General notes

• Syncs on Bizhawk 2.11
• Documented Rerecord count - 15707
• Uses glitches and exploits to save time
• Takes intentional damage and deaths to save time.
• Note: My YouTube upload is an older version of the TAS which is 26 video frames slower.

Introduction

General game notes

• I used the US version for this run. The PAL version lost a few frames on startup but the two versions are otherwise identical gameplay wise.
• Ledge grabs are slow and ledges in this game have wonky collision, allowing you to stand, run, jump, etc. on ledges. I avoid climbing up ledges at all costs either by taking advantage of the wonky ledge collision or another exploit I will explain later.
• You can kick and punch. You can punch and kick on the ground or while crouching. You can also kick in the air which is by far your most useful attack not only because it is your quickest attack but also because it has multiple other applications such as for movement, avoiding ledge grabs or landing on platforms.
• The game has a few Rufus sections. Rufus sucks to play as, with the controls and physics in his sections being completely wack. There are a whole bunch of dumb intricacies to Rufus' movement I won't go off about. Jumping with Rufus is faster than running so jumping is used a lot in the Rufus sections.
  • When climbing a wall with Rufus, you can do a small jump by jumping while not holding any horizontal direction. This jump is small but it gives you just enough height to jump onto platforms which is faster than climbing up platforms and it is way more precise than it should be.
• This game has a number of gadgets to use which you can buy in a shop although the only one which is actually useful in this run is the grappling hook... More on that later...

Movement

• You can kick up to 16 frames after a spring jump to maintain speed. Kicking 12 frames or later after initiating the spring jump will give you the most distance on flat ground, more than simply spring jumping on its own.
  • When jumping to a lower platform however, you want to kick as late as possible in order to keep speed and distance for the longest time possible.
• Kicking early during a spring jump will reduce the distance of the spring jump which can be useful for spacing in certain areas.
• Spring jumping into a ceiling or wall will kill your speed. If you kick before you hit a ceiling, you can hit the ceiling while keeping your speed. If you kick as you are about to go under a wall, that will allow you to regain your speed.

Grappling Hook

• Before I get into that, the first thing to note is that I get the grappling hook early. Normally, you cannot get the grappling hook until you reach world 2 and it costs 100 chips. However, there is an exploit which lets you buy items you cannot access. If you go to buy an item you can buy, you scroll to the next item and then on the next frame, press buy. I believe what is happening here is that you change the item but the option to buy from the previous item does not update on the first frame so if you press buy, it will buy the item you have highlighted, even though that item is not supposed to be available. If you can't afford the locked item you have bought, your chip counter will max out to 9999.
  • What I do in the run is that in 1-2, I highlight the first aid kit which costs 50 chips (nothing is available in the shop until 1-2) and then I use the glitch to buy the grappling hook, even though it is not available and I couldn't even afford it if it was available.

• There are 2 types of jumps relevant to this, neutral jumps and running jumps. Neutral jumps you get while you are standing still while you get running jumps while moving. Neutral jumps have more startup but they are required for infinite jumps.
• Whenever you use the grappling hook in the air and it doesn't grab anything, once it retracts, there is one frame where you are considered grounded. During this grounded frame, you can do a neutral jump to jump in mid-air. Subsequently, you can then use the grappling hook out of this jump which can then be chained numerous more times for an infinite jump.
• The camera does not follow you vertically during infinite jumps which is annoying, making optimising infinite jumps awkward. There is a visual cue for infinite jumps as you time your jump when the grappling hook bends in a weird direction but this obviously cannot be used on when you are off camera.
• How quickly you can infinite jump depends on how long it takes for the grappling hook to retract. If the grappling hook hits a wall, it will retract quicker so that is taken advantage of although you can't get too close to a wall or you will wall jump.
  • Infinite jumps technically are not infinite as if you go too far beyond the camera, the grappling hook will glitch out and end the infinite jump. There was only one point in the run where I had to work around this.

Level comments

1-1

• During cutscenes, you can press A or touch the touchscreen to advance cutscenes or press Start to skip them. At the beginning of a world, you have a single screen which can be skipped with either input although pressing start is a smidge faster.
• In this level, you see me climbing ledges, climbing on ladders, wall jumping and swinging on poles. Don't get used to these things because they will be gone after the next level.
• After crawling, I double jump to skip a getting up from crawling animation.
• There is one section where you can either climb on monkey bars or climb up a ladder. The ladder was faster, especially since I could clip into the ladder in order to get up it faster.
• I used wonky ledge collision to perform the wall jumps faster

1-2

• You can kick to go through ropes. Climbing on ropes is very slow so it is avoided at all costs.
• I buy the grappling hook early as I explained earlier. The grappling hook isn't that powerful in that level, mainly speeding up the wall jump but it becomes much more useful later on.

