Laser Blast(Atari 2600) FAQ/Walkthrough version 1.0.0 by schultw.andrez@sbcglobal.net(anti spam spoonerism) Please do not reproduce for profit without my consent. You won't be getting much profit anyway, but that's not the point. This took time and effort, and I just wanted to save a memory of an old game and the odd solutions any way I could. Please send me an email referring to me and this guide by name if you'd like to post it on your site. ================================ OUTLINE 1. INTRODUCTION 2. CONTROLS AND SCORING 3. STRATEGIES 4. VERSIONS/CREDITS ================================ 1. INTRODUCTION So I was just browsing through GameFAQs and I said/sez/says to myself, "Self, what could GameFAQs use more than anything else? Ooh! I know! I mean, you know. I mean, we know. Another Laser Blast FAQ to accompany AltTesta's! Why, we could add a screenshot of the winning ending, too, along with some other nonsense people don't care about but that might be more generally interesting!" "Why, self," I says back to myself, "That is one PEACH of an idea. You just get us rolling. I'll do the typing and you do the thinking. Or should..." "Well, I'll let you go first, whatever you want to do, self. Heh heh." ... Did your head explode from the stupidity of the above? If not, congratulations! You're ready to take on the pointless-fest that is Laser Blast! It was probably the first game that really started to shake my faith in game programmers to, well, make fun programs. There was no guarantee games would be fun. And the games I didn't know were fun or not, well, there was no great mystery I was missing out on. Nevertheless this FAQ comes from the depths of my despair, and I was able to bust out of said despair by figuring out that the easy stuff was still easy, and in fact the hard stuff was not too bad either. Basically, you can do the same thing over and over, and the game falls. Eventually. Unless you need a bathroom break. Thankfully Stella with its/her latest version allows for save states, and you can use them if you get bored or annoyed or whatever This review also gave me a nice sense of perspective(minor profanity): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrxov-2-S6k I basically agree with him. It's neat to see a small game like this is doable, and it's a funny idea, but dang if it doesn't get boring quickly. You could get 2 different patches at Laser Blast, one for 100000 points and one for a million: http://www.atariage.com/2600/archives/activision_patches.html I also have a screenshot of the ending. It's not worth 2 hours of work, but compared to the years of wondering, blasting through the game on Stella was no big deal. Basically, as a kid, I got to 250000 on the easy mode, had to go to the bathroom, and didn't get back in time. Rats! Another time my sister wanted to watch Star Trek, which was weird, as I don't remember her watching Star Trek at any other time. What really hurt was, I wasn't allowed to watch Dr. Who. Well, enough kiddie angst. The interesting tradeoff of game speed vs security would be nicer if the game wasn't so repetitive. It can wear you down. But if you get a pattern down and get in a zone, you can polish off several thousand points in a breeze. 2. CONTROLS AND SCORING Difficulty switches do not matter. You can move down to fire at the enemies at close range through levels 1-8. The further along you are, the higher your lower limit is. So this is utterly useless in my scheme to work through the game earlier, so don't worry about it. The main thing to know is that you can fire quickly straight down. You can move left and right without twisting. Firing and pointing left/right fires in a diagonal, so that if you are above the middle cannon, you'll hit a side one. Unless they fire at you first. It's possible to fire diagonally immediately but takes too much time. You get 10 points per cannon on the first round, up to 90 on the 9th round and every subsequent round. With an extra ship every 1000 points, that means the 2nd gunner of round 8 will get you an extra life. Then you will pretty much get an extra guy every 11 gunners, or approximately 4 rounds. Actually, it's every 3.703703703... and you need to win 73% of your rounds without getting