Also Battle fuckin' Garegga. Basically the idea here is: what if lives were a resource to be used?
>in Garegga there's something called RANK, the higher the RANK gets, the harder the game gets, and top rank is downright humanly impossible to NMNB or to recover from
>things that increase RANK include: holding down the fire button, picking up items, having more lives and bomb, using bullet sealing (moving right in an enemy's face to prevent them from firing), having more options (things that fly around your ship), and simply existing
>things that decrease RANK include: dying
>so what you want to do here is tactically kill yourself at certain points to keep the RANK from raging out of control
>but this will make you run out of lives, and you only get one for every 1 million points you score
>score in turn is gained by medal chaining (picking up all medals on screen before they fall off to raise their point value to 10k, but if a medal falls off-screen (and there's no other medals on screen) it's reset back to 100)
>however, there's also tons of background targets you can only destroy using your bombs for tons of points, and you also gain half a bomb in your stock each time you die (non-full bombs are still useable, they just last shorter) which you might want to do to gain extra bombs for lucrative scoring opportunities later on
>in fact, whenever you ship gets destroyed it damages all nearby enemies, which is something you can use to quickly destroy several tough targets at once
>so you might be wondering why you can't just hoard lives and bombs, that's because RANK increases faster the more lives/bombs/weapon power-ups/options you have, than if you'd have one of all of them
>meaning if you want to control the RANK, you constantly have to be living near the razor's edge of having next to no lives and no bombs because you want to use them as soon as possible, while suiciding at points where it's safe to keep RANK in check and not lose out on any medals, on top of suiciding to gain extra bombs for later on
>because there's always something that goes wrong in your plan, you always have to be thinking how to change your tactics in the long-term in order to keep the RANK under control and how to nail as many scoring opportunities as possible
>but there's more, while you can switch the formation of your options to resemble a wide/front/side formation, if you pick up certain items in a certain order you can make your options fly in a secret but more powerful formation such as homing formations, the kicker being that it raises rank faster than normal
>if you tap the fire button at a certain rate, you can actually permanently increase your default autofire rate, however doing so increases the rate at which RANK increases as well, and there's no way to lower your autofire rate once you do, so you want to know when it's safe to do this
>the sequel, Armed Police Batrider, would start you off at high rank so you'd have to make more of an effort to lower it and sacrifice more lives near the start
>but it also let you reduce rank by grazing bullets for increased risk/reward
>in Batrider you also have to select a team of three fighters, so when you get hit your ship will be the next character in line with its own shot type and quirks and so on, giving you even more to experiment with when it comes to intentional suiciding to change weapons
Basically, what's different about Garegga is that you have to be thinking a lot in the long-term. Most shmups are very much about in the moment thinking, but here when you screw up you have to rethink your general approach so the RANK doesn't bite you in the ass later on. It's a style largely unique to arcade games where each run lasts 30-50 minutes, much like Alien Soldier, and I haven't seen a lot of games arcade or not really try to replicate this approach.