About the Game(s):
Action 52 is an unlicensed game made for the NES and Sega Genesis, featuring - you guessed it - 52 different video games. The NES version was published in 1991, whereas the Genesis version was published in 1993. Both versions were published by Active Enterprises.
Star Evil is game 33/52 in the Sega Genesis version of Action 52. The concept is pretty much the same as Sunday Drive, Slalom and Magic Bean among others. 9 levels of autoscrolling where you have to dodge the objects and end input as early as you can. Except this time, you're navigating a spaceship avoiding other spaceships on the same planet, as the scrolling gets faster and faster over time.
About the TAS:
This TAS aims for fastest completion, which means beating all 9 levels with the shortest input time possible.
Gameplay/Tech:
With this game (among a few others in the cartridge) essentially being an autoscroller, gameplay time is impossible to optimise, and input time is only meaningful in the last level. All we have to do is survive.
In this game, there's one key difference to most of the other autoscrollers - we can press C to shoot, making navigating around the map easier.
The scrolling speed gets faster every 2 levels, as demonstrated by this list (TPS = tiles per second):
For every level, the map is exactly the same and loops over and over. Therefore, we can copy and paste some of the inputs several times - while adding some C presses here and there to take down enemy ships - to make the TASing process a whole lot easier.
The game keeps scrolling for a few seconds after dying, which can be used to end input earlier than expected. On Levels 5 and 6, we lose a life on the same frame as completing the level. Luckily, this doesn't crash the game and instead we advance to the next level at the cost of 1 life.
Input ends on frame 22490, the final necessary input to survive Level 9.
Action 52: The Conclusion (kinda):
And that marks the end of my Action 52 TASing journey on the Sega Genesis! I'll still be submitting some of these on the NES every now and then, but I'll mainly be moving on to other TASes for now.
Thanks for reading.
nymx: Claiming for judging.
nymx: Nice upbeat music. As with the other Genesis Action 52 games, this one is another survive to win concept. Each level gets faster and faster, with more moving enemies to deal with. So I'm going to clear the queue of this one so that we can keep it under control.
Accepting.
