Introduction
It's near the end of the year and I can at least squeeze in a quick one before 2022 meets its end. Time for a game that you'd think would have at least one submission to this site. Yet somehow despite being pretty simple nobody ever threw one at the site. Maybe it was the old rules being a bit too strict, but not even for an April Fools joke. Wild. Anyways while this isn't the first TAS to finish Snail Maze at this time, this is the first to get submitted.
Oh yeah, some background to this game. In early US/Euro Sega Master Systems there was a hidden built in game if the system was turned on without a game plugged into the console. Pressing Up + Button 1 + Button 2 will access this hidden, simple game to at least give someone without any games something to do with their console. This game was removed in later SMS revisions that instead had different built in games like Hang-On.
I had a hard time figuring out if Sega ever called this game "Snail Maze" in any official capacity. The official US hints sheets never gave a name to this despite telling the hidden code. The only remotely official capacity for the Snail Maze name that I could find was from the Handheld Electronic Games portable console thing. More specifically, the archived web page for the handheld that has the game listed under the "Snail Maze" name, though the preview screenshot seems to have an edited top of the screen.
Mechanics and techniques
Yes there are a couple of things worth mentioning. The game is tile based where each movement takes 8 frames to complete. the exception is the start of all rounds after the first one. The first input of those rounds can be done much earlier than normal, saving 8 frames each round start.
Round 11 has two splits in the path. The left half has a top and bottom route that can rejoin. The right half also has a top and bottom route. In both cases, the top routes are much faster than the bottom routes.
As far as I know I at least matched the time of the other TAS I could find out there. From what I can tell there's not really any glitches since this game is incredibly simple.
ThunderAxe31: Claiming for judging.
Darkman425: Cancelling this submission since I got in contact with the other TAS's author and seemed to convince them to submit their version as they did it first.