Game Description:
Pitfall II: The Lost Caverns is the sequel to the popular game Pitfall! for the Atari 2600. In this game, you play as Pitfall Harry once again. This time, your goal is to rescue Pitfall Harry's niece Rhonda, your cowardly lion sidekick Quickclaw, and to recover the Raj Diamond. Along the way, you can also collect gold bars and a valuable ancient cave rat in order to gain points. The game ends once you collect Rhonda, Quickclaw, and the Raj diamond.
Goal:
The goal of this TAS is to beat Pitfall II as fast as possible. The game is considered beat once you rescue Rhonda, get the Raj Diamond, and rescue Quickclaw.
TASing Process
While working on my maximum score TAS for Pitfall II, I decided to see if I could improve the fastest completion TAS of the game as well. I didn't find quite as many opportunities for timesaves here as I did in my maximum score TAS, but I did find a few tiny optimizations. In particular, I was able to save time in the bat and condor sections in the last 2 minutes of the run by manipulating the condors to fly a little higher than Pitfall Harry, allowing me to climb up each ladder slightly faster than in the published run. All told, this saved only a handful of frames, but it was enough to beat the game in 4 minutes and 2 seconds as opposed to the currently published run, which beats the game in 4 minutes and 3 seconds.
I hope you enjoy my TAS!
slamo: Obviously this is well done, 13 frames isn't much, but it's still an improvement.
What's not so obvious is the tier this should be in. The previous submission is in Vault, but it has a 6.4 rating, and the feedback for this movie has been somewhat limited but pretty good. This looks like a borderline case, but I'm going to upgrade the tier for now. Accepting to Moons as an improvement to the published movie.
feos: Pub.