Tomarc the Barbarian
Senta is being held captive by Dak the prison guard.
Lost himself in a labrynth of underground caves, Tomarc must make his way to the jail and free Senta from her cage. Unfortunately, the cage can only be opened/destroyed by Tomarc's sword (which is also missing somewhere in the labrynth and must first be found in order to rescue Senta).
Gameplay
For the A2600 this game actually offers an interesting premise: Simultaneously play as two different characters using just one controller.
The catch(es)?
- The characters are in different rooms of the labrynth
- The player can only control one of these characters at any given time
- While controlling either character, the player is unable to see the second character; but action continues around this off-screen character.
- This means that an off-screen character can take damage from enemies on their screen which are also invisible to the player until they switch to that screen.
Win Condition: Rescue Senta
Game Over: occurs when all hit points/life bars are lost.
Controls:
- Tomarc
- Left & Right: Move Tomarc laterally
- Button: Makes Tomarc Jump. The longer the button is held, the higher he jumps.
- If Tomarc is moving laterally, the jump will be in an arced pattern. Lateral movement cannot be changed while in mid-air.
- Senta
- Left & Right: Changes direction of fire
- Button: Fires Star attack at Vampire bats.
- Both Characters:
- Up: Does nothing
- Down: Switches control and screen to the other character.
Difficulty: There are three difficulty options selectable at the beginning of the game using the "Select" switch. With each successive difficulty, the speed of enemies increases and the holes between rooms can vary in size.
Player Characters:
- Tomarc: The titular barbarian
- Senta: The damsel in distress (who can apparently hold her own against enemies, but is still somehow trapped in a cage)
Enemies (Taking damage from these depletes a life/healh bar at the top of the screen):
- Rats - These crawl around on the floor in the labrynth rooms where Tomarc is running around. Some can climb the walls as well.
- Vampire Bats - These fly around in the jail where Senta is held. They will attack her.
- Dak - This guy is the prison guard according to the manual, but he doesn't do squat other than pace back and forth.
Labrynth Layout
- All difficulties have a 9x9 room layout for the labrynth with the jail above the top middle room. Below is a drawn example from the manual.
Room Openings: The holes in the floors/cielings of the rooms allow for vertical movement. While it is possible to walk across a hole in the floor without fallign through, jumping into a hole in the floor will cause Tomarc to fall down to the room below. This is also the case for falling from an above room; if there are two upper rooms with aligned floor holes, Tomarc will fall to the lowest floor unless he is falling on an arced path.
How the game is supposed to be played:
Upon starting the game, the player controls Tomarc first. Tomarc will start in a random room at the bottom of the labrynth. He must then travel around the labrynth while avoiding rats in order to find his sword before travelign to the top room with the jail.
All while Tomarc is running around, the constant threat of imminent vampire bats will plague Senta and these can attack her even when the player isn't looking. When these bats become a direct threat, a lower pitch grinding noise will alert the player to switch control of characters from Tomarc to Senta so she can blast them out of the air with her magic star shot.
While controlling Senta, Tomarc is himself at constat thread of damage from rats. Similarly, a noise will alert the player to switch back to him to avoid these rats. This time the scratching noise is higher pitch.
The player is meant to switch back and forth between these two controllable characters until they are able to acquire Tomarc's sword and reach the jail itself.
Upon having Tomarc reach the jail, a brief cutscene occurs.
- If Tomarc has not collected his sword yet, he will simply walk through the jail from one side to the other falling down the hole back into the labrynth on the far side.
- If Tomarc has his sword, he walks to the center of the screen and frees Senta from the cage to win the game.
- After rescuing Senta, the game loops at the next highest difficulty.
The TAS
What I thought was an interesting gameplay premise to TAS, ended up being effectively negated by the act of TASing itself.
- The game is completable fast enough that Senta is never actively threatened by the bats to a point where control needs to switch to her to attack them.
- RNG:
- RNG affects both Tomarc's starting room and the room where the sword is waiting.
- Both of these can be manipulated by altering which frame to start the game on.
- Difficulty Choice:
- This game presented an interesting situation and decision for whatever judge chooses this run.
- Given the RNG manipulation availability, Tomarc's starting room and sword location can be pre-determined upon starting the run to minimize how many rooms he must traverse in order to reach the jail and save Senta.
- It's possible to yield the same starting room/sword location in all three difficulties. Thus the routing is nearly identical between runs of all three difficulties.
- Also because of the speed of the run, no enemies apear fast enough to affect the inputs/outcome.
- Given the nigh-idential routing, the difference in gameplay from Easy to Hardest difficulties is only 6 frames (with Hardest actually yielding the fastest gameplay). However, The amount of time spent selecting hard difficulty is significantly logner than 6 frames.
- This submission contains the Easy run which has the shortest overall time from power-on to final input.
- Here is a version that utilizes Hard difficulty. While the total time is longer, the actual gameplay portion of this userfile is 6 frames faster than this submission. The primarily visible difference of this userfile compared to the submission encode is how long the game sits on the intro screen while difficulty is being changed. Otherwise, the gameplay will appear almost identical.
- If this submission is accepted, the judge needs to determine which version would be preferred from a publication standpoint.
- There was only one major optimization trick used in the movement aspect of this run.
- When Tomarc simply walks off of a platform, he falls at an angle similar to a descending arc of a jump. I discovered that a one frame straight vertical bunny hop near the edge of a platform allowed him to fall straight down through the edge of the platform; thus allowing for more rapid positioning for the next jump up to the jail room.
Human Review
feos: Claiming for judging.
feos: Nice little run and
nice review by nymx. Regarding progressing difficulty, since this game has an ending, we don't need to care about further loops, and picking harder difficulty for regular games is up to the player. And since actual gameplay is basically the same either way here, difficulty settings are moot. Accepting the initially submitted version.
