Pink Sweets is easily one of Caves hardest games, but on PCB there’s an infinite lives glitch that can be triggered, which trivializes the rest of the game.
This requires getting 4 extends without dieing, which is not much easier than a typical Cave 1CC. I got this a while ago, but finally took the time to record a quick commentary on how to trigger the glitch, if others are curious.
Extends spawn when you destroy 2500 enemies or destructible bullets, and then kill an enemy. This means you want to try to destroy as many destructible bullets as possible, especially on midbosses and bosses. This requires pretty careful planning.
On a good Stage 1 run, you should be able to get the zan counter to about 2000, triggering the first extend early on stage 2. If you trigger the first extend later in Stage 2, that’s not a huge problem since you can make up some on the Stage 2 boss, where I don’t care much about going for zan in this run.
S3 midboss is the make or break section of the run, since it’s very easy to mess it up, and it will sometimes give you random movements which makes it hard to trigger the deaths of side capsules when you want it.
For MAME practice, you can use the following lua script, to display the zan counter when playing, which simplifies routing. This will obviously not be helpful when playing for real on a PCB later as in the video above.
// Put this in pinkswts.lua
cpu = manager:machine().devices[":maincpu"]
mem = cpu.spaces["program"]
s = manager:machine().screens[":screen"]
function draw_hud()
cnt = string.format("CNT : %d", mem:read_i16(0x0c4a3ab6));
s:draw_text(225, 3, cnt);
end
emu.register_frame_done(draw_hud, "frame")
// And run game with mame64.exe pinkswts -autoboot_script pinkswts.lua
For completitions sake, here is my full 1CC using the glitch, but the rest of the run isn’t very exciting.
The game itself is pretty interesting. It plays sortof like Yagawa’s earlier games, but is much less forgiving, and rank control isn’t as doable since you no longer get point extends.
Going for a non-infinite lives 1CC is very hard, and seems easiest by completely skipping item pickups and playing very carefully. It seems unlikely that I’ll get back to doing that, since this isn’t really one of my favorite games.
Stuff from the collection
