Laser Blast(Atari 2600) FAQ/Walkthrough
version 1.0.0 by [email protected](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.

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