Soccer is a 1985 NES game developed by Intelligent Systems. Players can compete against each other or one of five CPU difficulties. This TAS wins a game against the easiest CPU difficulty.
Objectives
- Easiest difficulty
- Ends input early
- Emulator: BizHawk 2.11.0
Notes
Five frames are lost due to picking Spain over the United States.
The first goal was crafted by me. The game uses RNG to help determine the CPU actions, and this can be manipulated by pausing. I wrote a script that automatically tests pausing on various frames, returning whichever run results in the CPU scoring no goals.
It takes a lot of luck for the CPU to never score a shot. The goalie doesn’t usually move on its own, leaving it susceptible to diagonal shots. The goalie can dive to catch the ball sometimes, but this results in them being away from the centre, which makes it very easy for the CPU to score. The goalie only moves back into position if the camera pans right, which only happens if the CPU accidentally kicks it to centre. Out of roughly 22 300 tests, only three games resulted in a 1-0 game for Spain, which equals to a 0.013% chance.
I'm going to be honest, this game's not that good. While the art is decent, dribbling the ball is very clunky and the game plays really slowly.
Challenger: A soccer game that can be beaten almost without doing anything? This is interesting.
Claiming for judging.
Challenger: This game looks simple, the objective everybody knows how to do in a soccer game, however, this TAS shows something that nobody would expect to see just after the match barely starts: before scoring at least one goal, the game is paused for heavy luck manipulation with a bold strategy that allows something reminiscent like "Luigi wins by doing absolutely nothing" during some minutes until the match finishes completely.
Although the game is somewhat slow both in gameplay and pacing, for the other side the timer decreases faster enough to have some entertainment just because the players are supposed to do the best, but in this case they went to an unexpected skill level while the CPU opponents just struggle to recover the score and nothing after all.
Nice job managing an unique objective to this TAS! Accepting for publication :)
