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Kablam! (Compute's Gazette)

A prankster perched on the top of your apartment building is tossing firecrackers on to the street. Your jbo is to meaneuver a water-filled buicket to catch and extingquish the firecrackers.
The article for this game can be found on page 60 of Compute's Gazette Issue 16 (January 1985)

Why TAS This Game?

The continuation of TASing games from my all-time favorite magazine, Compute's Gazette. This makes my 72nd TAS from this series.
This was the first issue that was delivered to my house, after I finally received a Commodore 64!

Game Difficulty and Ending

Because I'm going for "maximum score", I had to approach this game differently. This game increases speed every 20 bomb catches (I believe). Because of this, it is not prudent to start on the hardest level, since we would miss the easy task of catching bombs at a slower rate. Additionally, choosing the hardest level would only get us to a quicker end...because the speed still increases indefinitely. So...I start on the easiest level and play it out until I am no longer able to catch bombs.
The end comes when I can not wrap around or go directly to the final bomb. Even though this game was mostly BOTed, I did play with it manually to come up with a strategy to get a few more...something my BOT couldn't figure out.

Effort In TASing (BOTed)

There was no way that I was going to sit with this game and carve out inputs. Because I didn't know how long this game would run, I eventually figured out a script that helped me to put this game to rest...mostly. So about 99% of this was BOTed, while the last few bomb catches were done manually, due a limitation of my BOT. Basically, I played strategy to time the bomb drops for easier reach. Obviously, I couldn't keep this up too long.

Human Comparison


TASVideoAgent
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #9068: nymx's C64 Kablam! "maximum score" in 11:52.55
GJTASer2018
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A decent C64 knockoff of Activision's Kaboom!, which was a sleeper hit on the A2600 back in the day. Too bad the original programmer of this game never considered putting some kind of cap on the drop speed so that it didn't go zooming off into unplayability...
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
nymx
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GJTASer2018 wrote:
Too bad the original programmer of this game never considered putting some kind of cap on the drop speed so that it didn't go zooming off into unplayability...
Yrah...what gets me is that the developer had such a big score board. I figured this would be an indicator of a higher scoring game.
I recently discovered that if you haven't reached a level of frustration with TASing any game, then you haven't done your due diligence. ---- SOYZA: Are you playing a game? NYMX: I'm not playing a game, I'm TASing. SOYZA: Oh...so its not a game...Its for real? ---- Anybody got a Quantum computer I can borrow for 20 minutes? Nevermind...eien's 64 core machine will do. :) ---- BOTing will be the end of all games. --NYMX

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