Greetings,
This WIP completes the first wave of the Atari Lynx port of the classic arcade game Joust. The flight mechanics of Joust have always been a bit difficult to master, but with the aid of TAS tools the flight mechanics become eas... who am I fooling, it makes them even more challenging to master with any adeptness, albeit a lot more fun. It's possible to flap two frames and pause two frames to get significant lift, but the only way to go fast down is to hit your head hard going up and the mechanics of doing that can be incredibly difficult to get right. In the end, the result is something that is impossible in real life and in my opinion makes it look like the flight controls are top-notch.
After setting the difficulty to skill 9 (whatever that means - I did not see any apparent change in my testing), I start by demonstrating how fast the mount can get from the bottom to the screen to the top, subsequently demonstrating that both mount and rider must be helmed as they crash into the top of the playfield with enough speed to ricochet to the bottom in time for the first enemy to appear. Getting the timing right to be above the enemy on the first frame it could be killed was incredibly challenging as the enemy spawn code seems to have been written to avoid placing them in your flight path. I spent literally hours on this before finding a decent solution.
Winning in combat is a matter of being higher vertically than your opponent at the moment of impact at which point an egg is dropped, the enemy rider disappears, and their mount flies off. The egg must be collected to continue on to the next wave which means 6 things must be hit in the first wave (3 riders, 3 eggs). For this WIP I collect both rider and egg in the same pass. The first rider's egg takes an unfavorable bounce but is collected quickly. The second enemy at the top of the screen was hit twice with a ricochet to retain maximum speed and the third rider was hit at just the right angle to also pick up the egg (this is not always possible; I couldn't get it to happen with the first or second rider). I ended up killing the first rider in the second wave by smashing him at very high velocity after being at a virtual standstill a second before, just for the fun of it.
The number of rerecords in this WIP doesn't include the couple thousand attempts I made in other files to get to this point. I had a significant challenge with Mednafen as the order that must be used to get the emulator to not destroy your movie file is a bit specific. This WIP should be in good shape to play back on either Mednafen on Windows version 1.1 or on Linux revision r144. Thanks for any thoughts you have,
A.C.
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