Submission #8809: inconsistent's DS Pac-Man World 3 in 24:53.53

Pac-Man World 3 is a 3D platformer. You play as Pac-Man as he goes to stop Erwin from siphoning all the energy in the Spectral Realm. The DS version is a relatively bad port of the PC/Console releases, with much content removed and no cutscenes.

The fastest form of movement is the rev-roll, which is ~2.7x faster than walking. They last for 2 seconds with a full charge. You can double jump out of them (as well as wall hangs) by pressing B the frame before/after it stops. For unknown reasons, many things are tied to the rev-roll (door opening/closing animation, rev plates, elevators, etc). If you're charging the rev roll at the end of those animations, you'll jump, so I usually wait for their animations to finish before charging.

Elevators usually lock you in place when you ride them, but if you jump the frame before it locks, then it will rise with Pac-Man still able to move (which is called EEE for early elevator exit). But even with this, elevators disable the rev-roll if you're on them, so you need to hop off before you can start one.

You can clip into walls if enemies push you into them. They need to run into you without attacking, because that will stop their movement. So I either make then run at an angle they need to turn into (because they only attack if you're straight in front of you), or jump above their vision right before they attack.

You skip needing to kill the enemies to lower the bridge by just rev jumping across. Normally you'd press a button to break the robots glass, but you can just jump into a slit at the top. After the elevator, you'd need to do platforming to make the robot arm raise a bridge. We just damage boost across then double jump to the platform. You can skip the spectral fight just by double jumping over the collision. We have to lower the elevator because its collision is too large to get around it. After that, we wall jump upwards instead of riding the elevator because that's slower. In this TAS, the camera also freezes where the rev plate is. That's because charging a roll immediately after leaving the plate freezes the cam. It's not done anywhere else, as it makes it hard to see, and certain angles are impossible.

Skip lowering the elevator because this time the collision lets us go around it. After the key door we grab the red gem. There's normally a spectral fight that has to be done to progress, but you can just double jump to the Pac-Chain and ignore it. The second key door doesn't have collision in the top left/right areas, so we can fall through it and progress to the other side.

Small timesave at the start by wall jumping to the b-doing. We then double jump to the spinning ring, skipping a puzzle that'd have us ride a platform to it. You can completely skip a spectral fight by hugging the right side of the wall, and then double jump to the platform (which would normally rise after the fight). We skip another by double jumping over the portal's collision, and then double jump over the wall to get past the door (which doesn't open unless you fight the spectrals). Double jump to the next ring to skip a tiny bit of extra movement. At the end, there is a portal fight that you must do to finish the level. To spawn it you first have to jump to the top pellet and then fall back down. After that, I wait for both spectrals to spawn before grabbing the power pellet, because they only turn blue if they're already spawned.

Throughout the entire run the ghosts aren't used at all lol. When she has power, Pinky can place platforms for Pac-Man to jump on. We can just jump to the other side without her. Right after we wall clip and stay on the edge of floor collision, to get to the elevator without fighting the monsters. On the elevator, we do an EEE to free our movement. For some reason, the green wall at the top of the elevator has no collision, so we can jump through it and to the other side of the wall, saving more than 40 seconds (because we ignore the spectral fight and some other platforming shenanigans). This TAS doesn't show it well but you can get a better view here.

We skip the 2nd spectral fight by chaining wall jumps and double jumps. At the end of each wall hang your state goes to "Idle", and the next frame should make you airborne as you fall. But you can jump on the idle frame to chain and do a pseudo-infinite wall jump. On top of the door, I can't run straight ahead as there's death planes, so I fall under it then get back in bounds.
The end of the level requires you to kill 6 monsters, similar to Spectral Cliffs. But these enemies don't spawn unless you hit the button, and you have to kill the enemies next to the button, otherwise the button does nothing. Because of how close the end area is, we can just jump over to it. There are death planes, but we jump over them fairly easy. Rev-rolling into enemies is the fastest way of killing them if you don't have the butt bounce power pellet, after that it's punching and then normal butt bounces.

We skip a pretty lengthy puzzle at the start that would lower the platform, by wall jumping between the platform and the wall. After that, the game wants us to do 2 spectral fights which open a door, then climb up blinker platforms. We skip that by jumping to the peak of the cliff, and double jumping to the next area, saving ~20 seconds. The next spectral fight we can't skip as similar to the end of Gogekka Central, not killing the spectrals causes the b-doing to do nothing when hit. When Clyde has power, he can knock down standing pillars. We easily skip him by rev jumping across. To end the level, the game wants us to use Clyde to knock down another pillar, then use Pac-Man to collect a ring. We can double jump to and from where the ring stands though, skipping that.

Defeating all the monsters at the start would cause a HUGE monster to smash open the door, but we use an enemy to our advantage and wall clip around it. We have to collect this gear to fix the gondola, otherwise we can't ride up and progress. Because it moves as soon as we place it, we sadly can't reach it to skip a cycle (which seems to be a recurring theme in this game). We can skip the 2nd though by doing a precise double jump across, and the 3rd by doing an infinite wall jump. With a cute (-w-) enough wall, your vertical speed is higher than the horizontal, letting you regrab the same wall.

