Submission #7893: NEVERDOORS's GC Luigi's Mansion "Hidden Mansion" in 08:52.12

Luigi's Mansion any% TAS in 8:52 (7:08 RTA Timing)

This TAS is an improvement on the currently published #7274: NEVERDOORS's GC Luigi's Mansion in 09:27.42, and uses the same general route to complete the game as fast as possible, while implementing two new strategies involving Chauncey, as well as saving a couple frames towards the end of the run. This submission overall is a ~35 second improvement, and brings the total TAS time down to under 9 minutes!

Normally, after activating the rocking-horse to make Chauncey appear, the door locks behind us, we lose control of Luigi briefly while Chauncey appears and says a few words before we regain control. It was discovered shortly after the previous TAS was published that it is possible to retain control of Luigi and skip this small cutscene by standing in the upper left-most corner of the room when activating the rocking horse. You still have to wait a short amount of time for Chauncey to become tangible before hitting him with the ball, but overall this saves ~2.5 seconds. It's called that cuz that's the name of the guy who found it and I don't feel like calling it something else lol

Well, I mentioned this as a theoretical skip in the notes of my previous submission, and it's real! Personally I am still rather surprised by this being real, as people have been looking for and joking about this skip for well over a decade at this point to no avail, until now! There are some strange, counter-intuitive requirements for it though, which is probably why it took so long to find. Basically, to be able to one-cycle Chauncey, you have to do two things:

For whatever reason, this combination of things allows us to defeat Chauncey in only one cycle, saving ~32.5 seconds!

The beginning of this TAS (up to entering Nursery) is identical to the previous submission. I was unable to successfully hex edit in the rest of the run after Chauncey, so everything was redone manually. Overall, 1 frame was saved between entering the OoB segment and loading into the King Boo fight, and another frame was saved on the King Boo suckup animation.

A consequence of not taking two cycles to defeat Chauncey, is that we don't have the opportunity to damage ourself to lose coins for free by getting hit with his attacks while waiting between cycles. This leaves us with more coins than usual, with fewer obvious opportunities to lose them (as a reminder, having no money at the end of the run saves frames from not having to watch it tally up in the final money count). We mitigate any timeloss by getting hit by bowsers initial fire attack, and also running into a spike ball to lose the exact amount of coins that we need.

I'd like to use the submission notes for this movie to talk about another recent discovery the LM community has made. Basically, for a long time it was thought that you could only obtain a 'skew' while standing on Floor 1.5. The specifics of this physics quirk were (and still are not) understood extremely well. As it turns out, it is possible to obtain a skew on regular ground, using some specific sources of damage, notably mice and the flying fish found in the courtyard. Additionally, it was also discovered that you can use the Gameboy Horror to clip through certain walls and other pieces of geometry, while in this skew state. Before this was known, the only way to get out of bounds and start skipping around rooms in the mansion was by defeating Chauncey, and using the Area 1 Key chest to clip onto Floor 1.5, as seen in this submission.

The new 'inbounds skew' tech allows us to begin sequence breaking from an even earlier point in the run: the very first area with mice on the ground, the Area 1 hallway. From here, we can obtain an extreme skew off of a mouse and clip into several different Area 2 rooms early. On NTSC versions of the game, we are currently trapped within these rooms, and cannot do anything useful or continue any sequence breaks from them. However, the PAL Hidden Mansion, unlike the NTSC Hidden Mansions, have completely different ghost spawns in most rooms; notably for us, mice now spawn on the ground in the Kitchen, which is one of the few rooms we are able to clip into early from the Area 1 hallway. By obtaining a skew off of these mice, we are then able to clip into the Area 2 hallway early (with the help of a PAL exclusive fire bomb enemy spawn). This is significant, because from here, after getting another skew and clipping into the Courtyard, we can perform another newly discovered skew-clip straight into King Boo's Secret Altar, from the bottom of the Well! This allows us to completely bypass both regular Area 1 portrait ghosts (Neville/Lydia) as well as the lengthy Chauncey fight, and skip straight to the end even faster than before.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned before, this is currently only possible on the PAL Hidden Mansion due to exclusive ghost spawns. Discovering how to access the Area 2 hallway (or Floor 1.5) early on NTSC versions would instantly make this possible, and save almost two minutes over the route used for this movie! If you would like to see the route in action, I have created a LOTAD which you can watch here: Luigi's Mansion PAL any% LOTAD (5:25 RTA) I currently have no plans to TAS or submit this route though, until it becomes possible on NTSC (I'm not even sure how publishing that would work, as PAL Hidden Mansion is a bit of an outlier in regards to 'version differences' among games (ie it has more money than any other version or PAL Normal Mansion, completely mirrored layout, different ghost spawns in every room, double damage, less health, harder 100% requirements etc...) I have no answers to this, but feel free to discuss!)

shoutout to minimini352, saria, glitchphd, snap and everyone else finding new applications for new tech! thanks to everyone who enjoyed the previous movie, and thank you for watching!

ThunderAxe31: Claiming for judging.

ThunderAxe31: All right, the movie syncs just fine after generating the SRAM file with the provided verification mode. We only recently introduced SRAM-anchored movies to the list of goals allowd in Standard. This means that this movie is not considered as an Alternative goal, and an hypothetical clean SRAM movie would be published as a separate branch regardless of how similar may look to this submission.

As such, accepting this submission for Standard, as an improvement to the current publication, as that also starts from SRAM.

fsvgm777: Processing.