Demon Star (Compute's Gazette)
Your mission: to penetrate lifeless areas already devastated by Demon Stars and to transmit energy units back to your home planet. While you are awaiting Demon Stars and Quasars to appear, you are free to convert celestial objects into valuable energy units by scoring direct hits with your torpedoes.
Why TAS This Game?
The continuation of TASing games from my all-time favorite magazine, Compute's Gazette. This makes my 66th TAS from this series.
I remember this game very well and avoided it for reasons of having more interesting games to type in from later issues. So why didn't I type this in when I first received the issue? My uncle had subscribed me for the first 2 years. Because of that, I received maybe 4 or 5 as a backlog for some reason. I really don't know, it could be that my uncle ordered them so that I had a full set. Because of that, I went through other things that caught my eye first.
Well, years later...I finally got to this game, but it was only on the Vic-20. I thought it was cool, but I didn't understand what was going on, due to me being very young and not liking to read the article or understanding the article.
Game Difficulty and Ending
This game has some weird start up logic. Before a game is started, you can pick your level. If you pick Level 1, then you can progress from level to level...up to Level 8, depending on how many points you score. The article, on page 63, clearly states that you cannot obtain these higher levels via game progression. Here, I play the hardest level of 10.
As for the ending...I play one round, since it repeats over and over with no level increase. I do this, while showing all unique content the game has to offer...which is not much.
Effort In TASing (Not BOTed)
This TAS was manually made. I spent more time trying to manipulate RNG in this game than any other technique. So, because this game was written in B.A.S.I.C., you are able to use the RND command before the game is ran. In this cause, the RND value of -317 was used to produce the best Demon Star / Quasar patterns I could find. Even though I spent time trying to get this pattern, there was one more manipulation that I had to control. If you are located on the same block, where a Demon Star or Quasar was going to appear...it will skip it and move on to the next object. I do this one time, and it pays off, since the next object ends up being a Quasar, which is 500 points! I tried to make the game give me two of them as early as possible, but I couldn't.
Human Comparison
Here is a video from the Vic-20 version, as I can't find one for the C64
nymx: Uploading a 14 frame improvment.
Darkman425: Neat, didn't realize that this was submission 9000 if that number is to be believed. Anyways...
I'll start off with stating that the optimization and RNG manipulation is perfectly on point. Nice work on that!
The slightly trickier thing that gave me a bit of a pause was that level select was required to select the hardest level. The type in program as it's presented only allows reaching up to level 8 if starting from level 1, whether by accident (just a small bug) or by choice (which I feel is more likely due to the possible idea of the person typing in the program also wanting to modify it). As the game is presented, this input has to select level 10 as there's no other way to select it otherwise. The only difference between levels is the amount of object density that increases with higher levels as the core gameplay loop is essentially the same. Object spawns can be manipulated to be favorable which mitigates the only real differences between levels. With all that I can say that this completes the game perfectly fine by playing on the level with the hardest difficulty as the content between the levels isn't all that different outside of object density.
Accepting to Standard.
