Haunted Mansion (Compute's Gazette)
An evil witch has captured some friendly neighborhood cats and taken them to her haunted mansion, where she will later turn them into "witch cats". She is out flying on her broom in search of more...so now is your chance to enter the mansion and rescue the cats. The witch's mansion is a maze of corridors, and she has placed the cats in various locations throughout the maze. Your goal is to rescue the cats while avoiding ghosts, bats, and evil spirits.
- I don't get it...why does the game get advertised in the Magazine as "Haunted Mansion", but come up in the game as "Haunted House". Go figure.
Why TAS This Game?
The continuation of TASing games from my all-time favorite magazine, Compute's Gazette. This makes my 54th TAS from this series.
This was an exciting time for me, as I clearly remember typing this in and playing it on my Vic-20. I remember a friend, during the time that I finished it, calling his parents and saying that he wanted a Vic-20 also! So this game was a surprise to me, and I'm happy to finally see it played, as a TAS.
Previous Compute's Gazette submissions include (In order of submission):
Game Difficulty and Ending
This game's difficulty is chosen at the beginning of the game...where I choose the hardest level of "6". This game repeats over and over, without any new content or increased difficulty.
Effort In TASing
My effort was to manipulate RNG, using the RND command to affect the "seed" value. I did this to give me the fastest route for collecting the cats. This took days to find a pattern that I was happy with. Most of the re-record count was from testing out the layout; however,it's not terribly high. The reason that it was so low, was that took almost a minute to test every RNG seeded value that I programmed before the game was ran. Once I found what I was looking for, the the game was pretty much wrapped up.
Human Comparison
This is the Vic-20 version, as I can't find one for the C64 that makes sense. There are C64 versions that have been modified that doesn't represent the game well.
feos: Claiming for judging.