Submission #2107: nineko's GB Daedalian Opus in 11:05.30

Daedalian Opus is a puzzle game for the Nintendo Game Boy. You have to put pieces into a canvas. The pieces are like the one used in Tetris, except that they are pentominos instead of tetrominos (with the only exception of the square piece you receive in the last level).

<Put here a longer explanation of your submission> When you start a level there are pieces all around the screen. You move the cursor with the directional arrows, then you pick a piece with A, then you move the piece around with the directional arrows. B will rotate the piece 90 degrees counterclockwise, Select will flip the piece vertically, Start will flip the piece horizontally. Then A will drop the piece. You can move and rotate in the same frame; you can move and flip in the same frame; you can't rotate and flip in the same frame. You must wait 1 frame before doing the same operation twice (e.g. up, wait, up, wait, up), though you can do different operations on consecutive frames (e.g. up, left, up, left). The resulting number of frames needed to move a piece is the same in the two cases anyway (as up, left, up, left takes the same time as up+left, wait, up+left, wait). I tried to optimise the solutions by looking for the shortest paths and shortest keypresses, in order to minimize cursor movements. Sometimes this wasn't possible because the pieces were completely spread on the screen. After each level there is a long cutscene where the character moves from a level to the next one. Unfortunately those cutscenes are not skippable.

Puzzle games are always particular when it comes to a TAS. I think it can be interesting to see a movie that finds all the solutions in the shortest time possible, but I don't know if this would apply to people who never played the game. Daedalian Opus is still a cool game, in my opinion. My main concern are the ultra long cutscenes, but in case this submission is accepted, it wouldn't be hard to shave them from the AVI file. All in all, I'm happy about this movie, also because it's technically almost perfect. By "almost" I mean that I found out some possible improvements while I was playing the later levels, and I could apply only a part of them to the earlier levels, because hex editing the movie file caused desync. I doubt this would save more than 1 frame per level, though, resulting in 1÷2 seconds of global improvement. A more massive improvement can come if someone finds a better solution or a better path. If that's the case I would be more than glad to see someone obsoleting my run.

Well, I'm looking forward to see how this one turns out, I put a lot of time and effort in this run.

mmbossman: As a puzzle game this is ok, but the unskippable cutscenes ultimately kill the entertainment value of the run, so I'm rejecting it. Good luck with your future works.