Joined: 5/25/2007
Posts: 399
Location: New England
Moon Patrol is a decent game where you pilot a moon buggy jumping craters/rocks/mines and blowing up tanks and spaceships. Its technical claim to fame is being the first major use of parallax scrolling, where the foreground scrolls faster than the background layer(s) to give the impression of a 3D scene.
I had a lot of fun with the Atari 2600 version as a kid and was surprised I couldn't really find any speed-running or TAS-related efforts for the game on any system. Well, here's a WIP that gets through the first course on Hard difficulty.
Link to video
The buggy has 3 speeds - half, 3/4, and full - and how fast you go depends on where the buggy is onscreen. If it's left of neutral position, you go half speed, if it's at neutral position (exactly) you go 3/4, if it's to the right you go full speed. Note this means that most of the time when the buggy moves left to dodge bullets or just jiggle around, it is NOT actually losing speed as the course's scrolling is unaffected. There are 2 spots in the WIP where I do have to slow down to pass combinations of craters and rocks.
There's a decent amount to optimize to be fast and kill lots of the ships overhead, so hopefully this will be reasonably entertaining for an A2600 TAS.
The game goes on indefinitely but my current goal is to complete 2 courses on Hard as that's when the difficulty/scoring levels stops increasing and 8ish minutes seems about right for this type of game. If you're curious, the score can run up to 999,990 but then it just rolls over to 0 with no notice.
