Score Milking

A tactic -- often an exploit -- in a videogame with Scoring Points that provides you with a very rapid or near-infinite stream of points. Some instances of Score Milking are the result of Good Bad Bugs, other times it's just Gameplay Derailment.

Your Mileage May Vary on how fun this is. Some find it a neat and advanced way to improve one's scores, others (especially in the case of milking bosses) find it repetitive and tedious.

See Infinite 1-Ups for the Video Game Lives equivalent, and Level Grinding, for the RPG equivalent.

Examples of Score Milking include:

• Battle Garegga has two such scoring mines:
  • Stage 2: There's a castle that, when hit with a Smart Bomb, releases a flock of flamingoes. Shooting them with your main weapon will yield some points, but shooting them with another Smart Bomb will result in even more points. Whereas most players have about 600,000-1,000,000 points by the time they get to the stage 2 boss, it's possible to have 3 million points before you even get halfway through the stage if you have the right ship and enough bombs.
  • Stage 7: The midboss Black Heart mkII, in several of its attack patterns, spits out a continous stream of grenades. At times, it will suddenly fire a dense cloud of grenades. Hitting them with your bomb, combined with drawing out this battle, is a great way to get millions of points on this boss alone.
• In Giga Wing, you collect medals to raise your multiplier. Small flying enemies drop medals that are worth n+5 (n being the current value of a medal) medals, and hitting enemies with reflected bullets will yield a medal worth n+1 medals per hit. But in Stage 4, hitting a particular group of targets in the right order can yield giant medals that add n+100 to your medal count. There's also a couple medal fountains here.
• Gradius V's Stage 4 is a Womb Level with regenerating walls. At one point, there is a long, screen-high regenrating wall; continously pounding at it can earn you several hundred thousand points.
• Time Crisis 3 has the giant plane in Stage 1 Area 3. Shooting the cockpit of it doesn't raise your combo, however, it does contribute to your no-miss streak, so continously hitting it allows you to get plenty of no-miss bonuses.
• Any song in the DJMAX series from DJMAX Portable 2 onwards with hold notes. A hold note, instead of being counted as 1 or 2 notes in those games, will raise the combo at a rate of 1 per 1/16th note, so to hit a hold note is, from a scoring point of view, like hitting many notes. Thus, if you like seeing huge scores, it's in your interest to pick songs that have a lot of hold notes.
  • DJMAX Technika continues the trend with hold notes and drag nodes; the best scoring sets are those with very long hold notes. However, in Technika 2, this sort of milking is Nerfed in two ways: You no longer generate points while you hold or drag a note, and all songs have a maximum score of 300,000 (before the near-pointless Fever bonus).
• Battle Bakraid has a multiplier system for destroying large enemies. You can exploit it on the Stage 1 boss to have as many as 11 million points by the end of it.
• All Knuckles or Rouge stages in Sonic Adventure 2 can allow the player to reach the cap of 999 rings. All one has to do is randomly dig into the ground.
• Sonic 3 and Knuckles
  • At the end of the first Act in most zones, there is a goalpost that you can bounce indefinitely to score points. Since the clock stops after you defeat the boss, the only thing stopping you is your own lack patience.
  • At the beginning of the Launch Base Zone of Sonic 3, you can get a ton of points by standing in a tripwire which sends a limitless supply of Flybot767s to kamikaze attack you, and going into a spin dash. The bird-brains will fly into you and break; the first one is worth 100 points, the second 200, the third 500, the fourth through fifteenth 1000 each, and the sixteenth and onward a whopping 10000 points. This trick also doubles as a way to gain Infinite 1-Ups; after you lose a life from exceeding 10 minutes, you can do it all over again, with more lives than you started out with. See here.
• Glider 4.0 let you shoot down the respawning balloons/copters/darts for points. There were no points for shooting enemies in Glider PRO.
• Star Fox 64 - There's a couple of stages where you can shoot things for extra points, making it much easier to get a medal on the stage.
• Death Smiles averts boss milking by simply freezing your score during boss battles.
• Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 has a contiguous power line around the skate park in Rio. It's trivial to keep grinding the same wire while doing flips, because the balance meter resets after each flip.