Star Dragon (Compute's Gazette)
The Dragons are here! They have come for their revenge and you are the only hope. Fortunately, you have a powerful and fast shooting weapon...but are you fast enough to use it? Thankfully, there is an end...as they only came in a pack of 30. Persevere to the end, and you will be the victor!
This game is one of the few that features the ability to show more than 8 sprites, which is the limit to the Commodore 64. In this case, the method used is to turn a set of 8 sprites on and off in different locations to simulate the ability of 16 individual stars. A previous TAS that I've done, #8245: nymx's C64 Omicron in 03:19.29 also used this same technique. You'll notice in both cases that all the sprites 'flicker' with a transparency. For those who are interested...just use the frame advance to see them alternate back and forward.
The article for this game can be found on page 54 of Issue 36 (June 1986): https://archive.org/details/1986-06-computegazette/page/n55/mode/2up
Why TAS This Game?
The continuation of TASing games from my all-time favorite magazine, Compute's Gazette. This makes my 9th TAS from this series.
This was one of the rare games that I really liked a lot. Even though the magazine article mentioned 30 dragons to defeat, I never was able to get that far. The game got progressively harder with each dragon to the point that I may have defeated 6 or 7 dragons in my youth.
Previous Compute's Gazette submissions include (In order of submission):
Game Ending
This game has a clear ending screen that congratulates a player on beating all 30 dragons. So there is no looping, which helps to make this game feel like it truly ended.
Effort In TASing
After I defeated the first dragon, I thought this game was going to be over in a matter of minutes. I WAS WRONG! I had spent days trying to optimize this game, for reasons that I didn't expect to run up against.
One of the troublesome factors was RNG. This game doesn't have the same kind of random generation that I have found in other Commodore 64 games. Here, RNG was controlled by a frame rule. So delays were used to help in some cases. At the completion of this TAS, I still don't understand it very well.
Another factor that really made this game hard, was the avoidance of lag. On the first dragon, I was able to fire shots on just about every other frame. As the motion increased on the screen, input lag started to become an issue. So my work ended up checking every "fire button" press to confirm that a shot was actually produced. This became very tedious and aggravating towards the end. After completing this TAS, on a first effort, I went back to try my knowledge again and was able to cut an additional 809 frames. Because of this outcome, I tried for a 3rd round and failed...as I kept landing on different frame rules and loosing lots of frames and gaining small amounts through out the first few levels.
One last factor that hindered production, was getting the "Next Stage Dragon" to be within reach so that shot delays were minimized. It was an exercise in balancing out shot delays, lag reduction, and taking advantage of positioning the game's weapon...in the limited time before the death of each dragon.
Human Comparison
This game is not very well known. I was only able to find one video of game play, which seems to be exploring the game...more than trying to beat it. At least this video gives the example of what happens in human effort.
feos: Claiming for judging.
feos: Accepting.
despoa: Processing...