Hello everybody!
Today, I present to you the first ever submission to this website of a Magnavox Odyssey 2 TAS (and hopefully, this will become the first Odyssey 2 TAS to be published to TASVideos as well).
In honor of this historic(??) milestone, I have chosen to TAS the game Super Cobra. The manual for this game has unfortunately been lost to the cruel winds of time, so I will have to make up my own description of the game's plot here: Super Cobra is a game where your mission is to fly to the right to reach the end of each screen. When you reach the end of 13 screens, you can pick up a bag filled with money and dynamite which was left abandoned on a platform guarded by two flying warthogs. Be careful, however! If the money hits into anything, it explodes, and the evil warthogs force you to repeat the screen all over again till the end of time! (...or until you successfully grab the money off the screen) After completing this task, you go through all 13 levels again on a harder difficulty level (you now have less bombs per screen on some screens and certain enemies fire faster). After finishing the 2nd loop, the game is over, since the difficulty doesn't appear to increase on subsequent loops.
Controls:
In Super Cobra, you are always moving slightly to the right, even if you aren't pressing any buttons. However, you can move right faster by holding right. Additionally, you can slow your rightward movement down by holding left. Besides that, you can also fly up and down by pressing up and down (duh). If you tap the fire button, you will shoot a bullet straight ahead of you. If you hold the fire button, you will drop a bomb in front of you. You have a limited number of bombs on each screen (which is indicated by the number of squares in the bottom-right corner of the screen), so you can only fire a bomb if you have any left on the screen.
Gameplay:
You have 10 health points to start off with. Whenever you hit an enemy, you lose a health point, but this doesn't stop you from moving or slow you down, so it doesn't really matter from a TASing perspective. If you lose all of your health points, then your ship is destroyed and the game is over. Each enemy in this game dies with either 1 hit from your gun or 1 bomb hit. Additionally, each enemy deals 1 point of damage when they are touched. If you hit into the walls of a screen, you will both lose a health point and be forced to start over at the start of the screen, so this must be avoided at all costs. To grab the money bag, you just have to be flying above it and close to it, and you will automatically pick it up.
Optimizations:
Because this game is so basic, there's not a lot of optimizations to be had in this game except "hold right for justice". However, there are a few time saves I implemented here and there that a human would have some difficulty doing in real life. At the end of the 6th screen of the game, I need to hold up for a frame perfect amount of time at the end of this screen and the start of the next screen so that I can make it through both the 6th and 7th screens without letting go of holding right the entire time and without bumping into any obstacles (this can be seen at 0:52 in the encode down below). In every screen of this game except for the 2 money bag screens at the end of each loop, I never let go of right. Unfortunately, I have to hold left on the money bag screens in order to avoid overshooting the spot that you have to be at in order to pick the money up. I also end input early by letting go of everything once I have the final money bag and am past the last enemy, since you move slightly right even when you aren't pressing any buttons.
Goals:
The primary goal of this TAS is to "beat the game" as fast as possible. As a secondary goal, I tried to take as little damage as possible. As a third goal (with lower priority than the other 2 goals), I tried to kill as many enemies as possible.
Concluding Remarks:
This TAS is pretty boring. But hey, they can't all be interesting, right? In any event, I hope some of you can find some small amount of enjoyment in this!
feos: The input for the second loop syncs on the 3rd one, with a couple timing adjustments in 2 rooms, while loop 1 input doesn't sync on loop 2 at all. So we can assume that the game has 2 loops of difficulty, and this movie completes them. Not an exciting game, no excited feedback, accepting to Vault.