Ice Palace
You play as a penguin who is desperately trying to save the love of his life. But watch out! The prison palace is a harsh place, and you must be careful of its traps. There are 3 areas of the palace, each with their own challenge. With each level increase, you find yourself battling even harder...as some things become more difficult to manage. With all the Ice, Fire, Roving Machines...you are certainly on a mission to prove your love! -NYMX (I had to write this, because I still can't find a manual or a page about this game!)
Version
I do not know why, but this game was very painful to find any version. I eventually settled on a disk version, which was what I had in my youth. It is also the only source I could find. One problem...this is a "cracked" version, yet nothing is visible in terms of a title screen for the person responsible for breaking the disk copy prevention. Additionally, all my searches kept bringing up completely different game that shares the same name as this one.
I was hoping to use a tape version, but Bizhawk doesn't support T64 images yet. This would have helped to create a pure TAS, which I very much prefer.
Game Ending Choice
This game loops infinitely. I'm not certain that one loop would be good enough for this submission, so i decided to go the full length of difficulty, which ends at Level 8. Thereafter, it repeats at Level 8 over and over.
Effort In TASing
In the beginning, I recognized that RNG was the key to getting the results that I wanted. I started writing a BOT to force that RNG, but it turned out that it was just easier to add the inputs...so this was all a manual effort. As I went through this game, I discovered some exploits that made this game lighting fast.
- Jumping: On the first scene of each level, I was able to brush the edge of ice blocks and perform a wall jump. This jump is very touchy, as it had to be the right pixel placement and proper position on the screen.
- RNG: This was controlled very differently over other games. For instance...the first scene, the ice blocks being dropped were predetermined before they spawned. When I finally figured this out...I controlled that RNG, before spwaning, and replayed each block until it landed where I wanted it to.
- Ice Block: In the last scene of each level, building ice blocks gave me some options. I found that I didn't have to have a fully create a block to perform all the actions, as I worked my way up toward the goal; however, you can only do this to blocks that don't serve as a base for another to be stacked upon. Another point, is that during my turning animation...I was able to start building ice blocks a few frames earlier.
Game Details
- Scene 1
- Ice Blocks
- Standing too long will cause them to melt
- Fruit
- Collecting fruit will help you to create a jumping boost
- Scene 2
- There is no jumping available
- Ice Blocks
- Grabbing and Moving
- Can be placed anywhere on the platform and dropped
- Used to build the platform higher
- Fire
- Will partially melt the bottom block
- Higher levels will melt them slower, since they spawn more frequently
- Can be eliminated with an ice block
- Roving Machines
- Dropping blocks upon them will build your platform
- Scene 3
- Multiple Obstacles
- Shooting Snowman
- Falling Fire
- Ice Block Construction
- Player gets to build a platform to the goal area.
- Partially built ice blocks will prevent stacking additional blocks
- Can be used to shield you from the snowman attacks
- Partial construction will still allow for walking
Human Casual Play
I was only able to find one good video, and I can't really call it a speed-run though...as the player didn't seem to have a grasp on efficiency in many places. Here is something for your comparison, so that you can see how much more powerful my TAS is over human effort.
feos: Claiming for judging.
feos: Added publisher to game title to distinguish from
Ice Palace (Creative Sparks).
Here's a screenshot from the Creative Sparks version:
