Submission #8690: Merl_'s Linux Me and My Launcher "glitchless" in 00:48.82

Me and My Launcher is an action-platformer where you play as a dude with a rocket launcher. Your goal is to destroy every bomb in the level by shooting them, before heading to the exit to progress. When you shoot a rocket, you get recoil in the opposite direction, and you can maintain the momentum you get from the recoil to speed around the level at breakneck speed. This TAS completes all 15 levels in a mere 48 seconds, without using a single glitch.

Me and My Launcher has a very powerful glitch called "level stacking" where you can create multiple copies of different levels and play them all simultaneously. This drastically affects the route and the resulting TAS is a broken, incomprehensible mess. I chose to make this TAS glitchless in order to make it easier to understand, and to show off more traditional movement and strategies. I will make a glitched TAS for this game in the near future, but it will take a lot of work to optimize and it is nowhere near finished right now.

You might notice that some of the levels are slower than the world records on speedrun.com. This is not because my TAS is unoptimized, it is because the world records on speedrun.com were not carefully checked and are accidentally abusing a glitch which delays the in-game timer. You can verify this by measuring the real time that passes from the first movement to when the level finish screen shows up. In my TAS, the IGT and real time match perfectly, in the RTA ILs, there is a discrepancy. This is why levels 1 and 2 don't beat the "world record". Level 5 is different. You actually can't do a rocket jump on the first frame of the level loading in. I talked to the developer and he confirmed this to be a bug. Because of this, I have to wait a frame at the start of the level, which is why the TAS is 1 frame slower than the world record.

I think the strategies used in this TAS are most likely optimal, and because it is a glitchless TAS, new discoveries likely won't affect anything in this category. I do think there is room to optimize the gameplay more though, especially at the refill stations. The TAS frequently uses strategies where you walk onto a refill station, then walk off of it, then boost back into the station to get momentum and ammo. This is extremely hard to optimize, because you have to switch from moving at top speed with a ton of momentum, to stopping perfectly, to walking back and forth slightly. Sometimes, this was as easy as just holding a different direction at the right frame. But other times, I had to carefully manipulate my speed and position with complicated sequences of inputs just to save like 1 frame. I'm not confident that I was able to perfectly optimize these sections. Additionally, I think that level 11 could be improved after shooting the first bomb. You might be able to get a little bit less height and land a frame earlier, while still clearing the spikes. I also think you might be able to take a slightly different route in levels 6 and 13.

InfoTeddy: Claiming for judging.

InfoTeddy: This game does indeed seem to have some weirdness between in-game time and real time, so I'm fine with accepting this to Standard as the glitchless branch.

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