Descent To Kaylon (Compute's Gazette)
Gliding asteroids and a layer of clouds separate you from your supply base on Planet Kaylon. Yet...crusing over the planet, you spot a supply base below. But as soon as you send off a shuttle ship to the base, a cluster of asteroids sails across its path. Darting quickly through the asteroids and clouds, your shuttle narrowly escapes collision before touching down on Kaylon.
The article for this game can be found on page 66 of Compute's Gazette Issue 17 (November 1984)
Why TAS This Game?
The continuation of TASing games from my all-time favorite magazine, Compute's Gazette. This makes my 62nd TAS from this series.
I have vague memories of this game. If it wasn't for "Bagdad", I think I would have eventually gotten to this. In fact, I don't think I played any of the other games until many years later. It probably happened when I finally got a Commodore 64 a number of years later.
Game Difficulty and Ending
There is no selection of difficulty. You start on the first level and proceed until the difficulty increases beyond a solvable situation. In this case, that situation occurs on Level 29. Why is this unsolvable? The way the physics work, you cannot fall fast enough to slip through a one block gap. You have to have a two block gap at minimum to continue on.
Effort In TASing (Not BOTed)
As with all B.A.S.I.C. written games, the speed of "interpreting" the language as it runs, has severe drawbacks on performance. So, to help out with speed...you cannot just hold a direction, as it will initiate the polling of the full joystick routine. If you were to analyze this movie's inputs, you'll find two and three frame inputs, surrounded by nothing. The difference in holding a direction can add a probably 30 frames per drop. So it is to your advantage to let off the direction until the polling comes around at the right time.
The amount of effort spent here, was around 6 weeks. I had originally thought of applying a seed RNG, by using the command "RND", but there is no way I'm going to run this full length TAS for every combintation...which can be hundreds.
Human Comparison
The only video that I could find, was the Vic-20 version.
ThunderAxe31: Claiming for judging.
ThunderAxe31: Un-claiming.
feos: Claiming for judging.
feos: Accepting.
despoa: Processing...