Submission #8863: CoolHandMike's Arcade Cyber Sled in 01:48.69

• Cyber Sled is a 2 seat arcade game made by Namco in 1993 that primarily features 1v1 versus matches.

• The non player vs player is a series of arena matches against 6 different cpu tanks.

• Although apparently there are difficulty settings I just do not see where to change them in game or using dipswitches. So just using the standard difficulty.

• One thing to note is that the rom on loading has a message saying the machine does not work. LAN does not work (not relevant for a one player tas like this game). Second message is that there are some graphic imperfections.

Tank Characteristics

• There are 6 playable characters that have varying characteristics. The game assigns Speed, Weapon, and Shield stats. Speed is movement velocity, Weapon seems to be about starting missile capacity, and missile fire speed since the machine gun and missile damage seem the same. Shield reduces damage taken.

• The tanks themselves have some layouts that differ too. Some have machine guns that fire out from a single point, fire from ports on the left and right, or from a narrow area but vary slightly. Missile layouts come in single point or separated.

• The weapons all end up doing scaling damage depending on the health and Shield rating of the enemy tank. Meaning an enemy with less shield will take more damage. Also, an enemy with less health takes less damage. An enemy with very low health, and very high Shield will see very very low damage.

• Tanks with higher Weapon rating generally have lower reload speed, but it is by small 10 frame steps in general. The lowest weapon rating with 1 bar has 90 frames to reload, 2 bars has 80 frames to reload.

• Missiles can do massive damage if the enemy is at 100% health, but due to input reading and level layout it is infeasible usually to hit them while they are at full health. Missiles should always be used to finish an enemy due do the damage scaling. Missiles that are at a separated point have an advantage when trying to setup a shot against the input reading enemies since they tend to veer away from the center crosshair. All missiles home in slightly.

• Machine guns have a usage bar that decreases the more they are used. When nearly depleted the machine guns overheat and fire slowly. However by alternating fire and no input machine guns can fire every other frame. The limit however is that there must not be more than 8 bullets being on screen at a time. By decreasing distance to the enemy the machine gun can be fired very rapidly. Also machine guns are great for dealing damage to the enemy since they do not really input read and dodge the machine gun, while for the missiles they do incredible dodges consistently.

• Because of the machine gun's rapid fire, I completed a test tas with Alan, the fastest tank, due to how the machine gun will destroy most enemies very quickly. However there is a problem with the two tanks that have max Shield. The machine gun damage becomes very weak, and when they have less health the damage is laughably low.

• Every tank has a total of 4096 health. Almost every enemy takes somewhere around 100 damage at 100% health and then 30-40 damage at low health per machine gun hit. However the two heavies in the game are Hans, and Damon, the last boss, take much less. At 100% Hans takes about 60 per machine gun hit. At medium health he takes around 30 per hit. At ~15% health Hans takes around 16. The main issue though was Damon with my machine gun focused approach while testing with Alan. The last boss at 100% started off taking 14 per damage per hit, and then it decreases to an eye-rolling 8 damage per hit at low health.

• Seeing the weakness of the machine gun I switched to Rexer, the second slowest tank, but one with the fastest missile reload. Alan's fire rate is 90 frames, yet Rexer's is every 40 frames. Despite Alan being ahead of Rexer the entire tas, Rexer ends up catching up with Alan at Hans, falling behind a bit on Marie, but then being 100 frames faster on the last boss.

Enemy AI

• Enemy AI behavior loves input reading and making incredibly nimble dodges. Missiles are dodged past a certain distance without exception. There is no rng manipulation possible to snipe a tank right from the start. The input reading tends to always veer away from the center cross hair. The enemy interestingly does not bother really dodging the machine gun.

• One thing I noticed is that if the round goes on long enough the enemy seems to rarely react to the missiles at all, but too bad with tas speed we do not see that.

• As enemies are defeated their input reading and ability to dodge missiles goes up significantly. Many rerecords were made to try and get the right angles to hit the enemies as well as to reposition to continue using the machine gun. The two ways the more later tanks can be hit straight on with missiles is to rapidly change direction, then rapidly turn back to the other direction. This causes the enemy to think you were going to fire in one direction but end up firing slightly off center which with finagling is enough to get a hit. Another wrinkle is that the enemy tanks can cancel out your missile with another missile. The best way to deal with that is to only start strafing when the missile is heading your way. With Rexer this is particularly important unlike Alan, since Rexer is so incredibly slow. Since with Rexer strafing is sometimes not enough if you get close and also dodge the incoming missiles so angling the tank towards the incoming missile helps to avoid a hit.

Some other Resources

• Human Speedrun in 3:42 for Playstation version. (this tas submission is the arcade version). Different version, but you can see the gameplay similarities. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p6lGDn6H2I&ab_channel=DonAtreides

Amanda Bates

Rexer Ironside

Alan Striker

Hans Baird

Marie Yamamoto

Damon Hargray - Final Boss