Submission #9042: nymx's C64 The Way of the Exploding Fist in 07:02.89

The Way of the Exploding Fist is a karate simulation. You can choose to compete against the computer or a human player. When fighting against the computer you have each only one live. When reaching full two points, you will win the fight. After the time has run out the referee decides who has won. After two won fights you get into the next arena of which there are altogether four. Your "skill" then rises from NOVICE to 1st Dan and so on. The computer enemy gets correspondingly stronger. -C64 Wiki

More information can be found in the https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/The_Way_of_the_Exploding_Fist.

As with all my TASes, I always do a full run through, mainly as a Test TAS. During that experience, new techniques are always discovered. Afterwards, the real work begins...where I start from scratch and do the entire TAS with my gained knowledge. I have to say, this TAS was a surprise...in regards to the difficulty. Trying to trick the CPU into failing, was incrasingly difficult as the levels increase.

The game starts on "Novice" and stops increasing once it gets to "10th Dan". Because each level is fought twice, the 10th Dan is also done twice to complete the uniqueness of the game. Thereafter, it remains on 10.

This is one of the rare games where the CPU is strictly driven by an AI algorithm. In fact, this AI is so strong that it took quite a while to find an optimal solution on the later levels. There are times where every move I could make, does nothing. So the trick was trying to get some routines to execute and confuse the CPU into executing a move, so that I can counter it. Usually this is done during the advancement toward the opponent. Some times there are delays, while other tricks included pressing random directions to get the computer to do something that allows me to exploit a win.

nymx: Oops...I saw something that I missed. Re-uploading an improvement movie that cuts 67 frames.

Darkman425: Claiming for judging.

Darkman425: As a note, the given game version doesn't match the hash of the input file but still synced fine.

I saw a lot of different varieties to get the full points needed for the win in each bout. Understandable since later opponents would require a bit more AI wrangling to cooperate in a swift manner. Nice work!

Accepting to Standard.

Darkman425: Due to me not catching a PAL/NTSC issue and by author request, setting this to delayed to allow them to fix the issue.

nymx: Resynced against an NTSC version. Bye Bye Mr Bull. :(

Darkman425: Special thanks to fsvgm777 for catching something I overlooked in judging. Now that it's been resynced on a proper NTSC version and I've verified sync, setting this back to accepted.