Submission #10101: CoolKirby's GB Adulting! in 03:00.400

Palette

• Up and A+Up have coral sprites that better match the character's official art, but lose all contrast or have the same too-bright background issue, respectively.
• B+Left makes it B&W, which is fine but not as fun.
• B+Right's inverted colors don't look good for this game at all.

Pre-walk

• We can't skip the animated intro. The first input it reads is when it tells you to press Start. This is similar to Kirby's Dream Land 2's intro, and could be a reference to it.
• Movement is on an 8x8 pixel grid, except for special rooms like the park and the laggy space shooter minigame (not seen in this run). No diagonal movement, much like early Pokémon games. This makes most possible paths take the same amount of time.
• The game runs at 60 FPS, and there is a 2-frame window to press A optimally to check or talk.
• Our sprite disappears for a frame after collecting the key. Similar bugs occur throughout the game.

Walk

• The first section is finished by increasing Lulu the dog's X-Position. It will rubberband to you faster if you're further away, but not too far or it'll get lost. You can stop anywhere from just before the lamppost to just before the right side of the screen to start the screen transition on the optimal frame.
  • I don't know why only this section has slow acceleration and deceleration, as if you're in a vehicle. The normal XY position values don't work here, like you're a whole different character.
• The B button speech bubble doesn't go away if you press it close enough to a screen transition. I abuse this throughout the run, but Lulu's speech bubble overwrites it here.
• To exit the last section, you need to walk down to a certain Y-Position. Since movement is grid-based, it takes the same amount of time to approach the mess from the left or bottom, even if you don't have to go around the dog.

Library

• We return to the same spot as at the beginning of the game, so this would've been an equally good time to get the library book if I didn't earlier.
  • Getting it after the keys and before asking Lulu to walk is over 0.25 second slower.
• Since our roommate won't quit hogging the Wi-Fi until we walk the dog and return the book, we have to do both before filing our taxes.
• Our character clips behind strangers on the street, but only while walking, not if she stands still. This doesn't happen in the earlier GBcompo21 game version.
• When we return home, we can reset the router despite never checking the PC. RTA does this mini-sequence break too.

Post Office

• The graphic on the wall is a pixelated version of the U.S. Postal Service's "eagle" logo.
• As soon as you enter, the queue line will move on a long timer. Nothing you do will speed it up, but you can reset it by leaving or pressing Start, or freeze it by getting too close to the counter and alarming the clerk. So there's plenty of time to entertain.
• Customers collide with you most solidly while standing still. Once they move, they can walk through you. We're at the wrong angle to cut the second person in line, though, as far as I can tell.
• Despite the lack of collision, approaching the line from the right takes the same amount of time as approaching from straight on.
• It's 103 frames faster not to backtrack from grocery to the Post Office.

Wagons Groceries

• Each time you enter the main area, the customer positions reset. Once again, they're on a timer that starts when you enter from either the aisles or street, so we want to reload the room as few times as possible.
• The aisle customers seem to be the only RNG obstacles in the game. By pressing different inputs on frames where it doesn't affect movement, I manipulated them before entering the aisle without costing time. Approaching from the right is often faster since there are only two of them to avoid. Maybe this is why RTA does this store before Post Office, to cut down on resets.
• You always appear in one of two specific positions (left or right) on entering the room. It's not affected by the Y-Position you were at in the previous room.
• The right checkout line always moves faster than left; they're scripted that way.
• We have to wait again, but this wait can be cut in half with a glitch I found to share collision with the second customer by holding Up, cutting in line to make our purchase first!
  • You can lose a frame or two due to the weird collision making the glitch take longer to work. I had to sacrifice some entertainment to get in on the earliest frame.
• And that's all the items the game checks for, so we win. You can't actually call your parents since they don't pick up the phone.
• The cute ending smile is partially blocked by the speech bubble we opened earlier. It never unloads, for some reason, but looks funny at least.

Optional tasks and oddities

• If you were to do the grocery store before Post Office, you can take the filters home and make coffee. You can also enter the coffee shop and buy coffee there.
  • Both of these give you the energy needed to call your parents, but you can't anyway. The ending text will say it's moved to your list for tomorrow.
  • There is a stranger outside the coffee shop who complains of being tired. However, there's no way to buy or make her a coffee, so I don't know why she's there.
• You can pick up spoiled food in your kitchen, but can't seem to do anything with it and it doesn't enter your inventory.
• You can buy a slice of pizza at the restaurant, but it doesn't affect anything. You can also play a space minigame where you get no reward if you win.
• The PO clerk tells you to get in line even after all other customers have already left and the whole counter is open.
• Almost no NPCs in the game have dialogue. They will react with surprise or swear at you. It's like an inversion of the Talk to Everyone trope.
• This game uses the MBC5 board which contains a battery backup, even though no SRAM is ever saved or loaded. This inflates the cost of the cartridges for no reason.

Thanks to

• BizHawk devs for the awesome emulator
• RTA runners for some ideas
• You, for watching