1-3

• A the beginning, I grapple onto the ceiling while hitting a ledge on the same frame with a high amount of speed. This makes the game freak out and it teleports me forward (presumably where the X position is 0?, it teleports you to the same place if you perform it in other parts of the level). This was the only section in the game where I could take advantage of this exploit, it requires specific platform, ledge and ceiling positions.
• I use long jumps and infinite jumps to skip some platforming.

2-1

• Once you go into the warehouse, you can either go high or low. Taking the high route was faster.
• I use a spring jump kick to clip through the two vending machines. The clip is extremely precise, requiring extremely specific spacing and timing.
• After clipping through the first vending machine, I perform a skip where I reach a higher part of the level, skipping a crawling section and some climbing. This was originally found by ToxicPinHead although this TAS uses infinite jumps to perform the skip much faster.

2-2 Rufus

• This is the first level with a Rufus section. No, you cannot skip the Rufus section. For each level with a Rufus section, the level before and after you finish the Rufus section are considered two completely different levels internally which are designed differently so you cannot just skip to the second half of the level unfortunately. I don't have any significant comments for the beginning of this level.
• Biting wires with Rufus is weird. You can only bite when Rufus is at a complete standstill and he is not in another animation, including his long running animation which does not stop if you stop moving. The fastest way to do it is to jump into the wire and then you do a "micro walk". If you jump and then hit back for a frame as you land, Rufus will walk forward for a tiny bit and then immediately stop, allowing you to bite faster than waiting for his landing animation to end or for his normal run animation to end.
• One of the wires makes the propellers spin the other way to let you get past them. I tried to skip this wire but you just cannot get through the propellers if they spin the wrong way. It is so close to being possible but Rufus does not get enough iframes, he goes into a landing animation after taking damage and the propellers somehow have deceptively large hitboxes.
  • I did a setup where I pretty much got through the second propeller as quickly as possible without taking damage. The first damage boost was faster than waiting for the propeller.
• I had to wait for a furnace cycle in the end of the Rufus section. You cannot grab walls after taking damage which is definitely not annoying.

2-2B

• After going down the elevator, you are supposed to go all the way to the left to hit a switch to activate a moving platform. However, I just went straight to the right and used infinite jumps to get across (you don't even need infinite jumps to skip activating the platform but infinite jumps are naturally faster.
• At the end of the level, I use more infinite jumps to skip a moving platform.

2-3

• Frugal Lucre has a turnaround when you get behind him which delays all of his other animations including taking damage and resetting him activating the toasters (you do have to use the toasters). I only got one turnaround in this run. You can hit him from behind without him turning around which I do in the second phase but after the first phase, it delays him activating the toasters so it doesn't save time. I don't think zero turnarounds is possible.
• Frugal Lucre can only get hit by the toasters so quickly and while it doesn't look super fast, I did max it out as much as I could.
• You can use the grappling hook to manipulate Frugal Lucre's RNG. I had minimal problems resyncing the run during this fight because of this.

3-1A

• In this level, you are supposed to buy the hairbrush lockpick which will make you do a touchscreen minigame which is basically an electric wire puzzle (these suck, especially the last one, brutal for a kids game). However, you can skip getting the hairbrush lockpick by simply doing a well placed spring jump kick to clip through the doors (found by Baggypantsman). The first clip is pretty precise but the other two are much easier. You don't even need the hairbrush lockpick in later levels so umm... great game design "A2M".
• At the beginning of the level, you are supposed to go high where you have to crawl under a vent but I use the grappling hook to go low which is much faster.
• There are two more instances where you can go high or low and in these cases, going high was faster.

3-1 Rufus

• You are supposed to bite a wire to deactivate a furnace although this furnace can't even hit you so you can easily skip this wire. You still have to flip the propellers though.
• I had to wait short periods of time between each propeller
• After the propellers are some furnaces. Waiting for the furnaces is faster than tanking through them.
• There are a couple of points in this level where I can either wall jump or neutral jump to get on the platform opposite to me. In both of these cases, the neutral jump was a tad faster.

