Enter the magical maze of the Sorcerer! It's a truly magical quest for jewels in 10 different worlds. Sky, sea, mountain, river, forest and the castle all await you. Buy Magic Orbs and magic points then discover their unusual powers to help you move up and defeat the bosses in each world.
As you guess with this description, this game is a RPG an Arkanoid clone, with several absurd power-ups.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: PSXjin 2.0.2
- Aims for fastest time
- Manipulates luck
This TAS was initially make for the
Consolation Team Contest, however I continue it after the contest was close as a personal project.TASing this game is like TASing Arkanoid : there is an incredibly high amount of options in each levels.
First, each time a ball hit the paddle, you can shoot it with 10 different angles. This is neither low or high enough, since it makes you obviously unable to test all possibilities, and it means if you want your ball to get an accurate angle, you must choose between these 10 angles.
Basically, here is how to obtain them :
- 4 angles by hitting the motionless paddle
- 2 angles by hitting the normal/high speed paddle
- 4 angles by hitting the low speed paddle
And of course you can hit the ball with the side of the paddle, to get the same angle but a little difference with the ball position
Second, the power-ups. There are more than 10 power-ups in this game, and they can be purchase at the beginning of the stage (except some of them like the giant ball) with MP or obtain by breaking specifics jewels.
When you break two or more jewels without hitting a ball, you gain the same amount of MP. This means you must avoid to break only one jewel in a row, unless you have a good reason for this.
Here is a quick list of the power-ups that give a fast way to complete a level, with their price when you can purchase them, from the fastest way to the slowest :
- Laser (280 MP) : instant win
- Giant bomb (N/A) : all balls become giant, and they destroy any jewel in one hit
- 100-balls (240) : 100 balls on the stage, but the game start to lag with more than 20 balls
- Multi-ball (150) : each ball that hit the paddle split into two balls
- Stars (N/A) : stars fall and destroy any jewels in their ways (you can luck manipulate where they fall)
- Fire-ball (110) : the balls cross and destroy jewels without bounce on them
- Ball-control (70) : each ball that hit the paddle follow it until it bounces on something
Note that Fire-ball and Ball-control together give a powerful combo.
There are 90 levels and 11 boss in this game, which is a lot, so the MP management was a main issue in this TAS, and also the reason why I started with worlds 2 and 4.
The ball initial (and minimal) speed is 200 (maximal speed is 1600), and there are only three ways to increase it :
- It increases by 31 regularly after some times
- It increases by 65 with a Speed-up power-up
- It increases by 100 with a bounce block (see stage 2-4 for a good example)
2-5 : One of the few stages where I wasn't able to purchase a power-up with my MP limitations
2-8 : 100-balls power-up saves a great amount of time here, even if it costs 240 MP
boss 4 : 25 Life points...
1-8 : Here I used a lua script to find the best setup for the ball (since these bounce blocks can send back the ball either to the left or to the right)
boss 7 : You can't hit his body before you destroy one of his protection
boss 8 : 100 life points. Each cannonball deals 5 damages, but if you throw 3 of them in a row, the third deals 40 damage instead.
boss 9 : 9 life points, you deal 2 damages if you hit him when he throws an heart, else only 1, but he is only vulnerable for a really short amount of time.
boss 10 : 10 life points, but I manage to double hit one time and triple hit two times
final boss : I didn't find any way to end the input with 3 hits left, since the hitbox for the last hit is really small
Possible improvements
Better MP management (use fire-ball instead of multi-ball for example) and strategies.
Suggest screenshot
Stage 6-9 when the laser is activate
FractalFusion: Well done. The power-ups make this type of game a lot more interesting. Accepting for publication.
