Diner for the Mattel Intellivision
Years after Mattel gave up on the Intellivision, a new owner took up the brand and began publishing new games. The NES was already taking over and the Sega Genesis was a year away, but in 1987, Intellivision Corp. released Diner, a sequel to the successful Burgertime from the early 80s. Originally designed as a He-Man game, the Diner we ended up with was a fantastic addition to the excellent catalog of games for the system.
The basic concept to Diner is similar to its predecessor: There is food all over the play field, and you must use gravity to send that food down onto a dinner plate, all while avoiding killer food monsters. Here, instead of burgers, you have food balls (meatballs, riceballs, etc.), and you give them a swift kick to roll across the field and down to the goal. Instead of being straight vertical like Burgertime, Diner introduces a dimension of isometrics to gameplay, allowing you to squeeze around the enemies if the hitboxes line up right. This helps to cover the isometric view making the playfield smaller than in Burgertime, but it is still very tight and claustrophobic to try to escape the enemies, and it becomes increasingly moreso with every level. The game is legitimately difficult--despite being a favorite game of mine from a very young age, I still had no idea how many levels this game had until I was creating this TAS.
To help you out, rolling food balls can also act as a weapon, temporarily disabling enemies that are run over. Extra points for multiple enemies in one kick! Occasionally, a jingle will signal that a bonus item has appeared on the field, always in the same spot per each level. Collecting this bonus will give you an extra Pepper to use. Pepper can be used at will to immobilize enemies for a short time. You get a limited amount, and there is an engine limitation here as well: you cannot kick a food ball while using pepper, and you cannot use pepper while a food ball is rolling. You also cannot have two food balls rolling at the same time--this factors strongly into routing for the TAS, since there can be a lot of waiting around for a food ball to roll to a stop or make it to the plate. Whenever possible, I try to time kicks so that I am running from one ball to another while waiting for the first to finish its roll. Each kick can be done either to the left or to the right, so figuring out where each kick direction lands the ball down the field leads to many different possible paths through a stage. I gave each stage many, many reiterations to find fastest paths and new strategies, until I completed this run to my satisfaction.
One other thing to mention is bonus stages: Completing every 4th level activates a Bonus Stage mode, where enemies disappear and meatballs avalanche towards you from the top of the screen. Collecting them yields bonus points! But meatballs that flash purple and gray are actually poison, and will kill you and end the bonus round. As points are useless in this TAS, I find a way to kill myself in each bonus stage as quickly as possible to get to the next stage sooner. Deaths in this mode do actually count as deaths, though! You lose a life! Pretty serious business for a bonus round.
The big question
This TAS finishes after completing level 15. There are only 15 stages in the game, and they repeat after that point. There is, in fact, a difficulty increase here: More food balls in each level, and faster enemies. The death pits in level 4 begin appearing in other levels, too, and eventually speed up their cycles so fast that it becomes almost impossible to make it through them before they open up again and kill you. One reason I held onto this run for over a year was to see if I could work up motivation to complete a second loop, or if I could justify submitting one cycle. My argument is that with the levels having more food balls, the second cycle would be very similar to the first but with a *lot* more waiting around for the extra balls to stop rolling. Probably would cut into the entertainment value too much. So I submit this run to you now, and suggest giving the game a playthrough some time because this console had some good stuff, y'all
Samsara: Claiming for judging.
Samsara: Looks solid to me. Stage 16 is clearly Stage 1 But Harder, so the stopping point makes sense as a single loop of the game. Accepting!
despoa: Processing...