This submission is for the Atari 2600 classic, Adventure. Game 3 is basically a randomizer, so we force a favorable seed and win in under 2os using a very helpful delivery tool...
Game objectives
- Emulator used: Bizhawk 2.8
- Aims for fastest time
- Uses hardest difficulty
- Clever use of mechanics to end input early
Adventure is a game that needs no introduction. It was a groundbreaking and influential game for its time, paving the way for adventure games and RPGs alike.
In this game, you're tasked with finding a magical chalice and bringing it back to your home castle, which sounds like felony grand larceny and it probably is. But this small kingdom hasn't developed laws yet.
Difficulty 1 is very straightforward, short and sweet to teach players the mechanics of the game. Difficulty 2 is longer and harder, with a bigger map and more stuff (including our best friend, the bat) Difficulty 3 that we use is basically a built in randomizer, where it takes the premise of game 2 and shuffles everything to different locations, and this is meant to be the hardest difficulty. All those locations are stored in the 128 bytes of RAM so we force a seed that has items in favorable locations, and with favorable bat trajectory. This is why we delay on the game select screen.
The bat basically picks up items it comes across and flies around with them. It can exchange items with others it comes across, including player held items. This can be bad in casual play as it could steal the chalice or otherwise be a menace. We, however, use it to move things where we need them to be.
Prior to starting the run we have a little fun with an easter egg which lets you move on the level select screen, I opted to run into the 2 to "change" it to 3 to start the game, similar to Mario hitting a coin block or something.
We start by grabbing the bat and releasing him on a specific frame and pixel to course correct him a little bit. This path we put him on will deliver the yellow key right to our door later.
Since we have RAM watch we know that the white castle holds the chalice, and the white key is mostly on the way. We grab the key and get the chalice and double back to a specific point. This point serves a purpose; we drop the chalice for later retrieval. The bat has our key at the door so we press reset to teleport back to the castle (this does not reset the game) and use the bat holding the key to open the door.
We then carry the bat to a specific spot, let him go so he can go grab the chalice from a certain angle and we get eaten by a dragon and watch as the bat so helpfully delivers the chalice right into the door of the castle, winning the game while Grundle digests us
Possible improvements would be to find a longer bat path to the chalice that you could start earlier but the more variables you introduce to his path the less likely it will be successful.
feos: Claiming for judging.
feos: Replacing the file since making the movie shorter while delaying the ending is an artistic choice left up to the author, and in this case there's much more impressive manipulation too.
Also changing the branch to highlight the skill since it makes the route inherently different compared to skill 1: some rooms on skill 1 are the same but other rooms are different, and some other rooms are absent, and some items are absent, and you can't randomize the ones that are there.
feos: Accepting as a different game mode since there's lots of inherent differences on skill 3, much more than on skill 2 as far as TAS is concerned.
- Slow down the music:
This TAS goes for shortest input and the ShesChardcore's friendly bat finishes it later. The "trick" is simply pressing Select, which returns you back to the select screen while the "victory fanfare" plays slower. edit: therefore this easter egg is not applicable to the TAS.
