Note: the word "Collection" appears on the box art and on the cartridge--nowhere to be found in the game. Hmm...
As a fan of the series as a kid, I eventually found myself gravitated towards this game for how simple it was to play. I don't tend to like platformers, but I liked this one enough to actually find a cart and speedrun it about a year and a half ago. The more I played it, though, the more help I got in examining the game and the more it became clear that this was more than just a simple platformer.
The final product of my adventures with this game can be found at Speed Demos Archive.
I have managed to get this game a showcase at Summer Games Done Quick 2016 based on the runs I have done, but there is still quite a bit that I do not fully understand so I have decided to TAS it to see if I can find anything further. Fortunately, this game is simple enough to play around with since your movement speed while dashing is the same whether you are on the ground, jumping or bouncing off of most enemies.
I have
completed World 1 of 5 so far, but I don't want to go too far in case I have missed something fundamentally obvious. This is my first time trying to TAS something seriously so I expect to make plenty of mistakes. I would love some assistance with this before I get to the bosses that really make this game interesting. Let's just say that the scorposaur is the LEAST broken boss...
4/24:
World 2 is now complete. Now it starts to get good. I am finding myself mimicking my existing route as a baseline. I don't know if anything else is broken and worth using.
5/22:
World 3 is now done. I have been distracted by other things so this took longer than it needed to.