Choplifter - for Commodore 64
Choplifter was released by Broderbund in 1982 for multiple systems. It has the distinction of being one of only a few games originally made for home computers BEFORE being ported to an arcade machine.
The premise:
You are an ace helicopter pilot tasked with rescuing prisoners of war from enemy camps and returning them to the home base. There are a total of 64 POWs that need saving, but you can only carry 16 at a time. Thus multiple trips to/from the POW camps are necessary. The game ends when you lose 3 helicopters or all POWs are either dead or rescued.
Given that there are only 4 camps, this is a rather brief game when TASed.
Enemies:
- Tanks - Shoot from the ground
- Jets - Shoot from the sky
- Drone Mines - Track you in the sky...the only enemy capable of crossing the barrier into your home territory.
TAS Notes
- BizHawk 1.13.0 used with default settings.
- Game is a cartridge version.
- Objective was fastest completion.
- The game states "Magnificent!" when completed then resets to the title screen.
- Flight is done as low as possible to avoid enemy fire and minimize takeoff/landing time.
- Changing helicopter direction does not impact flight speed.
- All POWs are saved.
- Theoretically you could kill all the POWs for a faster game completion, but that's kinda the opposite of the purpose of the game. In my opinion this would be equivalent to a branch labeled "fastest loss."
- Some enemies are attacked, some aren't.
- I tested the firing input every frame trying to kill some of the tanks, but I could not determine why some couldn't be killed. My only assumption is the flying height somehow affected this. Given that it wasn't necessary, I didn't worry about it.
- In what seems backwards as far as a difficulty curve, the first group of POWs is strangely the most difficult because they have already escaped their camp and are spread out running around openly in the fields. This requires multiple takeoffs and landings to pick them all up in the fastest time.
- The other three camps must be shot open before the POWs can be rescued, but this also allows for them to be picked up all together in one landing.
Repetitive? Yes. But at least this run won't take too much of your time to watch.
Fog: This run was indeed repetitive, but seemingly well optimized.
Accepting for Vault.
