Submission #9364: dekutony's SNES Pokémon Gold Silver in 02:26.24

What is this? Tony submitting a Pokémon bootleg TAS?? In our current(?) year of 2024!?!?!????????? It's more likely than you think.

This is a TAS of Pokémon Gold Silver. This is a bootleg platforming game for the Super Nintendo. It was released around 1999 or the early 2000s. This game is notable for stealing the music from Bonkers for the SNES. It also takes a lot of stolen assets from other games, while also using the Pocket Monster platforming engine, used by a lot more other bootlegs. The game plays pretty badly all things considered, and it runs really weird too.

You can play as two different characters: Chokorita (Chikorita) and Waninoko (Totodile). Cyndaquil is nowhere to be seen in the game for whatever reason. Each character moves at the same speed and has the same jump height, not to mention they perform the same attack. They do have distinct abilities from each other. Chikorita has the ability to fly, either on the ground or in midair. Totodile... well... he can do a ground pound that freezes all enemies on the screen (at the expense of causing a lot of flashing lights), as well as ride on a skateboard... that serves no real purpose whatsoever, other than look cool I guess. In most of the movie Chikorita is used for her flying ability alone, being incredibly useful in many situations, sometimes even letting me finish levels in mere seconds.

This TAS beats the game in under two and a half minutes.

The first level consists of climbing the tree branches in the forest, then reaching the end at the far right of the level. You can see I jump a lot without abusing my flying ability. This is due to the flying itself being quite slow compared to regular jumping. Even with that in mind, I do fly twice for reaching some higher branches earlier. I do this by performing my flight ability in midair after jumping, then cancelling my flight by pressing down while in a neutral position. This will be a constant thing throughout the movie.

This is the most complicated level in the game. There's enemies and falling platforms everywhere. Managing my health is crucial here, because I need to tank as many things as possible. Killing enemies by attacking them with projectiles is very slow, so just getting past them is the prefered option, and manuevering around them was also very important. Thankfully, there's quite a bit of health refills so it wasn't the absolute nightmare it could've been. The invincibility powerup was also necessary to pick up so I could survive the rest of the enemies remaining.

This is the level where jump-flying in midair is the most evident. The end of the level is at the top, so this level is beaten incredibly quickly thanks to flying around.

Not much to say about this level either, besides being directly taken from another certain Poké bootleg. Midair flying is noticeably used here as well. I switch to Totodile at the end for merely stylistic purposes. He will be the one to fight the boss.

The final boss, Mewtwo (or MU as he's known in the streets), looks like a joke when I utterly destroy him in this TAS. He likes going back and forth, shooting projectiles at you. He's actually intangible when he's shooting at you, so you can only hit him when he's moving around. You only see this happen once though. The strategy is this: When you shoot projectiles in midair, the cooldown that happens afterwards gets considerably shortened. Usually, shooting is very slow due to its insanely long cooldown, but continually doing it in midair speeds this up quite significantly, so I do it all the time in this fight. I land the first hit in the first frame possible, where the projectile doesn't despawn from the screen. The boss takes 18 hits to defeat, so this fight could've been tricky to optimize without this midair shooting strategy.

I've always been interested in TASing this game since 2014 (yeah over a decade ago now, time sure flies, huh...), but the game itself is not very pleasant to play compared to other Poké bootlegs I've TASed in the past, mostly due to the very awkward controls and framerate. Two years ago however, I made a TAStest where I explore the potential in this game. I finally got around to do this now, and I'm glad I managed to beat my old attempt by nearly 20 seconds.

With all that said, thanks for watching and reading.