[TAS] Spectar Arcade 253,320 points in 28 rounds

Tool-assisted superplay (TAS) of Spectar Arcade 253,320 points in 28 rounds

-Spectar is a sequel to Targ.

-There are 2 ways to end a round:
-Eat all the dots like Pac-Man (36 dots at 20 points each)
-Shoot all enemies (10) like Targ

-Note that dots may disappear for reasons other than eating them:
-3:10, 6:34, 7:10, 7:46 An enemy's bullet hit a wall, the dot there disappears
-If you kill an enemy on a dot, the dot disappears (1:32)
-If an enemy bullet hits another enemy on a dot, it disappears
-If you shoot an enemy missile over a dot, the dot disappears (3:19)

-The game reaches its hardest point at round 11, from there enemies are always as fast as the player
-At this speed it's almost unplayable for a human

-The quickest way to get points (if you are a TAS) is to finish the rounds as quickly as possible to obtain the round bonus: 1000,2000,3000... (max 9000 points)
If you eat all the dots you get (6X6=36 X 20) 720 points
If you shoot all the enemies (90 points each from round 9 and onwards, lower before that) you get (10X90) 900 points
-But if you're a real player, you might want to stay as long as possible in the first round and shoot the green and yellow enemies that appear regularly.
As shown here: https://www.twingalaxies.com/showthre...
In this video you can see that he kills 212 green/yellow enemies (for a 1st round of 48360 points) while keeping as many red enemies as possible so that they don't accelerate.
From my testing, if you keep 4 or more red enemies, they will never speed up.
His game ends on turn 11 which is almost unplayable by a human.
This also shows that you can wait for green/yellow enemies for as long as you want.

-Round 15 (2:49) I shot all the red enemies except one and waited for green/yellow enemies but only 6 appeared, I don't know why. Or maybe I should have just waited longer?
-Round 16 (4:21) I didn't shoot any enemies
-Round 26 (6:24) I waited again at the end but with 3 red enemies, after 24 green/yellow enemies I decided to stop.

-Round 17 at 4:41 shows the limits of hit boxes, this is the closest the player can get to an enemy without dying. (View it frame by frame with the “Greater than” key)
-The player's hit box does not appear to be centered on the player's sprite. I sometimes had trouble not colliding with an enemy because the collision would happen before they visually hit each other.

-In Mame, you need the Targ samples to have the shooting and explosion sounds.
-Shooting and explosion sounds often play more times than they should. Emulation problem?


What is a TAS?    / prog61  
For a good introduction to TASing:    • How to create the perfect speedrun - ...  
For more information visit https://tasvideos.org.


0:00 Rounds 1-5
1:05 Rounds 6-10
2:01 Rounds 11-15
4:19 Rounds 16-20
5:23 Rounds 21-25
6:23 Rounds 26-28