Submission #5323: Tee-N-Tee's SMS Castle of Illusion: Starring Mickey Mouse in 11:46.53

Mickey and Minnie are dancing happily as all of a sudden the evil witch Mizrabel, jealous of Minnie's beauty, plunges out of the sky and abducts Minnie. Mickey chases after Mizrabel all the way to the Castle of Illusion... He has to collect the 7 rainbow gems to turn into Super Mickey build a bridge to the final level, beat the witch and rescue Minnie.

In the following, I will describe several tricks that are used.

Usually Mickey's running speed is capped at 1.5 pixels per frame (px/f) and sliding down a slope is capped at 3 px/f, that means if you were to hold the direction you're going after a slide you would fall back to max running speed but pressing left, right or down every 4 frames, allows you to keep your sliding speed, as long as you're on the ground. Moving objects can also be used for a speed boost, for objects moving in the same direction as Mickey, you have to jump at the last possible moment before running off of it, for objects moving in the opposite direction, you have to jump off right after landing on it. In both cases the object's speed gets added to Mickey's speed.

Partly used in earlier TASes but with precise y-positioning this can be done on every ladder. Basically, you let go and regrab the ladder just before a screen transition, this puts Mickey in his standing state for a split second, allowing you to jump.

By partially clipping a ceiling, Mickey can jump up to 9 pixels higher, which allows you sometimes to skip a platform or ladder and even bypassing some part of the level. Additionally, Mickey's x-position gets shifted up to 4 pixels.

Mickey must meet the following conditions: downward momentum, x-velocity over 2 px/f, proper x-positioning to skip the wall's two outmost pixels.

Mickey can get wedged between an item and a door. You can then pick up the door, resulting in Mickey zipping around.

This run improves the currently published movie by 3716 frames (62.01sec). It breaks down as follows.

I divided the levels into sections. Every time a screen transition or fade-out occurs, a new segment starts. The number of lag frames was reduced from 94 to 40.

The first "leaf boost" is actually a special case of the aforementioned speed tech. Mickey interacts with the leaf in such a way that he gets the left- and rightward momentum, resulting in a speed of 3.5 px/f.

Slightly faster boss strat, I got the boss to land twice on his box and jumped off of the box to grab the gem.

New strat, involving getting the barrel into the bossroom. Some time is lost getting it, but it's more than made up by utterly destroying the "Chocolate Devil". The way he disintegrates into pieces is RNG and can take between 12 and 26 frames per piece. By doing seemingly random movements, he can be manipulated into dropping a piece every 12 frames.

The bounce you can get off of the book boss, is strong enough to get on top of the wall, this allows you to get the subsequent hits as fast as possible.

Walljumping ftw! Getting to the gem early, skips a decent amount of backtracking. Damageboosting made it possible to get to the nut before it even moved and beating the boss in one less bob.

At the end of the rainbow cutscene, it's possible to jump (the jump sound effect can be heard), this is known as "rainbow jump" and is mainly for shits 'n' giggles, but it wastes 1 frame, so consider it a speed/entertainment tradeoff. The dragonfight seems a bit glitchy, especially the first hit. I think, as long as you traverse the hitbox with the barrel, it registers the hit as soon as you throw it. This oddity and the fact that the barrel falls straight down when Mickey's horizontal speed is 0, allowed for sneaking in an extra hit (2nd hit). For the next 3 hits, I manipulated the boss into shooting the lightning balls straight down in the fastest pattern and for the last hit, I was able to use a faster strategy, since I had one extra health and didn't have to regrab the barrel. Even before the final level transpired, I wanted to change the Mizrabel fight a bit (fastest to final hit instead of shortest input that still beats the game) and having no extra health left, narrowed it down to option 1 anyway. That's why the input is 10 frames longer in the final fight.

I'd like to thank Katzman 79 for the barrel strat against the "Chocolate Devil" and btrim for the door glitch.

I hope y'all enjoy this run :)

Masterjun: Judging.

Masterjun: Entertaining game and really nice improvements. (My tip: Try to do more different things in the autoscrollers to make it even more entertaining! Copying input is not bad in itself, but when you have the chance to increase the entertainment of your movie, you should take it!)

Accepting for Moons as an improvements to the previous movie.

Spikestuff: Publishing.