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Here's a few general playing tips to help you survive! There should be something here for the newbie and veteran alike <gulp>. I've divided this section is in two parts - Tricks Of The Trade and Maximising Your Score. If you have any tricks or tips, why not send them in? One last note - most of the tips on this site assume you are playing on the hardest difficulty setting. Some of the tips below don't work if the machine is set to the easiest settings due to the lack of numbers/speed of mutants. For some of the tricks there's a download option for a demonstration (for use on MAME only). Most of the bonus tricks you can see on the majority of MARP's highscore playbacks.
Let's start with a few tricks needed to keep you alive! Most of the skill in Rygar is in your reactions, timing and improvisation which improves as you play and gain in-game experience. If you're a veteran Rygar player most of these tips will probably be second nature by now. But hopefully you'll find at least one or two tips here that you weren't already aware of!
Griffin Riding: This is a cool trick, but brought shouts of "Boooo! Chicken!" if done in the arcade while spectators were watching! I suppose 'cos it was only ever used by people who'd lost most of their lives by level 7 <g>. It obviously only works if you don't have the Tiger power - on the levels where the swarms of griffins appear (e.g. level 7) wait until one swoops down on you from overhead. When its at its lowest point jump up and land on its back. You'll see that you'll be able to bounce on its back by tapping the joystick right continuously. This way you will be able to ride it all the way to the end of the level as no enemies will be able to touch you. The only bad thing is you miss a lot of points and powers this way.
I've attempted to try the same trick with the Dragons (that drop the warriors), but you seem to get killed after a few bounces as they move a lot quicker. You also die if you go too far off the top of the screen.
Moving Stone Object Trick: This is another
mint trick I discovered, you need the Star Power for this and the
Crown would probably help too. To do this a stone needs to be
about half off the left hand side of the screen. Shoot at this
stone and as it starts to crumble move it off the screen by
walking a little bit to the right and then move back to the left
quickly. The stone and the object inside should have disappeared.
But the object hasn't really. Move to the right (about one whole
screen) and the object should be there! The tactical advantage of
this means that you can move the Explosion items further along
the level.
(Download Demo - Trick
demonstrated on second to last stone on round 2 just before final
Mutant Stack)
Rope Shield: I'm not sure if this is a glitch or not, but on any of the rope stages if you kill any of the long-tounged lizards or the Cave Bat's missile with an overhead with a arc shot a shield will appear in the place where you hit. The shield moves as you do and can be used to "ram" into the other lizards. The shield disappears if you shoot again.
More Powerful Firing: If you've got the Crown, Sun and Star powers, if you fire forward and then tap upwards you do a vertical shot a lot quicker than normal. This is sort of like a more lethal version of the arc shot and vastly improves your killing power! This works just with the Sun power of course but is less deadly. Despite what you may think you can do a vertical shot to kill monsters infront of you. They need to be really close though, so only do this if you can't do a normal forward shot (e.g. you need to kill a Drone but don't want to hit a Mutant stack behind it). There's loads of tricks you can do by controlling the vertical firing but these can only be learned with in-game experience.
Another interesting thing about shooting with the Sun power - if you are on a tree branch and jump up high enough, you can do a vertical shot and kill things in the lava below the ground! This is useful for killing the Lava Men or Worms as they are moving out.
When you've got the Star power you seem to have slightly more range firing to the left than to the right. Shooting left goes to the edge of the screen but shooting right falls short considerably.
Experiment with different firing techniques as this is the most vital skill you need.
Concealment: When standing beside a rock you can move into it, crouch and tuck yourself in. This will make you unreachable by certain enemies. The same can be said about standing on the absolute edge of a pit.
Make Time Pay: It's never worth finshing a level with time still remaining on the clock. However, if you collect a Time Item after the clock has reached zero, the seconds are added on but the clock doesn't go down again. This means you get the full points for the time remaining at the end of the level and can stay on the level longer to boost your rank bonus. See below in the Maximising Your Score section for more on this.
