Do any TASes of this game exist?
The mechanics are simple - it's a shmup with two colours of enemies, bullets and your ship can flip from white (absorb white projectiles, fires white bullets that deal double damage to black enemies) and black (the opposite) as you please. Also when absorbing bullets, you fill up a gauge that can be depleted to fire powerful homing shots of your current colour at nearby enemies.
The main categories that would be most interesting as a TAS are:
2p, Hard, maximum score
2p, Hard, dot eater (a special rank for killing no enemies. The main draw to this category is timing out the 3rd stage of the chapter 5 boss:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC_m0FKZ5nc#t=4m05s )
What makes maximum score interesting in this game is the scoring system - you increment a 'chain' by killing three enemies of the same colour. Consecutive 'chain's give you doubling points - 100, 200, 400, 800... until 25,600, where it stays (9th and beyond chains). If you kill a wrong coloured enemy by mistake, you have to start again from chain 0. Many of the levels have a section which will spawn more enemies the more you can kill them, so the potential for increasing your chain higher is always there. Plus, you gain points whenever you absorb enemy fighter, so mopping up enemy fire and letting enemies stick around instead of blowing them up immediately is incentivized. I think that for TAS, having the second player around to absorb bullets the first player is out of position to absorb, and to get some extra chains that would require player 1 to move fast, will make up for the disadvantage of having to increment two chains to chain 9 not just one and allow for a combined higher score than a 1p TAS would.
What makes hard, dot eater interesting is that it has never been done deathless to my knowledge. Doing a 2p TAS of this on top of it could let you play around with two strategies at once - one ship doing ridiculously dangerous dodges, the other ship showing lazy, safe strats and how to move as little as possible. (That is, unless you want to make it a maximum score dot eater - then both ships have to wipe up every bullet in existence!)
There are a lot of excellent real time play videos of this game - just go on youtube, search for ikaruga and you'll see 1p high scores, one guy who can do 2 players by himself, dot eater playthroughs, etc. The standard of play for RTA in this game is extremely high.
I will keep track of leaderboards in this post:
http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=366417#366417
