The Forbidden Crypt (Compute's Gazette)
You're a leading archaeologist who's happened on a fabulous treasure. But spiders, bats, snakes, and ghouls guard the riches. How long can you survive in the forbidden crypt?
As a local legend, long dismissed as mere myth, speaks of a great and powerful king who once ruled this area. While investigating the orgins of this tale, you've discovered a cenotaph covered with unusual glyphs. They're difficult to translate, but seem to say something about the king and guardians and forbidden treasure. Undaunted, you open the door and enter. The door slams shut, leaving you stranded in the crypt!
The article for this game can be found on page 53 of Compute's Gazette Issue 20 (February 1985)
Why TAS This Game?
The continuation of TASing games from my all-time favorite magazine, Compute's Gazette. This makes my 40th TAS from this series.
I remember this very, very well. I quickly jumped on this, when the magazine arrived in the mail. My reason...it looked like the game "Venture". Well, it was similar, but not as exciting.
Previous Compute's Gazette submissions include (In order of submission):
Game Difficulty and Ending
This game doesn't have a difficulty setting, but it can be classified as complete upon finishing level 27. Why? On Level 28...the speed of the game goes down to a crawl, just like it does in Astro-Panic!.
Effort In TASing
I was surprised, but this game actually has a fair of details to focus on for optimization, listed below:
- Diagonal movement: Allows to progress forward, while moving up and down to dodge enemies
- Sprites don't always move at the same time, so you can route through tight situations to avoid collision with any enemy by alternating directions back and forward.
- In some cases, performing a Level in the reverse direction to get a different RNG pattern...upon entering a room.
- For when the enemy layout is completely against a straight forward effort, you have the ability to shoot; however, shooting delays about 5 frames. So I have to pick my situations and resort to this when nothing else can be done.
Total amount of time spent on this, was about a 3 weeks. As I progressed, I discovered mechanical exploits that I had to go back and reapply to the beginning parts. Not a big deal, but certainly adds time in production of making this movie.
Human Comparison
Darkman425: Claiming for judging.
Darkman425: Finally, Venture for tired people. Jokes aside, this looks pretty well optimized with some room layout manipulations and minimized shooting.
Accepting to Standard.
despoa: Processing...