killed in order to stay above water. Technically it's a bit more than that, as you may spend some time with more than six extra ships. That does not get you an extra life, but on the bright side, your number of lives does not roll over to zero when the bit flips, leaving you with an unexpected problem. At 1000000 points you get !!!!!! on the screen, and the game freezes. You have won! I get about 8000-9000 points per minute on the toughest(commander) level, which means that it can take 111-125 minutes to win. Well, a bit more, as the first levels are a bit slow and don't get as many points. But basically, 1st 8 levels = 1080 points (1000000-1080)/270 = 3699.703 So 3708 levels are needed to get to 1000000 points. Here are the difficulty settings for the various games, taken from the manual(thanks AtariAge): lvl1 lvl2 lvl3 lvl4 lvl5 lvl6+ CADET LEVEL 1 2 4 8 8 8 LIEUTENANT LEVEL 1 2 4 8 16 16 CAPTAIN LEVEL 1 2 4 8 16 32 COMMANDER LEVEL 1 32 32 32 32 32 What this means, basically, is that lieutenant is a bit quicker than Cadet from level 5 on. Captain is quicker than Lieutenant from level 6 on. And Commander gets tough right away but is no tougher than Captain long-term. You may wish to ease your way into Captain, and it is a slightly better choice to start on than commander, because you will have easier fights til level 6. On level 6, you have 3 fast fights til your first extra guy. On commander level, you get there right away. However, you may want to prove you can master commander just by running wind-sprints up to 1000. See if you can get there without losing a man. If you can do so consistently, your win-probability is .87, more than enough to win. See the end of section 3 for details. On the Stella emulator, hit F1 to select the game and F2 to begin. Hit F9 to save the state and F11 to recall it. You should only need one. 3. STRATEGIES Move quickly. Don't worry about firing at an angle. That is too tough to judge. Just fire down, move and fire down. The big trick to remember is that cannons will move into you. If your UFO is located slightly to the side, the cannon near it will move into it. The cannons don't have to, as they shoot at angles, but knowing this is a big help. When your UFO falls, steer it onto an enemy turret to kill it off. After a UFO dies, you get time to shoot everything and get to the next level, so losing 2 UFOs in one level should not be a problem. Enemies fire from left to right. They fire at where you were a half-second before they fired, so if you move around, you can get them. If you can time things so the enemy fires, then you are right above one after moving, then you can take out an enemy. Moving back and forth, you should be okay, as long as once you get to the edge, you can move back. So you can avoid getting hit that way til you're in position. Remember to do so once you get near the edge, or you'll get trapped. Also, moving against the grain can be tricky, i.e. to the left if they fire up/right. More risk of getting hit as they may be aiming at where you were before reversing direction. But really it's better to be expedient. With proper play, a level should only take two seconds. Here is what to do: Position yourself between the tens and ones digit as the enemies come in. Fire down. Move to the right, where extra ship #4 is. Fire down. Move to the right, just halfway under ship #5. Fire again. If you don't have 5+ extra ships, you can estimate. It's pretty much reflexive. Boom, right, boom, right, boom. The cannons are on their own special timer, so you may wind up getting hit if one fires away. Then you may have stretches where the game is a breeze. You can avoid all the fire if you want, but that may still cost you a level if you aren't in the usual position to knock off a level quickly. So have faith that you can fire just right of the left cannon, it walks in, then left of center and it walks in, then left of the right. If you have 6 saucers and your hundreds/tens score is 910, and you are hit, do not land on an enemy. Shoot them down instead. If you land on an enemy, you don't get an extra guy. Similarly, if you need a break, then's the best time to get killed. You'll get an extra guy ASAP. You can also crash into an enemy with