Uploaded March 2016 | Updated September 2026, 3 days ago
(Quite a bit of lag present on this video, again. oh well. Though mostly just the Ice Palace stage is very laggy, and the beginning of Hades Castle. The rest seems good. I hope it's still manageable! Some of the lag is actually in-game slowdown though, which is meant to be there. If you own the Steam port of Deathsmiles yourself you might want to watch my run in-game instead, by downloading my replay from the MBL leaderboard. :P)
This interesting horizontal shmup called Deathsmiles was released on Steam three days ago, including the Mega Black Label version as well as a version 1.1, and I was really hyped for it. :) I've owned this game on my Xbox 360 but I couldn't play it very well because I suck with a controller. I need a keyboard... xD But now, thanks to this PC release, I can actually utilise my bullet hell skill on this game and truly enjoy the game! I already liked it a lot on X360, and now I'm enjoying it even more; it's one of my favourite bullet hells out there. :D I just love its system and design. Also I have only been able to score 317M at best when I played on my X360, and now with improved scoring strategies and better actual play (yay keyboard), I scored over a billion more. c:
The game has six stages for which you have some freedom in choosing the order in which you play through them. After that, in Mega Black Label, there are two (optional) Extra stages; you can choose to either not play them, play one of the two, or play both. Myself I played just the second one, Ice Palace, which allows for a lot of scoring. I amassed more points on Ice Palace than I did on all seven other stages /combined/. Anyway, after that, you play through the lengthy and difficult final stage, Hades Castle, and its two boss fights. You can actually select the difficulty for each regular stage, by the way, which is a pretty cool feature. I select Level 3 (second hardest) for all of them here. Depending on your difficulty selection and the game mode you're playing, there will be suicide bullets, which can be cleared by your familiar(s). They move in the opposite direction to yours though, so pay attention to their movement when trying to place them right to cancel the bullets.
Scoring in Mega Black Label mostly relies on the powerup mechanic, and not dying. Powerup can be done once your item counter reaches 500, and when it reaches 1000 you can be powered up for twice as long. Your counter decreases during the powerup and it ends once the counter reaches 0. During the time you want to "abuse" it as much as possible; you will optimally want to use it on sections with a lot of enemies or big enemies that drop many items. Finding the right timing for powerup is key. There is also a multiplier that increases while you are in powerup as well, and it decreases when you die. A notable section that is good to use powerup for is the rock spawning in stage C-2, where pointblanking the rocks gives loads of points.
Lake Shore (C-1) 0:11 Mary 1:41
Volcano (C-2) 2:31 Bavaria 4:24
Forest of the Lost (B-1) 5:34 Whroon 7:10
Graveyard (A-2) 8:04 Jordan 9:42
Port Town (A-1) 10:41 Deathscythe 12:27
Swamp Wastes (B-2) 13:43 ...Sakura clone? 15:29
Ice Palace (EX) 16:59 Ozier 22:16
Hades Castle (Final) 24:11
Jitterbug (Semifinal Boss) 31:15
Tyrannosatan (Final Boss) 32:06
The run went really well, I did all of the six regular stages NM, yet it still ended up being super close! The enormous amount of suicide bullets makes the EX and final stages pretty difficult. xD The last part of Hades Castle was extremely tensive and I was deathly afraid of dying; the Jitterbug fight had an unbelievably close moment as well, which was a very tight micro dodge that I knew I had to do because I assumed I wouldn't be able to move around the bullet wall fast enough. I had saved a powerup for Jitterbug on purpose so I could quickly finish him off, without dying or bombing; since doing it without bombing awards you a healing item that gives you two entire lives back! So, when I reached Tyrannosatan, I knew I won. :P
Even though this is my first 1cc with Ice Palace included, I still put my score in the title, since I paid attention to scoring. Although it's far from any top player's score. :P I'm also trying a Lv3 1cc of the original game, which I will probably upload as well once it succeeds.
(Btw I was actually no. 1 on the MBL leaderboard with Sakura and EX on for a while, lawl, but any top player could have beaten me. Oh and this run was my first time getting the second extend before doing EX/final.)
