Lollipop Chainsaw: Tips & Tricks

I'm in Stage 5 in Lollipop Chainsaw at the moment, and am very lose to finishing the game. Here are some parts of the game I found very difficult and had to retry over and over. 

The Cake-bomb in Stage 1

The aim of this part of the stage is to protect the dynamite-rigged birthday cake from coming into contact with the fire zombies. At first, this may seem easy since you're dealing with slow-moving zombies, but once running zombies come into play, things heat up considerably. I played this on Easy, and you have 3 chances for fire zombies to touch the cake (that means once 3 fire zombies reach the cake, GAME OVER). The trick is to dropkick the early zombies and decapitate them with normal chainsaw swings. Then when the big star pops up, take the big star to charge your sparkle meter. If you think you can handle it, don't use the sparkle mode just yet (it won't last the entire part). When you think you can't handle it or a stray zombie touches the cake, enter sparkle mode and kill all the remaining zombies as quickly as possible. Once you finish, a cutscene occurs and you have a small time limit to reach the exit. Ignore the spawned baby zombies and make a mad dash to the exit to complete that part of the stage.

Zombie Baseball in Stage 2

You don't have to kill all the zombies, just make sure Nick's health bar doesn't reach zero. Sparkle mode is not needed here because the zombies that appear here are weak 1-shot kills anyway. Stand on the bullet refill spawnpoint so when the bullet refill spawns, you don't have to move to take it (it automatically fills your ammo). Hold L2 and shoot with R2, then let go both triggers and repeat. This makes the crosshair automatically snap to the nearest zombie without needing you to aim manually. This occurs only if your aim is AUTO in the options menu so check it before starting this part. Once Nick finishes his second run, zombies will spawn faster and in larger numbers. At this point, focus on killing the zombies that are closest to and in the path of Nick. Don't panic, as I said, as long as Nick survives to finish 3 runs the zombies will all despawn.