observe, I think it isnt too hard to connect the 8 chips to the orange rings, |
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On inspection, you're quite right - you can basically guarantee it by paralooping those chips normally instead of grabbing onto the rung. The reason I wasn't doing this myself is because I'm always worried that I'm going to accidentally grab the wrong rung if I try and do anything fiddly in this area, but in this case it doesn't seem too awkward...
| tabitha wrote: | | How are you doing your Level 3 by the way? Im not quite clear on that. |
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Oh yeah, I got so bogged down in that Course 2 description that I forgot to mention 3 and 4. In Course 3 I'm doing five laps, pretty much with the advice Kraken gave. During one of your bonus time laps, it really is very important to use the paraloop-extension item to do a massive loop in the area with all the snowballs and stars, as Kraken said. I usually dash up-right through the lower three groups of snowballs, then do an anticlockwise U-turn and dash back down-left through three of the upper groups, then try and connect that into an enormous loop to suck in most of the revealed stars plus shedloads of collateral stuff from the background (and the "unseen" foreground). I tend to get an exactly 50 link off this, though I've had as high as 55.
On all other laps, I approach that area by dashing up-right through the three lower groups of snowballs, do the U-turn and dash down-left through the last two higher groups, then connect that into a paraloop (snagging loads of the revealed stars) and dash right towards the bonus ball and rings, without losing the link.
Incidentally, it should definitely be possible to get an infinite link on Course 3 - I've managed to link each group of items in the course to the next, just not quite in the same run - but it'd be difficult to maintain it throughout, and I wasn't trying to do this when I got my highest score.
On Course 4 I was doing four laps, and the only tweak I made to Kraken's strat is that in the bobsled run, I only hit the very first speed-booster, and none of the others. By avoiding all the other boosters you should be able to collect and link the other items in the bobsled run more carefully, which helps your score a bit and I think is what enabled me to get 49,000 points even though I didn't open the bonus ball on every lap.
Also in Course 4, you can link all of the items that aren't in the bobsled run together, though that's probably quite well-known...
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Scoreattack.net » Score Attack - ... » Frozen Bell » Re: Reaching 600,000...
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