About the Game
Plummet Challenge Game is an NES homebrew released in 2021 by FistaGames. You play as a professional plummeting athlete who has to die to reach the next level. You're encouraged to aim for maximum score, but this run instead dies as quickly as possible.
About the TAS
This TAS aims to complete all 150 levels the Marathon Mode in record time. It also improves the Main Game levels by 3.44 seconds. (The first 15 levels of each 30-level phase are exclusive to this mode. The other 75 are repeats of the Main Game levels.)
Main Game Level Improvements
- Most of the improvement is on Level 141 (66 in Main Game), where nearly 2 seconds were saved by clipping through a wall to get to a flame faster.
- We also used a new acceleration trick to reach a previously unreachable flame on Level 147 (72 in Main Game).
- The rest of the improvement is from lag reduction and tweaked input timings to save about half a second.
Movement Tech
Fast Falling
It's faster to jump off a ledge rather than just falling off of it. Sometimes this doesn't save any time or is even a frame slower than just falling, but it has the potential to save 1-3 frames when used.
Fast Climbing
This is hard to explain, especially with my neuro-divergent brain, but I'll give it my best go.
At parts where there are different blocks opposite each other that go up a bit like a ladder, I found that there was a very specific way to jump here. For every jump you do, you need to make sure it reaches the next block, otherwise it's suboptimal. We try to minimise how long we jump for so that every jump reaches the next block but doesn't quite land on them. This is a handful of frames faster than the old strategy, where I didn't chain the jumps like this.
Lag Reduction
In Phases B and D (levels 31-60 and 91-120), it's occasionally possible to reduce lag by making random left or right inputs. This was checked thoroughly by myself to make sure the game lags as little as possible.
Clip Through the Ground
In Level 141, while fixing inputs on my Main Game TAS, I accidentally discovered that by timing your jumps very precisely, it's possible to clip through the floor and get hit by one of the lower flames, which is about 3/4 of a second faster than climbing and accelerating to reach the flame at the top left corner, and about 2 seconds faster than my original strategy which was to just jump down to the lower flames.
Vertical Acceleration
This is used in Level 147 to reach the flame in the top left corner, a flame that was previously thought to be out of reach. As soon as the level starts, we hold A and R for 2 frames, then on the 3rd frame, we let go of R and start holding L instead. This shifts the character's Y position just enough so that we can jump 2 blocks instead of just 1, thus making it possible to reach said flame.
In Conclusion
This TAS was a pain in the backside to make, mainly because I kept finding more improvements I could use in the Main Game, but also because some tricks, such as lag reduction and the Level 141 floor clip were tedious to optimise.
Input ends on frame 27554 when we enter the exit door at the end of the game.
That's all from me. Thanks for reading.
ThunderAxe31: Claiming for judging.
ThunderAxe31: I can't judge this, as the emulator version (required for mapper #30 compatibility) crashes when I try to open TAS Editor, which I need in order to compare this submission with the other one. Resetting to New.
ThunderAxe31: I was able to circumvent the issue by switching to qfceux. Claiming again...
ThunderAxe31: Half of the levels of this game mode are already featured in the "Main Game" mode. Since the actual gameplay is perfectly redundant, I'm accepting this movie for obsoleting the existing "Main Game" mode publication.
EZGames69: Processing...