Layla is a classic Famicom game that is kind of like a mashup of Atlantis no Nazo and the anime Dirty Pair. You play as a cute space girl shooting everything that moves on eight different asteroids in a quest to save your partner Iris and defeat some mad scientist. There are lots of secrets in this game, many of which are timesavers.
For my test run, my plan is to get as many Roller Skate items as I can ASAP. Each one you get raises your maximum running speed, and you can have up to ten, so there's no reason not to stock up. As far as weaponry goes, I intend to get weapons that don't require me to go too far out of my way. Having too many different weapons makes switching between them take longer, though.
I did a quick test run of the first stage, Asteroid 1: check it out
on YouTube if you're interested. Here are some of my notes on it:
I get my first two speed-ups by destroying some crates with a grenade. It takes a little time to wait for it to explode, but I think the long-term advantage of extra speed will make up for it.
Getting power-ups can be frustrating because the game sometimes doesn't let you pick them up when you're right on top of them. You have to stop and turn around and/or jump in order to grab them. Hopefully there's some technique to get by this.
I get my second set of skates right after riding the elevator to the base. I also perform a wall jump because whatever I do I have to lose momentum at that point, and walljumping appears to be the fastest technique to use there.
In the next room, I shoot a path through a wall and get more skates and some weapons. I have to stop in order to pick up the weapons - we'll see if I end up needing them after the test run is over...
In the green room, I grab an item that powers up all my weapons by one level. AFAIK there is one in each level, and it seems like they're required to beat the game. This one is right on the route to the boss, but maybe some of the later ones can be skipped...
The boss fight takes longer than it should because I was unable to get an axe power-up to appear anywhere. I'm not sure how the item drops work yet, so I can't deliberately manipulate them. I take him down with the machine gun instead, which is pretty fast, but not nearly as fast as the axe - one hit is all it takes with that baby!
After each level is a bonus shoot 'em up stage, much like the ones from Galaga in which you shoot enemies flying in formation. There doesn't seem to be any way to skip them, so I'll try to make them as entertaining as possible.
I'm looking forward to diving deeper into this game. There's a fan site (in Japanese) that has lots of good info on the game:
http://laylairis.web.fc2.com/index.html. So far it's proven invaluable for this run, and I'm just getting started.