Submission #9225: CoolHandMike's Arcade Cyber Commando in 02:52.04

• Cyber Commando is an arcade game made by Namco in 1994 that features 1v1 versus matches.

• The game is a series of arena matches against 9 different cpu tanks plus a floating orb as a last boss.

• There are no settings that make any gameplay differences.

• One thing to note is that the rom on loading has a message saying there are known problems with this game. LAN does not work (not relevant for a one player tas like this game). Second message is that there are some graphic imperfections. Unlike Cyber Sled there are no particular graphics that cause crashes.

• Locations of ammo is sort of random, but there seems to be 2 or 3 layouts only. Doing enough damage to ammo will have them give double ammo.

• The first two arenas have the initial tank in a specific spot, but they move randomly. After the first tank of an arena two more will spawn away from you. Had to position the tank carefully to get good spawns. The last four fights of the game do not have another fight immediately after but have the arena reload.

Required Files

<BizHawk-XMLGame System="Arcade" Name="cc">
 <LoadAssets>
  <Asset FileName=".\cybrcomm.zip" />
  <Asset FileName=".\namcoc74.zip" />
 </LoadAssets>
</BizHawk-XMLGame>

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. Missile layouts come in single point.

• The weapons damage is more subtle and hard to pin down than Cyber Sled. The large damage reduction at low health is gone, but instead there is some small added damage the more damaged a tank becomes. The damage increase seems to cap at around 10%. Realized this late game, so had to redo some fights. In early fights it loses times since taking damage itself would lose time since you lose forward speed. There also seems to be slight rng to the damage with some unexplained small damage difference between shots.

• Tanks with higher Weapon rating generally have lower reload speed and more ammo.

• Missiles in this sequel are much more limited in capacity. Instead there are ammo packs in the map that the player is intended to pick up. Shooting the ammo enough will change the graphic and will upgrade the pickup to give double ammo.

• Machine guns can fire every other frame if only pressing the fire input every other frame. However in some instances it is better to preserve ammo and shoot later. This tactic is used on some very tanky bosses because as your tank takes damage your damage input can raise up to 10%-ish.

• Every tank has a total of 4096 health. Missile damage actually varies quite a bit depending on how high the shield is. Units like Andromeda can see about 1/3 of their health gone in a single hit, but the end boss units might take only 1/12 health from a missile. Machine guns do about 1/20th the damage per hit of the missiles.

• For this tas Andromeda was chosen. Andromeda is basically Alan from Cyber Sled reskinned and improved. The machine gun is now centered and shots come out of two slightly separated guns. The missiles are slightly weaker than some tanks like Murasame, but they fire fast. The tank is also by far the fastest with the lowest shield. Lowest shield ironically means that Andromeda is the best at taking damage which also means the best at increasing its base attack too. Note that while the tank Peacekeeper looks like the best tank to choose since when firing it shoots out a large amount of missiles, but the enemy tank only takes the damage of a single missile sadly.

Enemy AI

• The input reading for the tanks is extremely noticeable in this game especially for the tanks later on. There are these large boss tanks that will start dodging within a frame or two if they are centered with your cross hair. There is a technique of alternating leads to keep the tank moving left and right. This is the preferred way of keeping them from hiding if you cannot get close. The most common way the more later tanks can be hit straight on with missiles and machine guns 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. Sometimes merely strafing is not enough to dodge incoming missiles so angling the tank towards the incoming missile helps to avoid a hit.

Some other Resources

• namco " Cyber Commando " TimeAttack on PeaceKeeper https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwhbqjJuaNM

Opponents

Murasame

PeaceKeeper

Wild Boar

Andromeda

Persuader

Voodoo

Metal Serpent

Rafflesia

General -D

Nightmare