Submission #7599: Cephla's NES Nalleland in 00:43.04

Nalleland is a 2020 NES homebrew in which Nalle the bear wakes up and goes out for adventure but the world is littered with dangerous monsters. But Nalle has the enchanted pin at her disposal to pin enemies down, bounce on it to gain height and open secret areas. It's bouncing feature is extremely useful, especially when you want to beat the game as quickly as possible.

First, the intended gameplay needs to be understood. The game features multiple individual screens which Nalle needs to navigate through while avoiding and using the enemeies to jump on in order to cross large gaps. The pin is the big thing that makes this game what it is and it can be used to bounce on when stuck in the ground or in an enemy and when it is in an enemy, they can be jumped on for a kill and extra height. There is a boss fight at the end which is pretty long. At the end, the final and ninth gem appears and the game is complete. This final gem, I assume given I couldn't find an explanation of this run anywhere, is the gem this TAS gets out of bounds.

We start off outside the house and by using some careful pin jumping, we can make it out of the hole and into the second screen. I made sure that the pin was placed on the very last frame possible so that there's a minimum fall between jumping and jumping again.

The second stage is where things start to get fun. By bouncing on the pin, the game thinks Nalle is in the screen above and so warps her up there. The game also makes sure she's a certain distance from the edge of the screen and guarantees a sexcure spot in the wall. Thankfully, she's not stuck here and some quick jumping can get her out. This is also where the first breakable wall comes into play and this was quite a difficult section to TAS. Ideally, all the blocks should have cleared by the time Nalle is at the right height to hit the target but due to the low ceiling, this isn't possible. Before submitting this, I did manage to save a single frame on this screen by doing a mid jump rather than a full jump which would push her down the hole too quickly.

These are largely uneventful but on screen 4, I did try to skip having to kill the cricket by doing a pin jump over it but Nalle falls just short of the next platform and a pin jump cannot save it. The other screens are just simple pin jumps and targets but its where the glitchless version of this run catches up due to it being able to skip more to get to the boss fight. Unfortunately, we can't skip any screens as the one we need is closed off and just along this path.

Again, I cannot be sure my explantion is correct but my guess here is that by staying on the screen above for long enough gives the screen we've just left to regenerate the breakable wall and so Nalle gets stuck in it but she jumps out and so warps the screen below. From here, we can just glide to the left and grab the final gem that beats the game

For once, I'm pretty confident in this TAS; I went over each screen at least 10 times and made sure there was no alternative way to do things. Of course, there's a good chance there is and I hope there is a way to skip killing the cricket on screen 4 but nothing I tried seemed to work. Maybe someone else in the future will be able to find a way past it

slamo: Replaced movie with 10 frame improvement, and judging!

slamo: Yeah, this looks like a good effort. The mechanics were used well, and any better large-scale routing options are not immediately obvious. Accepting!

despoa: Processing...