Another interesting thing about game time - it seems to down faster if your moving left than if you are heading right towards the end of the level. If you stand still it runs a bit quicker than normal time, but it even goes down quicker even if you just turn to the left!
The final time trick - when you finish a round with over 100.00 seconds on the clock, you start the next round with the same amount (e.g. if you finished with 120:00 seconds you'd start the next level with it). If you finished the round with less than 100:00 you always start the round with 100:00.
End Of Continue: Not exactly a tip, more a word of caution for arcade players. Unlike other arcade games, Rygar was wisely programed to only accept continues up until level 20, even on the emulators this applies.
These are three advanced techniques that you can use to boost your score to the maximum possible.
Stay And Fight: The secret to getting a high 5,000,000+ score lies in fighting. The more enemys you kill the more points you get from repulse and rank bonuses. The more rank you have the more points you will score in each consecutive level, not to mention the points you get for killing the mutants, all of which works out better in the long run. On the first level I usually try to score at least 100,000 pts before entering the temple (with the blue rank and a stripe or two). On each level you should try to fight for as long as possible - some players tend to try to survive by running through the levels rather than fighting. The most important levels to stay back and fight on are the ones with the Dragons that carry the Mutant Warriors like round 14. Each one of these killed gets you 1,250 pts - the equivellent of 12 seconds of a time bonus!
Look at the table in the Bonuses & Scoring bit to see how many more kills you need per rank. You may as well stay back a bit if you only need 5 more kills for another stripe, but maybe not if you need another 50...
Another reason to wait for a time out is it's easier to manipulate the score in order to get the 10,000 bonus when entering the temple (see bonuses) while the time is at 00:00.
Finally, always play to get the highest score possible, not just to survive. I've seen some people do all the above until later in the game when their bottle goes and they end up just dodging their way past the enemys. It may get you to the end of the level but it doesn't score very highly.
Staging Your Deaths: If you get a Question Mark object before level 7 you could get the 10k Explosion object. Sure if you get the Cross you'll get the 160,000 pts earlier, but your not really gonna die before round 7 are you? On the other hand you could get the Cross, the 160k and then deliberately die to collect another 160k on level 7! If you get it on a level which contains loads of Dragon Riders, wait until well into a time out and then get the Cross. This give you time to bag even more of the 1,250 Dragons :) Yep, deliberately dying can get you a lot more points...
Another round that is good to deliberatly die on is round 14 where the Dragon Riders appear in mass (plus you'll need to die to get the 160k Cross bonus on round 17 anyway). This brings me to another tip... On round 17 there is the Mutant Villagers who form unlimited stacks which repeat after a couple of seconds. Staying back on that round after a time-out might even net you an overall extra score of between 100-300k for one life - if you can dodge Death for long enough. However, I have seen players use this trick to get between 1/2 to 1 million on that round alone simply by staying back for long periods of time and using up between 3-6 of their lives. Note that this is probably the last big scoring round before the end of the game so if you're good enough to finish the game on just one life from here on you should go for it.
I personally don't consider any of the above techniques points leeching as you still have to be a good player to finish the game men down. It is quite easy to finish the game starting with just two men once you get good, so this adds a bit of extra challenge.
Time Bandit: Unlike the other two, this trick only works on the easiest difficulty setting. The problem on easy is that on some rounds there's not enough monsters around to build up any sort of a repulse bonus. We will take round 2 for an example - this round's just filled with 100 pts drones and the odd small rhino every now and then. In 20 game seconds you couldn't kill enough to get much more than 500 pts. There's a trick to get 2000-10,000 pts extra. What you do is this - when you find your first time item don't collect it, instead wait for a time out (keep killing things as you wait). When Death appears collect the time item, 20 seconds will be added on but it won't go back down. Try to stay back as long as possible, even jumping over Death a few times to boost up you ranking as much as possible. Now continue the round and collect everything from the stones as usual. Depending on how lucky you are finding time items you could get between 2000 and 10,000 pts. You should use this on the low scoring rounds only (or on the harder settings depending on how good you are at dodging Death!)
