About the Game
Arrow of Death Part 1 is part 1 of a 2-part text adventure game published in 1983 for home computers. The worshipped rod's famous glow has been stolen. It's your task to rescue it with the aid of a magical arrow. Part 1 requires you to find the whereabouts of the parts which make up the arrow. It is the 3rd installment in Brian Howarth's Mysterious Adventures series.
About the TAS
This TAS aims to complete the game as fast as possible.
Why Such a Massive Improvement?
This is an improvement of 12,999 frames (4:19.57) over the previous TAS. This improvement was made possible thanks to a new discovery where pressing enter without typing a command gets rid of the picture. This does make loading between typing non-directional commands a bit longer, because the game's keeping track of everything you see and own with text, but it doesn't have to load the pictures, saving up to 10 seconds or more per directional command. We press enter just before typing our first directional command (N/E/S/W/U/D/GO/CLIMB) to save a fraction of a second from not having the text load. Input ends on frame 17088 when we input the command "CUT BRAN" (CUT BRANCH).
Why I Took a Break
I'm a bit angry and embarrassed that I missed this because I had found you could disable the photo, but I just assumed the picture would return by itself. This is also a big part of what made me take a week's break - stress, low self-esteem and burnout. But I'm glad to be back at it now.
That's all from me. Thanks for reading.
nymx: Claiming for judging.
nymx: Ok...so I understand why this would irritate you, but remember...I never thought of it either. With all the experiences I have with graphical text adventures, the only thing to turn off the display was a command at a prompt. I would have never thought of just entering a blank command to disable it.
So, just for my sanity...I checked the frame intervals for your keystrokes and they are spaced correctly. Yeah, there might be a one frame shorter command from time to time (like I find with Commodore games), but I'm not going to go through the entire game to find those instances. What you have here is fine. In addition to that, the short commands are also good. This was something also that I used a lot in my early play of these games. Because of your new discovery, I was curious as to why the first image showed up. Well, you discovery works after the game starts...where I would have thought a command or menu option would have been the trick.
I liked the previous TAS better, only because there was something to watch. But don't fret, as we have a new source of entertainment. A GEIGER COUNTER!
nymx: setting to delayed, since the author found more cuts. I will replace when I get home.
nymx: Movie file has been updated with latest improvements from the author.
