I don’t know that much about the speedrunning scene, but I have a flavour of what people do to complete games in quicker and quicker times. Sometimes it’s using emulators and exploiting imperfections in games to produce theoretical runs that would be possible if a player could hone their timings beyond human limits. Sometimes it’s learning a game back to front until it is completely within their command, doing things like manipulating the timings of random number generators so that the odds are ever in their favour.
There is a subset of challenges to the learn-the-game approach in which players don’t purely go for the fastest time outright, but the fastest time within restrictions: play as the weakest character in the game; don’t level up your RPG party. Some take the challenge a step further outside of the game itself: use an absurdly impractical controller; complete Super Mario World blind-folded.
Operation Thunderbolt on the Commodore 64 generously brings every one of its players into this world of ludicrous imposed challenges. The sequel to Operation Wolf, it is another arcade conversion and another virtual shooting gallery in which you play the part of a brave American hero massacring his way to rescue some hostages. This time there is the added tastelessness of being loosely based on real events, though in-game there is little enough information that you would never know, and the muddy graphics are such that all of the enemy hijackers are indistinguishable from your average masked ninja sprite. Not that that makes the idea ok. As for other changes, there are levels where you are carried forward on rails instead of to the side, but the really ingenious addition, or rather subtraction, is that you don’t get a crosshair for your gun.
The only way that you can tell where on the screen you are aiming your weapon in Operation Thunderbolt is by firing it. This means that unless you have a stunt speedrunner’s level of memorisation skills, you need to be firing constantly to be aware enough to be able to aim at anything. Like its predecessor, Operation Thunderbolt provides you with carefully limited ammunition for your machine gun. Do the maths there and the absurdity of the challenge is rapidly apparent.
The less ridiculous, or at least more positively ridiculous, addition is the two player mode. Specifically, the way in which the regular power-up drops, packages on parachutes, don’t dispense their items immediately when shot by a player, but send the item on a path over to that player’s side of the screen, direction reversible if the other player shoots it. And reversible again if the first player shoots it again, and so on. Never mind rescuing hostages, dragging out tennis matches over bonus ammunition is a much more fun prospect. And, honestly, more in keeping with the spirit of a conversion slapdash enough to shade into the bizarre.