We have to grab 2 keys to open the first door. We get the first by falling in the hole, then double jumping to the b-doing (which skips killing the spiders to raise a platform). The 2nd is just in a box. To get past the 3rd, we get the blue gem and ride the Pac-Chain to the next key. We skip a tiny puzzle by wall jumping, then rev jumping over the lava. After, we skip using Pinky for... something by wall jumping, then rev jumping near the rails. After, we use a spectral to wall clip. Above where we do it, there's a door that only opens after the spectral fight, but we use the OOB collision to gain height then jump to the floor where the door would take us. Then the level ends by killing 9 spiders. We have to press the button, otherwise they would keep spawning.

BOOORING!!

We skip riding the elevator by wall jumping over its collision. There's a bit of wall that has flooring, and walls that meet like this: _|
When walls are close enough together like that, you can chain jumps similar to what was done in Gogekka Central, where jumping off the | puts you on the _. Chain enough jumps and you save ~90 seconds. To end the level, we just have to grab the gear. The door blocking it has an open gap on the right side, so we don't have to butt bounce on the switch's to open the door.

We need to grab 2 keys to open a door and progress. We can't just jump around the door because of the death planes (they really did not want you breaking this door) After grabbing the first key, we intentionally die to respawn near the 2nd, and then wall jump upwards to grab it. After progressing a bit, we climb up a wire to lead us OOB and to the next part, which saves a little time over the normal way. The brownish door is similar to the one in Zephyr Heights, in that the game wants us to kill all enemies near it to break the door, but again we can wall clip and pass with ease. Then it's just platforming to the top of the level, where the end is.

Again, like Zephyr Heights, the elevator doesn't start its cycle until we hit the button. I tried really hard to catch this cycle, but I never got it. A lot of time could be saved if you get it, and if you want to attempt it you can get my closest attempt here. It's very challenging as you have to balance how long you charge the roll with when you double jump, and it's also actively rising up and away from Pac-Man. Making matters worse is that unlike every other platform in the game, you can't ledge grab this one.

Alright, enough sobbing. The game wants us to lower 2 robot thingies so we have platforms to walk on, but we skip that by rev jumping to a bit of collision we can stand on, saving ~40 seconds. A little while later after hitting the b-doing, we open a door then do wall jumps to the upper yard, which skips lowering the elevator. After that, the worlds slowest elevator shows itself. We have to hit all the buttons to open the door, otherwise we cant progress. The devs really just wanted to test a players patience... At the end of the level we do an EEE to wall jump to the end trigger a little earlier.

There's supposed to be more puzzle mechanics, and to make sure you do them the game placed a death plane between the 2 areas. Except, you can just jump around the plane. A little after we see the the 1st huge use for rev jumping up slopes. Normally the game doesn't let you do that, no matter how tiny the slope is, but with the magic speed value you can. We do it to get past the door, which'd require us to kill the robots. We're supposed to ride the Pac-Chain to the next area, but that's slow, and we can double jump across.
Now on the other side, the game wants us to do 3 things:

We skip all of that by jumping up the slope again. Then just kill murder drones to end the level.

At the start, we skip a lengthy puzzle by double jumping to and over the beams collision. Again, we have to kill the 1st phase of spectrals to use the rev plate (it does nothing if we done). But after that we can skip the 2nd phase easily.
In case you forgot or didn't read it, one of the things tied to charging a rev roll are rev plates. To prevent you from charging more than you should, the game sets the roll charge timer to -1 when you hit its limit. This stops us because the game doesn't like charging into the negatives. But stepping off the plate rolling again lets us do just that, as it unlocks the timer. From there it's smart movement to the end.

The final level. There are (supposed to be) 3 waves of enemies you have to kill to ride the elevator. Instead we wall clip and fall past the elevator to skip that.
Being the final boss or whatever, you'd expect Erwin to be kind of hard. But he's super easy. There are 4 crystals you need to raise to break his shield, and you have to butt bounce to damage him. After 3 phases of that you've beat the game. He has 2 attacks, homing rockets and a laser beam thing. The rockets are useless when you get away from their radar, and the laser can be easily jumped over. The attacks are RNG, but there's no need to manip since he hardly attacks, and you lose no time if he does.

The Pac-Man Speedrunning discord for the support and suggestions, especially wooferzfg for mentioning how close the end of Banni Canyon is.

21395, 37544, 76086

Darkman425: Imagine I put the lyrics of Scatman's World but replaced every instance of Scatman with Pac-Man. Anyways, claiming for judging.

Darkman425: I had an initial issue with syncing this where the DS firmware menu for me showed up when I tried to play thins when it shouldn't have. Thanks to Spikestuff's info on getting this to sync. For me, I had to have the ARM7 & ARM9 BIOS in the firmware directory and NOT have the DS firmware in the firmware directory. This let the input file for me to start without the DS startup showing up at the start, meaning I could sync verify this.

As for the TAS itself, while there's a lot of stop-and-go with revving up that doesn't mean this is slow. There are quite a bit of fast skips and clipping through the level geometry to finish this game quickly. Nice work!

Accepting to Standard.

Note to the encoder: an input is needed on the (I think) Comic Sans "CONGRATULATIONS" screen to properly start the credits sequence.

Spikestuff: PacAttack.