Submission #8767: Walgrey's A2600 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe "Level 1" in 00:03.50

3-D Tic-Tac-Toe is an interesting evolution to the standard Tic-Tac-Toe game. Instead of making three in a row, you make four. But, there's also four grids stacked on top of each other. Now instead of making a line on one board, you can make a line across multiple! This game was then released on the Atari 2600 in 1978, written by Carol Shaw. This TAS aims to beat the easiest of 8 difficulty levels against a CPU.

Remember when I said you can make a line across multiple boards? Well forget all of that, because in this TAS, we win on the top grid. Normally, your opponent wants to grab either the edges or centre tiles of each grid, as these are considered to be optimal positions. We take advantage of this however, while the CPU is grabbing those tiles, we can make a line at the top. It will try to stop us, but we can manipulate the CPU by confirming our move on different frames. We're forced to lose 5 frames each on turns 3 and 4 in order to win.

Initially, you can move the cursor one tile over on the first available frame of your turn, then confirm your move on the frame immediately after. On the 4th and 5th turn, this changed to being forced to wait 12 frames before you could move the cursor. Then back to the initial first-frame move on the last turn (for some reason).

I made this TAS all the way back in July of 2023, back when a few people started doing RTA runs of the game. I didn't want to submit my TAS back then, because I thought an easiest difficulty TAS wouldn't have fit this site. I then reconsidered. I got my PC after moving yesterday, so I went back to this TAS, and tried to look for ways to improve (wasting frames at different places) but got no results.

Edit: Future projects postponed. :(

nymx: Claiming for judging.

nymx: Ok...I have played around with these inputs and I see what the author has been going through. Just when you think you can make it shorter, the CPU decides to block you. Well, I can't see any way to to make it faster without pouring in tons of time....meaning, any faster solution definitely isn't going to be easy and definitely not an obvious one at that.

Accepting.

despoa: Processing...