For some reason, Mr. Big decided to kidnap the clones of a random girl and thought hiding them in the doors would suffice. Now Michael is on a quest to find out if Annies are okay.
This is 13825 frames (3 minutes, 50 seconds) improvement over the previous run. Improvements come from new route, new tricks, and some hard optimization.

Game objectives

  • Emulator used: Gens11-svn341
  • Aims for fastest time
  • Contains speed/entertainment tradeoffs
  • Takes damage to save time
  • Uses hardest difficulty

Tricks

  • Free Moonwalk: You can perform moonwalk to the left by pressing left+right togather. Also, pressing left/left+right alternatively will make you do stationary moonwalk. This doesn't save any time but hey, it's cool.
  • Lingering Hitbox: Performing spin during spark attack will make spark hitbox remain a little longer, damaging the enemies nearby.
  • Rescuing kids faster: When Michael finds the kids hidden in somewhere, doing jump will cancel those "Michael!" animation, saving 19 frames each.
  • Passing through the platforms: If you do spark attack within several frames after you're off the ledge, you won't touch any other ledges until you touch the ground. Only used in 4-2.

Stage by stage comments

Club 30

In 1-1, I took alternative route to reach the second kid a little faster. Then I followed nitrogenesis' WIP to beat the boss fight.
In 1-3, I figured out that I can beat the boss in just 2 hits, saving huge amount of time.

Streets

In 2-3, you have to take out the white dog which summons his friend doggies. Thankfully, this boss can be easily beaten by the same method from 1-3 so you won't even see it on the screen. Whether the dog comes up in left or right side of the screen depends on RNG, so I had to wait a few frames before starting the fight.

Woods

I accidently found from the walkthrough I can't remember that the player can cling to certain platform and launch at ridiculously fast speed. The discovery forced me to restart a few levels, but I'm satisfied I wasn't too late to find this out.
In 3-1, I used the dance here because there's no effective way to damage the enemies above the bridge.
In 3-3, starting position of two zombies in the boss fight depends on RNG, so I manipulated luck for enemies to be in right side to attack.

Caverns

I don't really like these places because they're the longest and yet the most tiresome levels throughout the game. Enemies' health become much stronger here too. I tried to pass the levels as fast as I can anyway.
In 4-1, there're two stalactites that fell by hitting the ceiling. This instantly kills the enemy below, so I used it efficiently to remove the foes to reach the end.
In 4-2, unlike previous run, I left piller-like stone on the screen during boss fight phase. This allowed me to deal with the zombie coming from upper side, and shrinked the time before performing the dance.
In 4-3, first I thought the dance is faster than normal kill, than I found really interesting strategy to finish the level much quicker. This is the only part I like in this section.

The Enemy Hideout

In 5-2, the boss fight features the toughest enemy in the game which can be killed by 3 hat attack, and even worse, there're three of them. Luckily, the gun turret on the ceiling works as the stalactite in Caverns level, so I utilized to damage and manipulate the AI. I never considered this section can be this short.
In 5-3, normally pressing any button in the boss fight will summon the star, which will then turn you into super fighting robot. But if you press A before the boss fight music start, you can still perform the dance. And if you dance with 8 people at this point, you can skip the entire robot things. This solely saves more than 30 seconds.

Michael's Battle Plane

RNG... RNG everywhere...
You have to shoot Mr. Big's ship 8 times while avoiding other annoying ship-things. These ship-things even block my missiles, thus I had to spam lots of buttons not to target those.

Other comments

This game suffers lots of lag which are induced arbitrarily. Depending on some random things like the number of enemy, what the player does, or just its own, it will put lags in the run. Because of this and the fact that the game is basically tedious, dull platformer, I determined to sacrificed some frames to show off and do funny stuffs. Also, I took several frames for better dance position if possible.
Plus, I tried to fill up the empty moment before the boss fights. I actually spent an amount of time here for viewers not to be bored. I hope you would enjoy those too.

Suggested sreenshot

23839

Credits

  • Frenom: The author of previous submission. I mostly followed his run.
  • nitrogenesis: His brief WIP made me come up with boss fight strategies.
  • Everyone in the thread who watched my WIP

feos: Judging...
feos: Updating the movie file per author's request.
feos: Accepting and publishing...

mklip2001
He/Him
Editor
Joined: 6/23/2009
Posts: 2224
Location: Georgia, USA
Oh yeah, ok. Then I think he's right... this was the oldest non-obsoleted movie. The site has only been around for about ten years or so, so a nine-year obsoletion is about as long as it can get. I think I still got the mention correct, though, for largest amount of obsoletion ever done. (At least, it's the largest fixed amount of time obsoleted... there may be some movies that had a larger percentage of their original time obsoleted.)
Used to be a frequent submissions commenter. My new computer has had some issues running emulators, so I've been here more sporadically. Still haven't gotten around to actually TASing yet... I was going to improve Kid Dracula for GB. It seems I was beaten to it, though, with a recent awesome run by Hetfield90 and StarvinStruthers. (http://tasvideos.org/2928M.html.) Thanks to goofydylan8 for running Gargoyle's Quest 2 because I mentioned the game! (http://tasvideos.org/2001M.html) Thanks to feos and MESHUGGAH for taking up runs of Duck Tales 2 because of my old signature! Thanks also to Samsara for finishing a Treasure Master run. From the submission comments:
Shoutouts and thanks to mklip2001 for arguably being the nicest and most supportive person on the forums.
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
mklip2001 wrote:
Oh yeah, ok. Then I think he's right... this was the oldest non-obsoleted movie. The site has only been around for about ten years or so, so a nine-year obsoletion is about as long as it can get.
We actually have a list for that: http://tasvideos.org/MovieStatistics/LongestNonObsoleted.html 3532 days is about 9.6 years.
Editor, Experienced player (608)
Joined: 11/8/2010
Posts: 4012
Oops, I guess my wording wasn't quite clear. Thanks for the answers though! According to the list Warp linked to, this movie was the 15th oldest non-obsoleted movie on the site as of right before this run's publication yesterday at 3247 days. I think the game with the second biggest difference between publication dates was Mega Man for GB before the publication of this movie, if anyone was curious.
EZGames69
He/They
Publisher, Reviewer, Expert player (3970)
Joined: 5/29/2017
Posts: 2709
Location: Michigan
[14:15] <feos> WinDOES what DOSn't 12:33:44 PM <Mothrayas> "I got an oof with my game!" Mothrayas Today at 12:22: <Colin> thank you for supporting noble causes such as my feet MemoryTAS Today at 11:55 AM: you wouldn't know beauty if it slapped you in the face with a giant fish [Today at 4:51 PM] Mothrayas: although if you like your own tweets that's the online equivalent of sniffing your own farts and probably tells a lot about you as a person MemoryTAS Today at 7:01 PM: But I exert big staff energy honestly lol Samsara Today at 1:20 PM: wouldn't ACE in a real life TAS just stand for Actually Cease Existing