Dig Dug Arrangement is one of the games included in Namco Classic Collection Vol. 2 which is a collection of six games released for Arcades in 1996 that consists of Pac-Man, Rally-X, and Dig Dug. Both volumes are notable for introducing the "Arrangement" series which are new takes of the game named after. These often introduce power-ups, new enemies & variants, a variety of level themes, boss fights, and simultaneous co-op. This is the third entry in the Dig Dug series and returns to the gameplay of the first while expanding upon it by introducing all of what was mentioned above, unlike its previous two entries, this one has a ending which plays out after Round 50.

This TAS aims for fastest completion with 2 players. Note that the graphics during the transition to the Moon has some issues and for the TAS, only affect the bottom row of the screen but isn't too distracting since the full animation is skipped.

While the differences between solo and 2 player aren't too drastic, here are the important changes: more enemies in most rounds, (For ex. the first round in single player has 4 while in 2P there's 6) more Boss HP, and a 6 frame slower transition to rounds compared to solo (12f) because of the VS results (18f) after every round.

Killing the enemies with the air pump is the fastest method for the most part but for certain rounds such as Round 5, a Cosmo Ball (the balls with arrows on them) is used to clear out the enemies that are further away from the players and focus on other enemies. In some rounds, it's better to just let the enemies crush themselves rather then directly killing them with the air pump. With other rounds, one of the players will stall the second-to-last enemy to make sure the last remaining enemy doesn't try to run away since chasing after them would waste time. There's also 2 (technically 3) rounds where the 2 players are trapped away from the enemies and can't dig their way out, with no choice, resorts to having to waiting until the enemies gravitate towards them. These are the slowest rounds in the whole game because of that. The last of the waiting rounds, Round 42, has a tons of boulders but it isn't worth getting them out the way because it'll waste time and the air pump can go through boulders/rocks once the enemies are close in range. Optimization for this game heavily relies on RNG manipulation which is done by either making the players go in specific paths or when a round is beaten, primarily Round 1 which affects all RNG in the game aside from the bosses which is just done by in a similar matter to the levels.

There's 5 fights throughout the game with only 2 of them requiring a explosion to damage the big boss and the other 3 being Ray Guns which are more faster thanks to the ability to shoot bullets with each player. The difficult part is having to space out the robots so that any explosion doesn't get them along with making sure the boss itself moves towards the ideal direction that the explosion radius can touch which has a larger hitbox than what's displayed on screen. Whenever a boss is damaged in the Ray Gun fights, they have a 31 frame period where the boss is invincible and nothing can damage it until that period runs out. Specifically for the Ray Gun fights, there's a weird behavior which only happens if there's 2 bullets on screen and one of them is going towards the boss while the other is after an enemy that can betray the boss' 31 frames of invincibility and drain its HP a little earlier than intended.

The items suffers from under-utilization in the run due to the rounds being beaten faster and than the time needed for any item to spawn in. One of the items the players can get is a pair of boots which increases the player's movement speed. For all items, they stay active for the rest of the game until the player dies or if they pick up a lock which keeps the power-up active even after death. The downside of aiming for the boots is that not only will you lose time in order to pick them up, but also hope that the boots spawn in and not a different item as well as losing the ideal enemy movement. Another major problem is that if the players goes deathless for 6 rounds straight then a item called the "Yellow Scales" spawns in which is the worst item to get because upon getting it, it will spawns a bunch of rings plus necklaces, after that, killing a enemy will drop a ring and the main reason to why this is a big deal is because the round doesn't end until the rings either despawn or are collected.

Other Comments: That's pretty much it, I have plans for Pac-Man Arrangement and as well Rally-X Arrangement so expect to see those in the future, maybe.

feos: Claiming for judging.

feos: Accepting.

Spikestuff: Processing...