Submission #8570: McKniggediKnack's GBA Spyro: Season of Ice in 49:18.24

In this movie I try to beat Spyro: Season of Ice for the Game Boy Advance as fast as possible while taking no damage, neither as Spyro nor as Sparx. There are a few suicide jumps off the map that are disrupted by cutscenes, so Spyro is not killed and takes no damage. One notable and pretty precise trick utilized in this run is the boosted jump you can get on any wall. It saves time as you don't need to take the stairs. During the autoscroller speedway stages I hit every object that grants additional time, making them more interesting to watch.

Spyro: Season of Ice - like the other Spyro games - is a platform collect-a-thon with mainly two collectibles: rubies and fairies. Fairies are necessary to complete the game and rubies are needed to unlock the special Sparx stages, which in return give you more fairies. Other methods of obtaining them include defeating all enemies in a stage, lighting up different things, like lighthouses, pumpkins and candles and hitting fairy thieves. Once the conditions are met, e.g. all enemies are defeated, you get teleported to the corresponding fairy. This mechanic makes for an interesting and synergistic route.

I did this TAS a while back and recently the current RTA record holder RubberDuckyAssassin encouraged me to submit it here. The route was taken from the record holder at that time Mr_Raptors and optimized for the inclusion of walljumps, which - due to their precision - only seem useful in a TAS. I don't know if they are considered glitches but I highly doubt they are intentional.

For the most part this run consists of running and jumping around and setting things on fire, often hitting multiple enemies or objects with one flame. Sometimes I needed to wait for certain things to trigger (for example the birds in stage two and the bells in stage three) as they wouldn't register being hit when I left too early. Most of the time it's faster to run up to a fairy crystal and hit it than hitting it from far away, as the camera panning is slow. There are some exceptions from this, for example if you need to go in a different direction afterwards.

During the platforming sections I didn't really care about the gems. When in doubt I avoided them, as they would make the transition screen - where your gems are counted - last longer. In order to get enough gems for all the Sparx stages I collected them in the speedway stages until I had exactly enough. To make these autoscroller sections more interesting I hit every object that gives more time. Especially on hard difficulty this looks pretty hectic at times.

In the Sparx stages it was harder to take no damage due to weird hitboxes, but it worked out in the end. In general it's faster in this game to not get hit. I can't think of a single situation that would be faster when taking damage.

nymx: Claiming for judging.

nymx: Replacing movie file with a trimmed version that is 8387 frames shorter.

nymx: This is a really good effort. After trimming the movie, we now see that your run dominates the WR by 12 minutes and 35 seconds (adjusting for RTA timing). With such a record, I can't say that anything looks obvious...as the author has really put the work into this. Great job!

Accepting for publication.

Spikestuff: Processing...