Back in May 2021, I started rating movies on TASvideos in order of their length. I got to about 30% of the content that was published at the time, and it kinda makes me that that the
Profile/Ratings no longer works on the new site, because I felt like it was the main thing that incentivised some people, including myself, to rate. Another thing that made me lose interest in rating movies is that, in the current form of the website, it is not possible to sort unrated movies by anything other than the name. It made it so that I eventually lost track of my progress, and it became difficult to start where I left on my previous movie rating session.
Anyway, among all the movies that I've rated, this game had the movie that I thought had the movie that was the easiest to be beaten, and had potential to be good April Fools content too.
Then I beat my time about 10 more times, until I got to the run that I'm submitting, achieved on November 30, 2021. I really felt like this game could have a movie that could be maxed out due to its simple mechanics, so I tried pretty much every possibility. It was a very tedious process, since I did everything manually, but I'd say I'm happy with the results.
The rules of the game, and how understanding them can save time
- You must defeat all the enemies without dying. You can still die after the last enemy dies, so you have to plan your movement around that.
- You cannot have more than 2 of your rockets on screen at the same time.
- There's a cooldown of 18 frames before you can shoot again. It's just enough for you to go from one side of a shield to the other.
- The area in which your can move is more narrow than the area in which the enemies can go to. This means that the route needs to be based around the movement of the enemies, as they can be unreachable if they are on the sides of the screen.
- The least enemies there are, the faster they go.
- The enemies move 1 row down if one enemy hits the side of the screen. In order to as much time as possible with this rule, I leave the top-left enemy alive so that enemies go down sooner.
The regret
Well, I guess I'm an Atari 2600 TASer now. I really wasn't expecting that when I first started TASing, but I guess there's no going back now.
Samsara: the pipeline from normal TASer to Atari 2600 is a dangerous, yet common one, and usually ends with me falling asleep in the middle of my sentences talking about riddle of the sphzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Samsara: It sure is Space Invaders for the Atari 2600. Love the amount of work that was put into this, happy to see that even the simplest games are still being heavily blasted with effort and improvements over 40 years after their release. Video games are art. Accepting as an improvement to the
published run.
