Submission #5967: ViGadeomes's A2600 Skiing "Slalom" in 00:26.57

My TAS beat Greg Degeneffe time by 0.21 seconds : https://www.twingalaxies.com/game/skiing/atari-2600-vcs/ntsc-game-05-difficulty-aa-fastest-time/page/3?ref=fbshare

This game has two modes, the first one is a slalom mode where the player has to pass through a series of gates, each gate missed counts as a penalty of 3 seconds on the final time. The second one is the downhill mode, the player has to reach the end of the bottom of the ski course as fast as possible. the 5 firsts tracks in the game are the slalom mode and the 5 last ones are the downhill mode. Each one has 4 different tracks determined and the last one is created by a RNG of frames. Since we are TASers, I think the best track for this game is the 5th track of the slalom mode (Game 5) because Downhill mode could be to eazy if you find a pixel where you can reach the end of the ski course without moving... A difficulty set is also possible so I'm using the hardest one which spawns trees on the road.

If the community wants me to do this 5th track of the downhill mode (Game 10), ask me and I'll do so.

The skier has 10 different positions ( 5 left, 5 right). Skier has 2 vertical positions (left, right), 2 horizontal positions, 2 diagonal positions, 2 almost vertical positions and 2 almost horizontal positions. More your position is vertical, more you'll be fast so the goal is to use the 2 vertical and 2 almost vertical positions to be faster. Changing between the 2 vertical position doesn't decrease your speed.

As Grand Prix [3660] A2600 Grand Prix by ViGadeomes in 01:34.67, you have to move as soon as you can to do not lose time.

Thanks to Greg Degeneffe (always) who made me want to do this TAS.

feos: According to the Manual, the game offers 2 modes and 5 games in each mode differing by difficulty. It should be noted that games 5 and 10 are shorter than 4 and 9, but they feature randomly built tracks, which may or may not be more difficult than the longest tracks. So which should we prefer?

There's another aspect to this game: it allows to select those tracks separately, or play them all in a row if you hit Select and Reset after every track. That will send you to the next one. Speedrun.com and TwinGalaxies feature a branch for every track.

I would argue that tracks 5 and 10 are what should be TASed, and since they both are instantly available as separate modes, each can have its own branch. Or they can be played withing a single movie, by selecting and reseting to 10 after you beat 5. This is up to the author.

So back to the main question, should we prefer 4/9 or 5/10? The game manual makes it sound like the speed increases for every track, but I checked the memory ($0E and $74), and you get the same acceleration on tracks 4 and 5. Maybe the developers think track 5 is more difficult due to its random nature, but this is just an assumption based on the ordering. But Olympic track isn't necessarily more difficult if you judge by the amount of gates alone: Intermediate has more gates than Expert, and I didn't notice any difference in acceleration. Also the second gate appears on the screen at the same frame for all 3 of the above. So I don't know why they call tracks 1 and 2 slower.

The only thing that objectively makes the game harder is trees appearing in the way. Difficulty between tracks is less clear, so I'll just accept this run as playing the highest skill track. A run of Downhill can be submitted separately, or it may be appended to a track 5 movie and obsolete this one. And due to simplicity of gameplay, Vault.

fsvgm777: Processing.