...Quite a lengthy description. Haha.
tl;dr version: amazing game! c:
(Quite a bit of lag present on this video, again. oh well. Though mostly just the Ice Palace stage is very laggy, and the beginning of Hades Castle. The rest seems good. I hope it's still manageable! Some of the lag is actually in-game slowdown though, which is meant to be there. If you own the Steam port of Deathsmiles yourself you might want to watch my run in-game instead, by downloading my replay from the MBL leaderboard. :P)
This interesting horizontal shmup called Deathsmiles was released on Steam three days ago, including the Mega Black Label version as well as a version 1.1, and I was really hyped for it. :) I've owned this game on my Xbox 360 but I couldn't play it very well because I suck with a controller. I need a keyboard... xD But now, thanks to this PC release, I can actually utilise my bullet hell skill on this game and truly enjoy the game! I already liked it a lot on X360, and now I'm enjoying it even more; it's one of my favourite bullet hells out there. :D I just love its system and design. Also I have only been able to score 317M at best when I played on my X360, and now with improved scoring strategies and better actual play (yay keyboard), I scored over a billion more. c:
The game has six stages for which you have some freedom in choosing the order in which you play through them. After that, in Mega Black Label, there are two (optional) Extra stages; you can choose to either not play them, play one of the two, or play both. Myself I played just the second one, Ice Palace, which allows for a lot of scoring. I amassed more points on Ice Palace than I did on all seven other stages /combined/. Anyway, after that, you play through the lengthy and difficult final stage, Hades Castle, and its two boss fights. You can actually select the difficulty for each regular stage, by the way, which is a pretty cool feature. I select Level 3 (second hardest) for all of them here. Depending on your difficulty selection and the game mode you're playing, there will be suicide bullets, which can be cleared by your familiar(s). They move in the opposite direction to yours though, so pay attention to their movement when trying to place them right to cancel the bullets.
Scoring in Mega Black Label mostly relies on the powerup mechanic, and not dying. Powerup can be done once your item counter reaches 500, and when it reaches 1000 you can be powered up for twice as long. Your counter decreases during the powerup and it ends once the counter reaches 0. During the time you want to "abuse" it as much as possible; you will optimally want to use it on sections with a lot of enemies or big enemies that drop many items. Finding the right timing for powerup is key. There is also a multiplier that increases while you are in powerup as well, and it decreases when you die. A notable section that is good to use powerup for is the rock spawning in stage C-2, where pointblanking the rocks gives loads of points.
Lake Shore (C-1) 0:11 Mary 1:41
Volcano (C-2) 2:31 Bavaria 4:24
Forest of the Lost (B-1) 5:34 Whroon 7:10
Graveyard (A-2) 8:04 Jordan 9:42
Port Town (A-1) 10:41 Deathscythe 12:27
Swamp Wastes (B-2) 13:43 ...Sakura clone? 15:29
Ice Palace (EX) 16:59 Ozier 22:16
Hades Castle (Final) 24:11
Jitterbug (Semifinal Boss) 31:15
Tyrannosatan (Final Boss) 32:06
The run went really well, I did all of the six regular stages NM, yet it still ended up being super close! The enormous amount of suicide bullets makes the EX and final stages pretty difficult. xD The last part of Hades Castle was extremely tensive and I was deathly afraid of dying; the Jitterbug fight had an unbelievably close moment as well, which was a very tight micro dodge that I knew I had to do because I assumed I wouldn't be able to move around the bullet wall fast enough. I had saved a powerup for Jitterbug on purpose so I could quickly finish him off, without dying or bombing; since doing it without bombing awards you a healing item that gives you two entire lives back! So, when I reached Tyrannosatan, I knew I won. :P
Even though this is my first 1cc with Ice Palace included, I still put my score in the title, since I paid attention to scoring. Although it's far from any top player's score. :P I'm also trying a Lv3 1cc of the original game, which I will probably upload as well once it succeeds.
(Btw I was actually no. 1 on the MBL leaderboard with Sakura and EX on for a while, lawl, but any top player could have beaten me. Oh and this run was my first time getting the second extend before doing EX/final.)
...Quite a lengthy description. Haha.
tl;dr version: amazing game! c:
