International Soccer (also known as International Football or as Swedish version as Cup Final) is a soccer simulation where two teams with each seven players (six of them are on the field and one is the goalkeeper) compete against each other. The game can be played against a human opponent or the Commodore 64. The computer-controlled players have a relatively good AI for 1983. They shoot high and flat balls, try to trick you, make throw-ins and storm the opposing goal. When the game is over, the captain of the team gets a cup handed over by a beautiful woman. --Wiki Intro

iMore Information can be found on the wiki site: https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/International_Soccer

As with most of my manual TASing, I ended up going through this game multiple times. In this case, I TASed this game 3 times from beginning to end. After seeing some interesting details, after each attempt, I was able to capitalize on them for the final effort. On my last attempt, I tried to score 11 points in one half. Despite getting ahead by 8 seconds on the clokc...it still wasn't enough as the game stops the ball at the sounding of the buzzer...thus preventing me from accomplishing 11 goals.

Below is a comparison video from my first full attempt and the final one....where I ended up cutting 867 frames to accomplish the same score of 20 to 0.

There are nine levels of game play. This is played on the hardest level of Level 9.

After playing two halves, the game is over. Afterwards...the award is given to the winning team.

Here is a pretty good run, where the gamer plays on the hardest level of 9. This run ends up scoring 7 to 0.

The game may look like it is over, when all the players walk off at the end of the 2nd half, but the winning team comes out to receive an award. This might be a good place to capture a screen shot, as most of the game is just the same visual over and over. I will leave it up to you to decide.

DrD2k9: Claiming for judging.

DrD2k9: I played a ton of the basketball game made by the same developers when I was young. It was cool to watch this run and see similarities compared to that game. No complaints from me on this run. Optimization techniques looked good including: kicking the ball from farther away from the goal so the players could get back to the starting positions faster and positioning the players before halftime for a rapid exit. Would be neat if someone found a way to beat this score, but for now this run sets the bar. I'm mildly curious if playing the easiest CPU would allow for a higher score, but I don't know that it'd be possible to get more than 1 or 2 extra goals given how efficiently this run scores; even then, the difficulty difference should probably be a reason that the runs shouldn't compete for publication.

Accepting.