Cell Runner (Compute's Gazette)
Not for the faint of heart or slow of hand, this frantic game puts you smack in the middle of a futuristic nightmare. Your survival depends on speed and concentration.
Why TAS This Game?
The continuation of TASing games from my all-time favorite magazine, Compute's Gazette. This makes my 43rd TAS from this series.
Another game that interested me enough to type in. I thought imagery, in the magazine photo made the game look like magic. I was in for a surprise, when I saw the playing field change so radically, every so often. Now that I have TASed this, it puts itself in the same category as other...being extremely unfair and unplayable at higher levels. Again, I never knew what would happen at the end of this game...which was fun to discover, but ended up being very boring.
Previous Compute's Gazette submissions include (In order of submission):
Game Difficulty and Ending
This game ends after beating 40 rounds. I never realized this, until
DrD2k9 point it out to me. Man, have I been looking at too many of these magazines to remember anything about any game!
Effort In TASing
I really didn't like TASing this game, because hard effort gets destroyed easily. You see, the cycle of patterns comes around very frequently within certain frame ranges. So i was never able to get the patterns I wanted...over and over. I did start off writing a BOT, but it failed...after seeing that I could never force the cells to line up the way I wanted. So this game has sever limitations and can crush any optimizations that are fought for.
I have been hanging onto to this TAS for month, basically because I didn't know how to end it or classify it. Now that I do, I went through this game a final time with great frustration. I eventually off optimizing levels 31 through 40 to cut about 21 frames. That should tell you just how ridiculous this game is to work with.
Human Comparison
Couldn't find one.