Submission #8628: Darkman425's Coleco 2010: The Graphic Action Game in 05:40.37

2010: The Graphic Action Game is a licensed 1984 ColecoVision game. It loosely follows the book/movie around where the Discovery needs to be repaired to escape Io's orbit. The player guides the ship repair drone WALDO to repair the ship into working condition before it crashes into Io.

I encountered a couple of desyncs due to some save states not quite working right. It simply needed a clear of green zones and readjusting where needed but it was still kind of a problem, albeit a small one for a short TAS.

The goal of the game is to move the cursor to the parts of the Discovery that need repair. Once there, WALDO can start repairing the circuits by guiding the power spark from the left side of the screen to the right side. The moving sparks referred to the manual as Magnetic Flux Fields, or MMF, can break chips on contact if the power spark is currently in that chip. Chips can also break if the power spark contacts a chip twice in a loop without backtracking.

HAL 9000 circuits work a little differently. Rather than direct control of the power spark an input sends it on its own path. The player changes the node ahead of the power spark's path to adjust the path. The green rectangle allows for a straight path. The blue L shape turns the power spark clockwise 90 degrees. The red U shape turns the power spark around 180 degrees. If there is no valid path with the given node the power spark sits in place until the node changes to a valid direction. In the HAL 9000 circuits an MMF will reset the power spark if any contact is made. Also a concern is that if the power spark touches the chip, it breaks immediately.

For broken chips it's simply a matter of moving the replacement chip to the broken chip's spot and selecting the correct replacement chip. This takes time though there are a few mandatory chip replacements after the initial repairs are done.

Difficulty mainly affects the number of MMF on screen and their aggressiveness against the power spark. On Level 4 there are 2 MMFs on every circuit and they have heavy aggression. This mostly means that they will quickly home in to the power spark if it sits on a chip in a circuit too long.

MMF trajectories can be manipulated by either releasing the Left Action button briefly, waiting on a chip for longer before moving again on a circuit, or timing when to change nodes on HAL 9000 circuits. This is done a lot with the more aggressive MMF behaviors.

The end of the game is when button 0 is pressed to ignite the engines when all repairs are done.

The main problem is the MMF movements so an improvement would need even better manipulation of their behavior. There might also be some potential RNG manipulation on where the chips that need repairs end up near the end but with the MMF behavior the time to manipulate that could be lost just by MMF movements changing for the unfavorable.

nymx: Claiming for judging.

nymx: I played a lot of Coleco games, when this machine was in its prime. I never knew about this game or even gave it a second thought once I saw it in the list of published titles. I think I missed out on this experience. :(

As for judging this submission, I decided to grab it because it looked like my TAS of #8418: nymx's C64 Circuits in 04:59.12, and the fact that I'm an electrical engineer who grew up playing around with circuits. After reviewing it, I see that they are clearly different in the goals. This TAS aims to repair, while mine was to destroy. So Darkman425's work is really good here and I don't see any problems with the optimization. Having done a number of Colecovision games myself, I understand that most games are much harder to control AI/RNG over other systems...especially since this was played on Level 4.

Good work. Accepting.

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