3-D Labyrinth (Compute's Gazette)
Your goal in "3-D Labyrinth" is simply to make it through the maze. Sound easy? It isn't. You start in the northwest corner and must make your way to the exit in the southeast corner. The maze is different each time you play, so tracing your path in one game won't help when you play the next one.
The article for this game can be found on page 96 of Compute's Gazette Issue 18 (December 1984)
Why TAS This Game?
The continuation of TASing games from my all-time favorite magazine, Compute's Gazette. This makes my 88th TAS from this series.
This magazine is memorable, as I was mainly interested in typing in [5632] C64 Cosmic Combat "pacifist" by nymx in 04:02.40, which I TASed in 2023. I'm not sure how soon I got to this game, but I do remember it and it was fun for the time.
Game Difficulty and Ending
There is no difficulty setting. The ending is clear, as you will see entering the maze, traversing the maze, and reaching the end where it says "FINISH".
Effort In TASing (Not BOTed)
Experience has helped me to do this one quickly. This game did provide a challenge on what appeared to be simple. At first glance, you would think that any route that didn't force you to turn a lot was the most efficient. The optimization issue came from recognizing the following points:
- Find a route that had less drawing activity. If you look closely, there are places where there are more content to draw. This slows down the game. it's written in B.A.S.I.C. and the speed of the drawing was affected by the language choice.
- Make only 2 turns. Turns waste a move....as you press forward (with the space bar) to move.
- Control RNG to find the best maze pattern. As with other B.A.S.I.C. written games, I've used the "RND" function to point RNG to a different seed value.
Human Comparison
There was only one video that I could find, but the person didn't know what they were doing and it was a modified version of this game. So, it wasn't worth showing.
Darkman425: Claiming for judging.