Space Dock (Compute's Gazette)
You've taken your Class 3 OC-88DL, mining ship to the asteroid belts and back. The cargo bays are brimming with valuable ore, as well as a few strange crystals you discovered. Six months in space is a long time; all you want is to dock the ship, collect your pay, and find a room with a hot bath.
But the traffic is heavy today. On arrival at the Lincoln International Spaceport, you were asked to go into a holding pattern. Finally, after three hours of flying in circles, you've been cleared for landing. You accelerate toward the landing bay and suddenly realize that every ship in the sector must be here, and they're all blocking your path. You bear an angry voice on the radio, "Hey, noodle-brain, where'd you learn to fly? Get out of the way." So you turn off the radio...
Why TAS This Game?
The continuation of TASing games from my all-time favorite magazine, Compute's Gazette. This makes my 21st TAS from this series.
I remember getting this magazine and opening it to find that there was only one game in it. This disappointed me, but when I saw the word "Space" in the game's title, I was pepped up just a bit. Well, this ended up being a fairly descent game. As usual, this one had a bit of a challenge to it and was very hard to play. Having only tried it on Level 1, it was a bit frustrating at times and would force me to quit often. So, you can imagine playing this on the highest difficulty...wasn't able to! Well, time for a TAS to show that it can be done!
Previous Compute's Gazette submissions include (In order of submission):
Game Ending and Difficulty
This game has a difficulty selection. I have chosen the highest option, Level 3. The game is a continuous looping game, where scoring is counted in the number of successful dockings. Since unique content has been demonstrated on the first round,
one docking is all that's needed to complete this TAS.
Effort In TASing
There wasn't much to TASing this, since it was easy enough to take risks and reverse any situation that doesn't work out successfully. There was a small amount of RNG, but it was not worth manipulating...since it depended on your screen location. So...I did what I could to minimize the frame loss during docking. Additionally, ending input early was a big time save.
Human Comparison
I couldn't find anyone that has played this. Just remember, don't be fooled by what you are seeing. I highly doubt that anyone could beat this game on Level 3, without using save-states.
Darkman425: Okay, so my laptop emulates this game at half speed. Even with just that and no save states it took a good hour to get a winning run of scoring a single point mostly due to the RNG of the moving dock being generally awful.
This TAS makes this deceptively hard game a bit easier looking than it is and looks good to me. Accepting to Standard.
