Heat Seeker (Compute's Gazette)
Heat seeking missiles are dangerous. They sense the heat from your jet engine and home in on you. They'll catch you too...they're faster than a jet.
Your assignment: Eliminate the heat seeker base. It's easy enough to strafe the missiles on the ground, but if any are launched, you'll have to take evasive action.
Why TAS This Game?
Its my continuation of TASing games from my all-time favorite magazine, Compute's Gazette. This makes my 6th TAS from this series. Additionally, this game has some hard physics to overcome and was always a challenge for me. So...I wanted to see it done quickly!
Previous Compute's Gazette submissions include (In order of submission):
Level Choice and Game Ending
In this TAS, I choose the hardest difficulty of "Expert". There is time loss, in selecting this, but I think the difference is worth viewing.
As for the ending, clearing all heat seekers on the first round is enough to satisfy unique content. Thereafter, it just repeats with the same task and difficulty. I consider this TAS to be like that of the submissions of "Space Invaders", where one round completes the movie.
Effort In TASing
I actually got the first version of this TAS done in an hour or so. As an experienced TASer, I realized that completing anything too quickly can blind you to other ways of optimization. I'm glad that I walked away from this for a few days, because I came back an noticed that this TAS would be better off with completing it with "earlier ending inputs". This gives the viewer more to watch, and a higher TAS time.
Also, I switched between PAL and NTSC to see which version would work for fastest time. Interesting enough, PAL won. I'm not sure why, but I wasn't able to beat this with an NTSC effort. Believe it or not, the response was different enough that I couldn't perform the same tactics across both regions. So...I took the best one out of the two versions, and this time it was PAL!
Don't be fooled though, the physics of this game are very touchy and precise. At the end of this TAS...the level flying is not so easy to perform for a human. In fact, it took me a while to get that strafe set up so that I could coast to the end of the round.
Alternate Version
This is a version that destroys all the heat seekers as fast as possible.
Human Comparison
Couldn't find anyone who has played it. :( Perhaps "Lost 8-Bit Caverns" could try this? :D
feos: Claiming for judging.
feos: Accepting. We can link the alternative version encode in the publication description, since the feel is rather different.
