Swords & Serpents
(Intellivision) in 3:23
THE GAME
Released in 1983 by Imagic, this game has no connection with the 1990 NES title, "Swords and Serpents," although you will see the two get mixed up online sometimes. This game is a top-down dungeon crawler, making it the console's closest thing to Gauntlet, perhaps. Intended for two players, the right player controls the Prince and his sword, and the left player controls Nilrem the Wizard and his magic. The Wizard only starts with the Freeze spell, and can learn more with scrolls littering the dungeon--two are on each of the game's four floors. With the 'Destroy Walls' spell, you can even get into the Ziggurat at the bottom of the dungeon, and slay the Dragon to achieve total victory!
...Except that that cannot happen, ever. As can be read on
an old forum post online in a couple different stories, the programmer behind Swords & Serpents claims he ran out of room on the cartridge to create a final battle or an ending, and opted instead to include an easter egg (his initials) as the only closure players could find. People who wrote to Imagic about the situation, claiming to find those three letters, did at least get a free poster back from the company and a thank you letter, anyway.
THE RUN
So, how do you TAS a game with no ending? Well, I see two possible goal choices here: Initials%, where you end the run once the easter egg is on screen, and 100%--See, along with the 8 magic spells to collect, there are 28 treasures throughout the dungeon, you can hold six at a time, and bringing them all the way back to the Chest at the start of the game rewards you with points and extra lives. You do not collect points for defeating any copies of the two enemies in the dungeon (the black knight and the red wizard, evil mirrors of your own heroes,) so there is a set maximum point value that can reached.
- This run opts not only for the basic Initials% run, but does it in the single-player mode, which is only possible to complete due to an oversight. The corner wall piece shaped like '╝' has no collision, and with specific positioning, the player can walk directly through it in a 45° Northwest direction. This places them within the two adjacent wall tiles, and they will eject the player sprite to the Northwest--making the glitch movement one-way only. While the time-saves that this run gets using this glitch movement (once on each of the first two floors) are pretty minor, the big revelation of this technique is being able to phase through the walls of the Ziggurat and reach the ending room without needing the Wizard's help at all! Since the only thing Player 2 can add to the run now is lag frames, the single-player mode is instead the fastest way to achieve the TAS's goal.
- Once we're in the final treasure room, all we have to do is spawn the initials to reach the only ending this game has. There are three treasures, and when one is collected, it will turn into a letter after it is scrolled off-screen and then scrolled back into view. Since the player doesn't have enough room to do all three letters in one pass with all the walls still intact, I have to scroll all the way to the left of the room and then all the way back to the right in order to get all three letters to spawn. The end, I guess!
Thanks for watching, y'all. The game befuddled me when I was a kid, and I always wanted to someday figure it out. It's hard, and needing two players using totally different characters in tandem to achieve any goals makes it an interesting and unique experience, but it's pretty frustrating at the same time. Very early-80s, in that respect.
nymx: Claiming for judging.
nymx: Not sure what to say here. It is an interesting game and your exploitation of flaw and mechanics was well executed.
Accepting to "Standard"
