About the Game
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.
Thrusters is game 12/52 in the NES version of Action 52. You play as a dark green/brown spacecraft shooting at other spacecrafts while avoiding 4 types of very oddly shaped meteors.
About the TAS
This TAS aims to complete all 4 levels in the shortest input time possible.
Bootup
After waiting through the Action 52 cutscene and a little bit of menuing, gameplay starts on frame 966.
Gameplay
Given that this is essentially an auto-scroller, optimisation is very trivial for the first 3 levels. All we have to do is survive by moving L/R to avoid the meteors and shooting when necessary to take down enemy ships, as well as pressing start on the earliest frame possible to start the levels quicker.
On Level 4, there's a certain X position in the level where the stars align (haha get it?) and we can avoid both all the meteors and all the spacecrafts. When the level starts, we hold D+R for 13 non-lag frames. Then we let go of R and hold D on its own for 11 frames. This way, everything is avoided and input ends about 50 seconds earlier than the actual level does, on frame 10440.
Action 52: In Conclusion
It's a real shame to say this, but this is probably the last Action 52 TAS you will ever see from me unless improvements to my already existing Action 52 TASes are found. The other games are either too difficult or too tedious for me to optimise.
It was a real blast to TAS this heap of rubbish games, and I'm glad I was able to inspire a couple of you - namely
OtakuTAS and
warmCabin - to make a couple of your own TASes of this abomination.
Before I started tackling Action 52, only one of the Action 52 games had a publication here, and that was The Cheetahmen. Now, that number has increased to 31, with a few more still to come.
That's all from me. Thanks for reading and I'll see you in my next TASing adventures.
nymx: Claiming for judging.
nymx: I thought I would go ahead and knock this one out, since I have judged more of these than other members. It follows the same pattern as many of the other Action 52 auto-scrollers. One thing that I want to re-iterate, is the fact that each level is on a timer, so it doesn't matter if you move to the top...it won't make a difference. But the best feature of this TAS is the early input ending at the beginning of the last level. This was HUGE! Great job.
Accepting.
