ACA NEOGEO PUZZLED

Heads up: this is difficult and will take at least a few hours, which is not the usual ACA Neo Geo recipe.

Unless someone finds some easy way to more efficiently increase your score, you're in for a rough trek to get to 300,000. The only way I found to score points was by clearing lines (100 per line cleared) and by completing levels for a bonus (1000 per level on floor 1 increasing to 5000 per level on floor 6).

This game plays like Tetris. Sorta. The levels have random patterns of blocks that you have to clear off to allow your character (in a balloon/blimp thing) to float up and off the top of the screen, moving to the next level. Most blocks disappear when the line they are on is cleared but there are special blocks that must have their line cleared three times before breaking and there are some blocks that cannot be broken/removed. Gravity works differently, too, as whenever you clear a line, any pieces left over from the blocks you dropped in will fall downward as far as they can. This makes things simultaneously easier and more difficult.

There is only one button for rotating pieces and you can only rotate them in a single direction. Which sucks. Because you have to rotate pieces three times if you want them rotated 90° the opposite direction of the rotation. Tough to do near the top of the screen when things are falling fast.

There is also a lightning meter that fills as you clear lines. Every four lines cleared adds one unit to the meter and there are activation points at four, 8, and 12 units. Activating the lightning drains the meter and causes your character to emit a surge of lightning that damages or breaks any blocks around him, doing more damage based on how full the meter is. This can be useful to free your character without having to clear all the way to the bottom.

The good thing is that in original mode, you can create a save (choose "create interrupt save data" in the options menu) at any time and restart from that point. I created a save at the start of each level and would choose "back to title screen" from the options menu if I was about to fail a level. Restarting in original mode would put me at the save point. If you couldn't create save points, this achievement might be impossible.

There are six floors and each floor has 10 levels. I started struggling to progress on the sixth floor, but things weren't easy by any stretch of the imagination on the floors leading up to that.

Note that the 30k Hi Score mode achievement required that I play a couple levels into floor 2. The 8k Caravan mode achievement came by the fifth or so level on the first floor. Quite a difference.

When I finally completed the 10th level of the sixth floor, I had 275,000. It took me about five hours to get to that point. 6–6 was particularly troublesome and I was stuck there for about an hour. 6-10 took me probably 30 minutes.

I then restarted back on floor one and needed to play through about six levels to push my score over 300,000. I let myself lose after the achievement popped and submitted my score for the Record Score achievement.