Game objectives

  • Emulator used: Bizhawk 1.11.4
  • Aims for fastest time
  • Uses hardest difficult
  • Manipulates luck
Oil's well is a game in which you control a drill head, and you need to collect oil while avoiding some enemies. There're 2 kind of enemies in this game: the write enemies, that can hurt the whole extension of the drill, but can be eaten by the head; and the bombs, that are harmful to the drill's head but can't damage the rest of it. The write enemies always spawn in the same place, but the bombs are RNG, so I manipulated it so that they never finished up in my way.
Every stage has one special item that, when collected, makes all the bombs to disappear and all the write enemies to walk very, very slowly for a while.
I finished up putting much more effort in this TAS than I thought I would. Route planning is incredibly difficult in this game, especially because of the write enemies that appear all the time and kill you. They make this game, at least in the hardest difficulty, to be extremely difficult to play in real time. Also, even if 2 routes are exactly the same long, it doesn't mean they take the same time. There is a weird frame rule of 2 that affects the drill's movement, which implies, for example, in situations in which going left first and then right to collect a line of oil is 1 frame faster than the opposite. This increases a lot the amount of testing needed to make an optimal route.
Now there isn't much to say. In many stages I used routes that are just slightly possible, as the enemies stop just 1 or 2 pixels away of the drill, but that you will tell with the encode :). Thanks to adelikat for suggesting me to TAS this game on IRC.

Tompa: Judging!
Tompa: Very interesting game and a nice TAS made for it. Was an enjoyable watch, which most (all?) people seem to agree on. Accepting for publication!
feos: Pub.

TASVideoAgent
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #5009: BrunoVisnadi's Coleco Oil's Well in 03:27.64
Joined: 3/9/2009
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Is there a minimum rewind amount? I'm curious about the very end of level 3 (1:15) when there are two dots left. You go left 3, rewind 3, up 1. Wouldn't it be faster to go up 1, rewind 1, left 3?
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Nope. When you rewind, the head can never stop in a square in which it changed its direction (you can notice these squares are outlined with a black square). Instead, it goes to the square that is behind it. So, if I moved there first, it would rewind 2 squares instead of one, which would mean my movement would be 1 up, 2 rewind, 4 left. As rewinding is much faster then going left, what I did is faster. Edit: also, yes, there is a minimum rewind amount that sometimes obligates the head to go back 2 squares instead of one, but that wasn't the problem there.
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Yes vote for making a very hard game look easy. Interestingly, the version that I played appears to be a different version of this; I seem to recall different screen layouts on some of the higher levels. It was on my brother's Atari XL which used floppies and had programs to translate from other version, so I don't know what version that could be unless my brother and I can get it loaded.
Patashu
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Cool game and cool TAS, yes vote
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This was far more entertaining to watch than I first expected - the number of times you narrowly escape damage is impressive. Well done, and a Yes vote from me!
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dwangoAC wrote:
This was far more entertaining to watch than I first expected - the number of times you narrowly escape damage is impressive. Well done, and a Yes vote from me!
I got to agree with this. I also thought this would be a boring run since it's a coleco game but this ended up being really entertaining. The routing for this game would have been pretty hard!
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The game has some pretty cool rhythms going on, a bit like a deranged IDM-song. The run was short and meticulous, so I'll give it a late yes vote.
Post subject: Movie published
TASVideoAgent
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This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [3084] Coleco Oil's Well by BrunoVisnadi in 03:27.64