Submission #9821: Phil7's NES Track & Field in 06:31.70

This is my first TAS, so if there's some mistake somewhere, I apologize in advance

1. Beat the RTA Record of 7:00.717 2. Show off actual time saving strategies over just beating the record on perfect technical mashing

This run is timed using the RTA ruleset, the movie will still show from console power on either way, the RTA rules states that timing starts when you select the first event from the event list (Event list shows at Frame 96 in the movie, but due to perfect start presses you don't actually see it), and timing ends once the game loops back to the 100m dash, so that's when the movie is cut off

For the first couple events you will see some frame perfect pausing as it skips the fanfare before the 100m and after some events (For some reason from Skeet Shooting onward the game just stops allowing that)

Not much to the 100m dash as always, perfect timing on the start and best possible mashing RTA WR - 7.82 | TAS - 7.20

Long Jump is where the speed strats begin, to go fastest in an RTA setting, you need to have enough speed but time it exactly to get as close to the qualify distance of 5.50m, the RTA WR did achieve a 5.51m but also had a 6.80m later on while the TAS maintained a consistent 5.54m for all 3 jumps, which was the lowest I could get without sacrificing speed, the jumps are fast enough that 5.50m exactly isn't necessary

The 110m Hurdles was optimized as best as I can, the goal was to jump as last as possible to give a little bit of extra time to recover the speed the player lost from jumping

RTA WR - 10.60 | TAS - 9.57

The goal with Javelin is to throw as early as possible with low angle to get as close to the qualifying distance of 60.00m, and the TAS actually had to slow down for a couple frames intentionally to not lose too much time on the throw, my initial distance with max speed was about 88m and was about a second slower than what was finished with. The distance was actually shorter in the RTA record but the initial speed burst at the start put the TAS over by about half a second still

Then it is fastest to foul obviously instead of throwing again, which gained more time due to the faster speeds

Skeet Shooting shows off the unfortunate part when trying to speedrun this game, there are 2 autoscroller events, this being the first of them, the goal is to collect as many points as possible from the plates, but that would be slow with all the bonuses obviously, so we pass the time trying to qualify by hitting as many as we can while skipping the big point givers (The Blue and The Red one, which doesn't even show up if you miss the blue one thankfully), so I prioritized just shooting the plates on the earliest frame possible while optimizing points to not go over the in game record...

The Triple Jump is a fun event to optimize as it requires the player to not only go as fast as possible but they must jump as early as possible while maintaining a low enough angle to stay just above that 13.00m qualifying distance, the timesave is with perfect mashing, more optimal jumping points and angles, a good refresher to the run after Skeet Shooting (Even if Skeet might be fun to play sometimes)

Now the bane of this run, an autoscroller that is 2 minutes long! The only optimization is hitting the A button as soon as possible to get your wind (Which that A press is also on a delay for some reason), and your goal is to get 2500 points at least to pass the event, so I tried to squeeze as much fun out of it as possible by getting exactly 2500 each time (There weren't many combinations to get there)

High Jump is a bit of a nice finisher after the pain that was Archery, unfortunately there's not much to it as the height only increases as you complete loops of the game, but we must do it as is for the sake of the speedrun, the goal this time isn't to jump as early as possible, which as funny as it is to see the character fly over the stick, it's pretty slow, so we need to jump as close as possible and lower our angle as fast as possible to hit the mat, the next 2 attempt we just foul and finish the loop!

Final Time of the TAS with the Speedrun Rules was 6:55.848 beating the current RTA World Record by nearly 5 seconds

Darkman425: Claiming for judging.

Darkman425 Input file replaced with an improvement done on Game B that's faster despite the higher difficulty, as well as removing 664 blank inputs at the end.

Darkman425: Hello Phil7, and welcome to TASVideos!

The goal is pretty easy to understand: reach the second loop in the fastest time possible. All of the necessary work to get the minimum scores in non-timed events are done well without wasting time and the speed events are done swiftly. While it's possible to end inputs early by about 1400 frames it takes longer in real time due to waiting on the time out fouls. This goes against the intent of this submission going for how RTA runs go so the inputs to quickly foul out the 2 other high jumps are fine to stay. Overall, nice work!

Accepting to Standard for fastest completion.

Publishers' (and likely also also other judges') note: the older Track & Field publications that currently don't have a branch don't fit the goal of fastest completion and will need a re-evaluation on how to branch those. From reading the description, this might not quite be a clean classification.

fsvgm777: Processing. McBobX is handling the encodes for this one.