a score close to the next thousands mark. You may need a break from the repetition. If you feel yourself getting out of a groove, then slow down. Don't play "are we there yet" if you are low on guys. Simply kill what you can. If you really have no faith, then duck and weave and try to wind up near where the left cannon or right cannon will appear before you get to the next level. Of course, you can use save states on Stella. Similarly you can take a 30 second break to go do stuff if you don't want/have save states. You can probably close your eyes and move left/right, switching when you hear the firing. It's not worth a diagonal shot to take out the remaining 1 or 2 cannons. Just get near them and blow them away, if you died and are regenerated. Basically you'll probably need some time to develop a rhythm. Fire, right, fire, right, fire and back left to the gap between the tens and the ones-that-is-always-zero. Once you do that, you'll be okay. It requires a bit of faith, but work hard at the start of commander level to master it, then off you go. Incidentally, I ran a PERL script on what success-rate you need to be able to get through the game with a certain amount of confidence. It is rough, as I assume 4 levels per lost ship, but basically you will find, based on the magic number(yeah, should be 3708) that P=85% gets you a 75% chance of winning. P=80% puts you at 1%. P(lev) P(lose) ------+------- 0.75 | 1.00 0.76 | 1.00 0.77 | 1.00 0.78 | 1.00 0.79 | 1.00 0.80 | 0.99 0.81 | 0.93 0.82 | 0.81 0.83 | 0.63 0.84 | 0.43 0.85 | 0.26 0.86 | 0.14 0.87 | 0.07 0.88 | 0.03 0.89 | 0.01 0.90 | 0.01 You can see there's a pretty big inflection here, from .82 to .84. Obviously, not every level is independent from another. But you can take heart that a .75 probability gets you a good score. Incidentally, the table for 100000 points is below. P(lev) P(lose) ------+------- 0.75 | 0.87 0.76 | 0.79 0.77 | 0.69 0.78 | 0.56 0.79 | 0.44 0.80 | 0.32 0.81 | 0.22 0.82 | 0.14 0.83 | 0.09 0.84 | 0.05 0.85 | 0.03 0.86 | 0.01 0.87 | 0.01 0.88 | 0.00 So in other words, if you can get to 100000 you really are very close to breaking it all the way. In fact, if you get to 50000, you probably just need to tune up. In general, you need to beware of frustrating clumps of losses, and you need to establish a "zone" where you are doing very well. Basically if you can get from 6 ships down to 2 and back up, it's a sign you can regain focus and build back up what you had. The first thousand points on commander level may actually be the toughest, as you have at most 3 ships, and it takes a longer time to get the first extra guy. Code below==== @x = (0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1); @y = (0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0); my $prob = .85; $magicNum = 3700; while ($count < $magicNum) { $count++; iterateTry2(); } sub iterateTry2() { my $outputString = sprintf "%5d:", $count; for ($i = 0; $i < 24; $i++) { $q = $i - 3; if ($q < 0) { $q = 0; } $r = $i + 1; if (($i == 23) || ($i eq 0)) { $r = $i; } @y[$q] += (1-$prob) * @x[$i]; @y[$r] += $prob * @x[$i]; $borp = 1 - $prob; #print "y[$q] += $borp *x[$i] | y[$r] += " . $prob . "*x[$i]\n"; } for ($i = 0; $i < 24; $i++) { $outputString .= sprintf(" %.2f", @y[$i]); @x[$i] = @y[$i]; @y[$i] = 0; } print "$outputString\n"; } ======== 4. VERSIONS/CREDITS 1.0.0: sent to GameFAQs 5/27/2009, complete. Thanks to the usual GameFAQs/honestgamers gang, current and emeritus. They know who they are, and you should, too, because they get/got some SERIOUS writing done. Good people too--bloomer, falsehead, Sashanan, Masters, Retro, Snow Dragon/Brui5ed Ego, ZoopSoul, War Doc, Brian Sulpher, AdamL, odino, JDog and others I forgot. OK, even Hydrophant in his current not-yet-banned message board incarnation. I am not part of his gang, but I want him to be part of mine. Thanks to the NES Completion Project for keeping it going. Thanks to SBAllen for his work at GameFAQs and for accepting silly guides like this. All you people at honestgamers, YELL AT ME if I forgot you and you deserve to be in there. I mean, it's partially because of HGWars I wrote this FAQ, and I want to add to this in the future. AtariAge, for their information on Laser Blast.