This is an NES demonstration ROM from 2012 which was meant to showcase that the direct porting of classic Intellivision games onto an NES-on-a-chip unit could be done. It was made by Carl Mueller Jr, the same guy who developed the original Intellivision Lives! compilation for PC and Mac. While a technically impressive feat, I would personally stick to the original versions. This TAS plays through the game titled Adventure (the original title of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Cloudy Mountain was not used for licensing reasons) in record time. Here is an excellent research video on the history of this ROM for further background:
Highlights
- Major skip glitch
- Takes intentional damage
- Uses hardest difficulty
- Genre: Action/Adventure
Difficulty
The difficulty selected affects the speed of enemies and the number of arrows you get from quivers. This TAS played on the hardest difficulty, called "Hero" difficulty.
Differences in this Port
- The NES field of view is too narrow to display the wider resolution of Intellivision games. Thus, a lateral screen scrolling feature was added.
- All tools are available in the player's inventory from the start, meaning you can traverse rivers, forests, and gates from the start of the game.
- You can stand over any object, whether it be a tool, skull, quiver of arrows, or exit ladder, to exit to the map screen.
- For some reason, executing the corner skip instantly puts you inside Cloudy Mountain, a shortcut which was used in this TAS.
Cloudy Mountain
All we need to do is find both pieces of "The Crown of Kings", each being guarded by a winged dragon, and we win. The first dragon we encounter must be killed using all three of our arrows; otherwise, escaping death is impossible. If we want to get both crown halves as fast as possible, both dragons must be adjacent to each other, one of which must also be adjacent to the start, AND all of the connecting corridors must be straight. All three of these criteria were met on the very first RNG seed it is possible to enter Cloudy Mountain, which is insanely lucky from a TASing standpoint. I used this port's screen scrolling feature to scroll the first dragon's death sprite offscreen faster to save 1 frame.