[TAS] Krull Arcade 10 loops (1,159,620 points)

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Prog61

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Published on October 9, 2022 11:51:28 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Hbmc36Aerg

Game:

Krull (1983)

Duration: 33:11

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56

Tool-assisted superplay (TAS) of Krull Arcade 10 loops (1,159,620 points)

GOAL: Reach over a million points

Playing Prince Colwyn, you must survive five events which repeat after completion.

Except in the first scene, you have 4 glaives that you can shoot. But you can't shoot a glaive again until it comes back to you like a boomerang after hitting something. Sometimes a glaives seems to bounce badly and go to the other end of the screen for no clear reason. (3:57)

== 1 The Mountain
Pick up the 5 pieces of your glaive, avoid all the boulders rolling down the mountain.
To get a higher score, walk/run under a boulder, the collision appears to be at pixel level.
-Big boulder = 20 points every 1/30 sec = 600 points per second
-Small boulder = 10 points every 1/30 sec = 300 points per second (9:55)
You may rack up points for a while, but eventually there are too many smart boulders that are faster than you and heading straight for you.
There is no place you can hide from the boulders, as I demonstrate in loop 10. (25:22)

== 2 The Swamp
Save 8 men by picking them up. The rescued men are carried over to the following scenes. Men can be killed by Slayers, it takes 3 hits to kill them. The scene ends when you have killed all the Slayers. New Slayers stop spawning after the last man is saved or killed.
To get a higher score, keep a man alive by guarding him and shoot as many Slayers as you can. But over time, the Slayers run faster and shoot more often. The man will end up getting killed. So you can't do this for very long.
When a man dies, you can save him by touching him before his death animation ends (12:18) (27:10)

== 3 The Fortress
Save the men by picking them up and then touching the hexagon. You start the scene with the men you rescued from the swamp. The scene ends as soon as you save the last man.
Since men can't die on this stage, we have to go get them. You can shoot Slayers for as long as you want, but if you don't move enough, a Slayer will spawn directly under you.

== 4 The Hexagon
Shoot the front wall of the hexagon when it is black. If you shoot at the wall when it is not black, your glaive will stick to the wall until the wall turns black. The scene ends as soon as you shoot the last wall.
To get more points, don't shoot the last wall, take the time to shoot as many Slayers as possible.
The speed at which the hexagon changes color increases, eventually becoming very fast. If you stay on that scene for a while on loop 10, the speed at the end is amazing (28:25) Good luck with that in real life :)

I wanted to see how long a TAS could shoot Slayers before probably be overwhelmed.
On Loop 1, it looks like it would never be too hard for a TAS. If eventually all the Slayers had run fast, I don't know if I could have keep up with them.
But after a while I wondered why I didn't need to move much and I realized that the Slayers never fired at me horizontally. Looks like I may have found a good place to stand. I think if you stay 2-3 pixels below the hexagon the Slayers for some reason don't shoot horizontally.
I retested this trick on loops 5 (16:33) and 10 (27:55). As you can see, Slayers never fire horizontally when I was in the right spot. I don't know if this trick can be useful for a real player but there may be something there.

== 5 The Beast
Rescue the princess, you just have to collect her at the other end of the screen. But the Beast is in your way. You can't touch it or the fireballs it shoots at you.
Each time you shoot the Beast, it will be momentarily stunned and you will get 100 points, but you cannot kill him.
The fireballs give you 100 points times the number of fireballs in flight. (source: Krull user manual) By watching the video frame by frame you can see that it is correct except that you have to count the fireballs that have not finished animating the 100's. I think the maximum is 1200 points for a fireball but I'm not sure.

I wanted to see if the beast would end up running too fast for the player to escape. But he doesn't seem to go faster and since he has to stop walking to shoot I think he will never be fast enough to bother the player. It's the fireballs that are the real challenge.
On loop 1, I followed the side of the screen waiting for the beast to follow me, to see if he would get stuck in a wall somewhere. But it seems that the Beast cannot be stopped by any wall as you can see at 18:08
If you could just shoot fireballs like the TAS, that would be the best way to quickly increase your score. But it's not easy to do in real life.

==
Before starting this TAS, I was sure that I would have to do more than 10 loops to get over the million points, since the score on Twin Galaxies is 600,000 for 10 loops. I never would have guessed that I could have done it on the first loop.
I played this game in the 80s and I was very surprised to see that the TAS, just by shooting more accurately than a human, could play the Hexagon and the Beast level for as long as I wanted.

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