Submission #8409: Cephla's GBC Grimace's Birthday in 03:40.83

(I found an improvement in 1-2 while writing this so encode with goofy dimensions is slightly inaccurate)

To celebrate one of McDonald's mascots, Grimace's 52nd birthday, the fast food giant commissioned a... GameBoy game? As if it couldn't get any crazier, the game revolves around Grimace riding a skateboard on his birthday (which he's celebrating at McDonald's) to round up Birdie. Hamburglar and the McNugget Buddies before he blows his candles out. Can he find them all before his candles inevitably melt? Supposedly yes, as he manages to find them all with the power of tool-assisted superplay in just 3 and a half minutes. (but that McDonald's is never seen in the game again. Wonder if it burned down)

McDonald's release a gameboy game? Of course I'm going to TAS it whether others have or not! To my surprise, I only found two TASes from other people, both of which are over a minute longer than this submission. Aside from all the memes and stuff, this was honestly very fun to TAS and the RTA community has already done a lot of research and the devs are quite involved with it all which is very useful when trying to get an insight on how everything works so I have used a lot of their research to my advantage and would like to credit them for most of the stuff I'm going to try explain.

Now some stuff I have to explain before technical details. This TAS is made for v1.7 and only 1.7. I started making this on 1.6 but switched to 1.7 which came out today which is why the SHA1 comes up as wrong when you try to load the movie but it still works and does not desync. The reason I waited to submit this on 1.7 is because of a new 'speedrun mode'. By pressing right when selecting 'Start Game', the game is put into Any% speedrun mode specifically which automatically skips all the cutscenes and an autoscroller at the end. Previously, holding right would only skip cutscenes and a cheat code had to be used to skip the autoscroller which I would have had to include had I submitted on 1.6. Pressing left instead of right puts the game into 100% speedrun mode which also skips cutscenes but not the autoscroller.

Now, I can understand that this can still be considered as skipping content which is why I have uploaded a backup TAS that does 'play' through the autoscroller but it doesn't add much value to the movie and makes it more boring overall but it doesn't contain improvements I found while writing these notes up so I haven't linked. This must be played on 1.6 as I still hold right at the start to skip cutscenes which can also be argued is skipping content, in which case I can quickly resync everything with cutscenes.

And another thing I almost forgot. This is all played in easy mode. At first it was a mistake that I forgot to fix but easy and hard mode are basically identical. All hard mode does is force you to hold down if you want to survive on a railing and it doubles your points for tricks. This is only applicable in the first two levels so I don't see much point in changing it to hard mode. If it's decided it would be better in hard mode, I can also change it and resync everything.

With that out of the way, time to get to the TAS.

This game is yet another 'get from A to B' game. The only things that can hurt Grimace are some bins and they only stun him for a couple of seconds. Collecting the shakes is slower as it adds lag frames and you have to wait a while after completing the level for it to count up so al shakes are actively avoided.

Grinding is 4 subpixels per frame faster than skating at full speed (31 vs 27 sp). The obvious decision would be to grind wherever and whenever possible. But there is a catch. There will always be 4 frames of no movement when first starting the grind (2 if coming up from the bottom) and a further one when coming off the rail, whether it be by jumping off or just riding off. This ends up affecting where we can grind.

Overall, you lose 135 subpixels (8.5 pixels) of potential movement every grind no matter what , but because you end up gaining 4 back every frame, you need to grind for 34 frames to be saving time. There are some places in this movie where I grind on seemingly slower rails but I have timed every single grind to make sure it is worth it, or at least if it is skippable because there are some grinds that lose time but it isn't possible to skip them.

1-1 is very uneventful and there's not much I can actually say about it.

The first room is more of the same A - B stuff.

The second, on the other hand, is more interesting. There are 3 routing options, we can either go up the left side, through the middle or up the right. RTA runs use the right side as this is most friendly and is fastest if you exclude one key piece of tech we have: the superbounce.

If you walk onto a spring and hold A on the right frame, you can get a massive boost that goes beneficially high. Unfortunately, this only works if you skate onto the spring... except if you manage to jump below the spring so that you land inside it, which is also a frame perfect trick, and then you just have to wait for the right frame and up you go. This allows the left side to come out as the faster route by 69 frames over the middle and 70 over the right side.

The levels in world 2 are very similar so I'm going to just group the two levels together. Level 1 is like 1-1: get from A to B but this time you can't skate and you need to jump over gaps. The only strat used here to save time is reducing lag by skipping as many balloons as possible.

Enemies are introduced for the first time in 2-2. These can usually be jumped over or under with minimal waiting, but for others, we need to wait until they fly off which is triggered by getting within a certain range of them. This wait can be reduced by popping a balloon as we pass through the enemy as the balloon popping takes priority over the collision with the enemy so that saves some time. The only issue is that the balloon before the one in front of the enemy needs to be popped in order to spawn.

ThunderAxe31: Claiming for judging.

ThunderAxe31: File replaced with a version that gets to the credits roll.

I can't believe this game is an actual thing. What a time we live in! As for the movie itself, it pretty straight about beating the game as fast as possible. Accepting.

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