I've been working on River Raid for the past couple of weeks and I think it has the most potential for an entertaining TAS out of any Atari 2600 game I'm familiar with, plus it was my favorite game. (25 years after I last played the game, I still remembered all the point values...)
The game finishes at 1,000,000 points, which human players (a VERY few have done this!) report takes about 3.5 hours, though at TAS speeds I calculate around 1.5 hours.
I'd like to ultimately write a Lua script to play through to 1,000,000, since hundreds of hours of my childhood demand a video of this game being annihilated start to finish, but the decision making can be very complicated, so I doubt it'd be all that close to optimal without bringing in a team of AI PhD's.
So for now I'm trying for a goal of 'fastest 100,000', which should be about 9 minutes of gameplay and about 60 bridge sections/levels. This last is important since the game stops getting more difficult (fuel more scarce) at level 48, so in a run to 1,000,000 nothing would change from levels 48-~600.
Here's my
WIP of the first 16 sections.
