Cosmic Combat (Compute's Gazette)
Wave after wave of enemy Zirconians attempt to descend on your home planet in hope of the ultimate conquest. Your only defense is your particle beam pulsar cannon, which will destroy them. But don't even let them get close--they'll self-destruct and take you along with them.
Alien visitors from a faraway galaxy have left their dying planet in search of a new base for their civilization. Their target: Earth. As they descend in waves, your mission is to carefully maneuver your nuclear-powered space cruiser, which is armed with a particle beam pulsar cannon.
Although you're greatly outnumbered, effective use of your powerful cannon can offset this disadvantage. A direct hit disintegrates an enemy ship. Unfortunately, the Zirconians know of your weapon and are artful dodgers. So much so, in fact, that they'll sometimes collide with each other in an effort to avoid your pulsars.
Why TAS This Game?
The continuation of TASing games from my all-time favorite magazine, Compute's Gazette. This makes my 41st TAS from this series.
I remember this very, very well. As with other space centered games, I quickly jumped on this, when the magazine arrived in the mail. This game was very fun to play, but it got too fast for me to play, as you progress. So this time around, I decided to TAS it to see how far it would progress. During the making of this, I realized it was faster to manipulate RNG so that I could cause the enemies to collide with each other...essentially making this a "Pacifist" run. This run look hilarious, as I just sit still and never shoot a thing. The enemies overestimated their chances, when they met me. My RNG powers are so amazing, that you'll wonder what is going on near the end of this run. LOL
Previous Compute's Gazette submissions include (In order of submission):
Game Difficulty and Ending
This game doesn't have a difficulty setting, but it can be classified as complete upon finishing level 25. Why? On Level 26...the speed of the game goes down to a crawl, just like it does in
Astro-Panic!, and my previous submission of
The Forbidden Crypt.
Effort In TASing
This game was extremely difficult to TAS. I had to write a BOT to hand this the forcing of RNG. In fact, the game is so bad at detecting collision that my BOT was not able to figure out all these situations. Eventually, I had to come up with a manual way of TASing. This game took months of effort. Additionally, I had to start over...which was a good thing. Why? I realized that forcing the enemies to crash into each other was far faster than shooting them. I have long awaited an opportunity to create a pacifist run, and now I finally have one that I'm satisfied with. Because of that, this run became way more entertaining than a standard shoot'em up run.
Human Comparison
DrD2k9: Very impressive accomplishment, in my opinion.
While it may be possible for a non-pacifist run to beat this submission by time, it would be quite the challenge to do so. So even though this is a valid "Pacifist" run, it should also currently receive the Fastest Completion flag as well.
Given that no score is awarded for enemies crashing into each other, this also happens to be a low score run; leaving the possibility of a Max Score branch still possible.
Accepting.
