For the life of me I can't figure out how Super Tyrian is even feasible with the late game levels. I can get up to Assassin on normal speed with no deaths, but that's as far as I can go. Can't get past the boss without lowering things to Slower or Slug mode.

I'm certainly not quite as skilled as that Eric guy on YouTube, but even his videos seem to end at Assassin, and probably for good reason.

If some one wanted to brute force it for kicks on Slow / Slower, I did some quick calculations:

First level runs about 10 minutes on slower. 30 major levels with bosses. Assuming you'd switch between speeds during the downtime in levels to save time, you'd still be looking at a run of at least 5 hours on average. Probably more since this mode follows arcade rules for bonus levels.

Yipes.

Maybe one day when I'm unfathomably bored.

Yeah I think it lends itself more to individual level runs than the whole game. Or at least individual episode

There's an invulnerability twiddle that's available on the two USP ships, you most likely have to use that to pass the game.

I think it costs armor. It would certainly be needed for levels, but not indefinitely usable for bosses.

I played part of EP3 last night on slow and it was doable. I think with a lot of practice I could do it all on normal. But the bosses on EP4 would really be the endurance test.

You'd need the lighting twiddles and maybe the hotdog blast one for the EP4 bosses, hilariously enough.

I could do it, but I'd probably need to map a gamepad at this point. My keyboard is still not up to snuff.

There is also a possible bug, where you use the invuln on the USP and fly into a boss, use a plasma storm (there are others) and it should(might) instakill it.

That might be an extension of what I was seeing with the pause/framestep cheat.

My theory is that if you can get all of the plasma storm to insta deploy, it should be an instant kill. Wonder if plain pause does the same thing.

The invulnerability twiddle likely would act similarly. Since your sheilds deal tons of damage, and there is no knock back effect, you can deal tons with it over only a few frames. We might even be able to use pause to achieve similar without the twiddle!

Hmm, so my theory doesn't seem to pan out. If anything, ramming bosses while using plasma storm seems to deal tons of damage and perhaps even kill them faster, but it's not instant, even with pause. I'll have to try the USP invincibility next.

Interesting, the first u-ship seems to give a repulser in Super Tyrian. Not sure if it drops any other specials.

The speed of the projectiles in this mode seems to negate a lot of it's usefulness though. It's not easy mode with it like the rest of the game modes, but it does seem to help a lot for bosses.

So @firefyte, you're partly right. looks like the invincibility twiddle and plasma storm makes for extremely quick boss kills, but only in certain situations. Pretty much instant on the first one. But really not useful once the bosses get past a certain point in health, and near useless against multistage bosses. I could be doing something wrong though.

Here's the video of the first boss:

Here's a few of the later ones:

Also, in Super Tyrian, I was wrong the twiddle doesn't cost armor, but it does cost all your shields. Could be worth it in some situations. It really doesn't last very long though, and the recharge on it seems like its 3-4 seconds (based on your shields).

I remember the post being that you have to be inside the boss sprite. So you mileage may vary. There were also alternate weapons to trigger this.