The Stack

I’ve passed level 12 — the halfway point! Enemies here are bigger and more trilobite-like. I suspect that by the end, ordinary warrior ships will rival the level 1 Sinistar in size.

Even though I’ve been playing for a while and seen half the game, there are still mechanics that I haven’t really mastered — specifically, the Special Items. These are among powerups contained inside special courier ships or blue-veined asteroids (how did they get in there?), and they mostly seem to be very powerful, but temporary — just the sort of thing you need in a clutch. Shields that block all damage. An instant return to full health. Automated drop-and-forget defense turrets. That sort of thing. I’ve deployed these from time to time, but I haven’t figured out how to choose specific Special Items from your inventory when playing from a controller. (The manual documents how to select them from the keyboard, but controller is clearly the best way to play this game.) I’ll probably have to figure that out soon to continue making progress. I’ll probably have to look at the input settings.

The Secondary Weapons, on the other hand, I’ve pretty much figured out, and they’ve been essential to getting this far. These are obtained from the same sources as the Special Items, and both selected and used via the controller’s face buttons. There are enemy-seeking missiles, a lightning gun that arcs in chains from ship to ship, a concussion weapon that sends out a spherical shockwave that damages everything in its radius — it’s not clear what medium is propagating this shockwave in the vacuum of space, but presumably it’s the same thing that allows me to hear explosions. Anyway, there’s a good variety of distinct effects that have advantages in specific situations, but in practice, they all come down to this: they let you kill stuff more quickly. This is important. There are things you need to get gone as quickly as possible.

But at the same time, you really want to use the secondary weapons sparingly, because they all consume resources. Each is found with a limited number of charges, but more importantly, they consume crystals — the same crystals that you use in Sinibombs. Indeed, Sinibombs are really a kind of secondary weapon, selected and deployed using the same controls as all the others, but they’re a special one, in that they’re available from the start and you never run out of charges for it. Crystals are also consumed when you heal damage, so that if you run out of crystals, you stop healing. Ideally, you want to minimize the number of crystals you spend on anything other than Sinibombs, because the more crystals you spend, the more crystals you have to mine to replace them, and time spend mining is time not spent on larger concerns, like bombing the warp gate or destroying the worker drones.

There’s a sort of Maslow-like hierarchy of needs at work here. In place of self-actualization, there’s destroying the Sinistar. Before you can concern yourself with that, you need crystals. But the first need, at the bottom of the pyramid, is the same as it always is: safety. When a particularly tough enemy spawns, taking it down becomes your first priority, crystals be damned. Secondary weapons exist for that moment.