Submission #3855: goofydylan8's NES Fisher-Price - Firehouse Rescue in 10:59.13

In this game a new fireman must drive from house to house saving people advancing his career from firefighter all the way up to Chief.

For my first submission that has no goals further than vault tier I present a kindergarten level Fisher-Price game. The goal of this game is to drive around a maze of a town to reach various houses to save the people from a non-existent fire.

When driving around the maze your velocity is a constant 1 pixel per frame so to win the driving stage you must simple determine the shortest route. When driving you are always placed in the middle of the road which can be used for two benefits. First, if you click to turn on the earliest possible frame you can move forward at 14 pixels per frame for the one frame where you turned. This is used multiple times in the run to speed up the route and has the added benefit of making the run appear more “TAS-like.” Another side effect is that this feature combined with screen scrolling can result in turns appearing to travel through the walls which again, hopefully, ups the entertainment as it appears that you are breaking the game as you travel through the walls.

Once you get to the houses there are between 2 and 4 windows, or for the first level one tree, where people will appear that need to be saved. The order that the people appear in each window is randomly chosen based off of when you enter the level and when you have saved the previous person. I manipulate this in the run to have the people appear in order of windows from right to left to prevent backtracking. I also pick up the people on the furthest to the left possible pixel to minimize walking time.

The final TAS characteristic of the run is the key placement in the fourth round. For the fourth round of the game a key is required to enter the houses and save the people. This key is randomly placed throughout the course again determined by the frame that you enter the level. I manipulate the location to either be on the route or as close to the route as possible to minimize time lost.

Final word of note. There are only two combinations of mazes within the game, those being Round 1 and then Round 2. After round 2 the mazes are repeated for round 3 and 4 with added twists to make the game more difficult. I have previously mentioned the key that is featured in the fourth round which slightly adjusts the route and manipulation. For the third round the only difference is that there is a 50 second timer but as the timer is 50 seconds long and it never takes longer than 19 seconds to enter the house it appears as simply repeating round two with no differences.

I understand that this game is not the most entertaining run to be submitted to the site but it was a fun, easy game to TAS allowing me to get back into this fun hobby despite not having nearly the time I used to have. I hope it is at least slightly entertaining to watch but regardless I am proud of it as it was fun to do.

A special thanks to The Mighty Ducks Trilogy which I watched while making this run and are the exact level of entertainment necessary to keep me entertained but not so engrossed that I can’t also do an easy TAS.

feos: Accepting for the Vault.

Ilari: Processing