Tutankham is a maze-shooter. It is definitely my least-favorite game in the Intellivision library.

Objectives

Goal

This TAS starts out playing at skill level 4, which is the highest difficulty and does not get harder when completing any loops thereafter. However, the second loop in any playthrough, no matter the selected difficulty, will feature one extra key in each level at each location you see one of those weird purple gate-looking things. This TAS therefore just aims to complete one loop of stages at the highest difficulty instead of exhausting all content. But let me ask you something. Do you really care to see that content? Do you really want to see the levels played again but this time with more of the same monotony and tedium of BACKTRACKING? You know, everyone's favorite game mechanic? ... yeah I'm certainly gonna pass on that one.

Luck Manipulation

Enemy spawns can be cancelled probably 95% of the time by firing your laser gun at the same time as the spawn. This is not true if you fire into a wall you're right next to... which I've never once cancelled a spawn by doing. You also can't cancel enemy spawns by shooting up or down because YOU CAN'T F*ING SHOOT UP OR DOWN AT ALL IN THIS GAME LIKE WHAT IS THAT!?!?!? I mean yeah, let's retain THAT arbitrary and also bad mechanic from the arcade, AND ON TOP OF THAT get rid of the one crucially good arcade mechanic: the fast movement speed. Yeah, let's get rid of that. That'll not be boring or anything. It'll ensure the player is completely helpless even in the most minor of inconveniences. They'll love that. This game sucks lol.

Level 1

Straightforward level. I beat this one in a whole bunch of different ways to make sure I'm getting the fastest route, and the final method shown is one of the ties for quickest.

Level 2

This level has one major problem: the long vertical corridor right before the first keyhole. Since you cannot fire into an adjacent wall to manipulate enemy spawns, the player is mostly helpless as he can't outsmart any Yellow Auk if one decides to spawn at the bottom. However, this problem was solved by cancelling pretty much EVERY enemy spawn in the level up until that point. Harder enemies like the Yellow Auks won't spawn until a certain number of Green Cobras have already spawned; and so through this method, we can get cobras to spawn in this hallway instead which are much slower and more manageable.

Level 3

The start of this level has a similar problem to the one in level 2. Both an enemy spawner and key are immediately visible at the level's start. But before you can reach that area, you must travel through another long vertical corridor where spawning manipulations can't be made. Thankfully, I found that by making use of the huge open area at the end of level 2, I could traverse many different paths which would change the spawning RNG at the start of level 3. Eventually, I found a pattern which did not spawn a lot of cobras, and was able to safely grab the key.

Level 4

Oh I almost forgot, there's a Flash Bomb mechanic in this game. The flash bomb which kills all enemies on-screen can only be used once per life, not per stage, meaning we can only use this once in the entire run. Luckily, it was needed in a pinch in Level 4 to tame enemy spawns while going into and backtracking out of the final corridor.

By the way, this run is obviously suboptimal

It probably happened in a couple places but its most notable after unlocking the first keyhole in level 3. While making this TAS, I completely forgot to check if having too many enemies on screen generates lag... you know, an obvious thing to watch out for. Sure enough, it does. Whoops. Now I'll be honest, I really don't feel like going back and correcting all that because I wouldn't exactly call TASing this game (let alone playing it) a riveting experience. I will therefore leave this mistake up to someone else to remedy.

feos: Claiming for judging.

feos: Having to do more of exactly the same (one more key) doesn't really feel like UNIQUE CONTENT in my opinion, so I think this movie's ending is okay for a game without an ending. Too bad I can't accept it since it's now my movie too.

feos: Abused powers to replace the movie.

DrD2k9: Claiming for judging.

DrD2k9: Good RNG manipulation. Optimization appears well done.

I did find that it is possible to significantly reduce lag frames through further minimizing enemy spawns as well as firing at certain times even when not trying to manipulate RNG. Unfortunately due to the movement mechanics of the game, this decrease in lag (of about 440 frames) only yielded an actual 1 frame improvement by the beginning of the 3rd stage, and I had no desire to continue through the remaining two stages as the reward didn't seem worth the effort.

I agree with feos that doing another loop which simply requires more keys doesn't really add new content and is unnecessary. It's more of a difficulty increase. That said, if someone were to include the 2nd loop, I feel it should obsolete this 1-loop submission.

Accepting to Standard.

despoa: Processing...