Submission #5009: BrunoVisnadi's Coleco Oil's Well in 03:27.64

Oil's well is a game in which you control a drill head, and you need to collect oil while avoiding some enemies. There're 2 kind of enemies in this game: the write enemies, that can hurt the whole extension of the drill, but can be eaten by the head; and the bombs, that are harmful to the drill's head but can't damage the rest of it. The write enemies always spawn in the same place, but the bombs are RNG, so I manipulated it so that they never finished up in my way.

Every stage has one special item that, when collected, makes all the bombs to disappear and all the write enemies to walk very, very slowly for a while.

I finished up putting much more effort in this TAS than I thought I would. Route planning is incredibly difficult in this game, especially because of the write enemies that appear all the time and kill you. They make this game, at least in the hardest difficulty, to be extremely difficult to play in real time. Also, even if 2 routes are exactly the same long, it doesn't mean they take the same time. There is a weird frame rule of 2 that affects the drill's movement, which implies, for example, in situations in which going left first and then right to collect a line of oil is 1 frame faster than the opposite. This increases a lot the amount of testing needed to make an optimal route.

Now there isn't much to say. In many stages I used routes that are just slightly possible, as the enemies stop just 1 or 2 pixels away of the drill, but that you will tell with the encode :). Thanks to adelikat for suggesting me to TAS this game on IRC.

Tompa: Judging!
Tompa: Very interesting game and a nice TAS made for it. Was an enjoyable watch, which most (all?) people seem to agree on. Accepting for publication!

feos: Pub.