3-1B

• You are supposed to buy night goggles in order to see in the dark in this section but you can get through the section without the night goggles. In fact, it's not even that dark in this section, you can easily see what you are doing, helped even more by flashing objects, enemies with flash lights and bright, glitchy objects (the glitchy flashing is an actual part of the game and not an emulation issue). I guess they were really hinging on the original DS model's screen to do the heavy lifting. There are also no required sections after this level which need the night goggles... more great game design from "A2M".
  • I did consider buying the night goggles as it doesn't lose time but I didn't as it is possible to tell what is going on.
• After using infinite jumps to climb up to areas early, I grapple onto a ceiling and then I hit a wall in a way where I grab onto a ledge to get to the next part of the level. I can drop off the ledge which gets me up where I need to go faster. This skips a bunch of climbing which normally involves wall jumping and climbing a rope.
• I go through a ladder to take a faster route.
• At the end of the level, you are supposed to wait forever for a guard to get close enough so you can go past him but I use the grappling hook to get past him without waiting.

3-2

• After a bunch of grappling hook shenanigans, we reach a pool of Piranhas where you are supposed to climb along a monkey bar. The gap is way too long to spring jump over, the water is instant death and you don't have room to infinite jump. However, you can do some super precise grappling hook swings in order to get to the other side without climbing on the monkey bars which is much faster.
• After skipping a ladder, we have another pool of Piranhas. You can do the same grappling hook stunt again but what I do this time is that I get on top of the monkey bars and then long jump over them. There is glitchy ceiling collision here so I have to do extremely precise inputs in order to make it over without falling onto the monkey bars. Getting even a single long jump requires multiple frame perfects inputs and you have to do this multiple times to make it to the other side. This was only a tiny bit faster than the grappling hook strat which isn't any simpler.

3-3

• Other than multiple infinite jumps, there's a strat where I hit a rabid dog and then I can grappling hook onto a wall. I couldn't go over the dog quickly so this was the best option and it is one of my favourite strats in the run which only works as you can walk forwards for a period of time.

3-4

• You are supposed to wait a really long time for a platform cycle so you can go up and hit the last 3 viles although I used infinite jumps to skip waiting for cycles. There are multiple possible routes with infinite jumps but "the intentional route but faster" seemed to be the best route.

4-1

• In this level, you use a parachute where you slowly fly down through a volcano and you can use the microphone to gain height. This is the longest level in the game at over 4 minutes.
• There are three sections where I intentionally take a death to hit a checkpoint. Whenever you die in this level, you fall much faster than you normally do and the checkpoints respawn you further along than where you hit them. Because of this, I die as early as I can and then hit the checkpoint while dying to respawn further in the level. Each death warp saves a variable amount of time with the final one in particular saving around 8 seconds.

4-2 Rufus

• The first part is mainly infinite jumps and optimising movement while the Rufus section is more Rufus. There are multiple points in the Rufus section where there is a vertical wall behind you which you think you can climb on (as you can seemingly jump high enough) although you never can.
• There is a furnace I damage boost through which is very precise. After that, I can either go up or right and going up is faster.

4-2B

• The end of the level is a big vertical climb. I infinite jump up as expected but I take a quick detour to land on a platform as if I didn't, I would have reached the limit for infinite jumps before reaching the top.
  • The fans during this section can damage you. The fan after the reset could have actually hit me although I avoided it by simply delaying my grappling hook (which avoided it for some reason). You can actually jump in mid-air after taking damage although that is slower than the delayed infinite jump.

4-3

• At the beginning of the level, you are supposed to do a really long climb to the top and then fall all the way back down to the bottom. However, I skip this by getting damaged by a robot to clip through a wall. I manipulate the robot to do its projectile attack and then I get hit at a precise time to clip through the wall. Incorrect timing usually results in death so this clip is very risky and precise. It's a unique strat and its a bit of a break from the expected infinite jumps (although those quickly come back after this skip).
  • I mash jump in order to get up from the knockback animation faster.
• I grapple along a ceiling to skip climbing on ropes.
• I end up waiting for the cogs to turn in the final section. The goal is really far away so infinite jumps are not worth it here.

4-4

• I skip a portion of a level by climbing up a wall and then using the grappling hook to grab onto a platform which clips me onto a platform above me (found by ToxicPinHead).
• I use infinite jumps to skip activating a platform and then having to wait forever for that platform.

Shego

• At the beginning of the level, I use an extremely precise double jump combined with a kick to land on a platform. The rest of this level is more infinite jumps/grappling hook shenanigans to skip platforming and to take more direct paths.

4-5 (Drakken) & ending

• Drakken has to jump and land on ground twice in order to make it break. Make him do it three times to win. Drakken has to turn around in order to face you so I take a route which minimises the amount of time he has to turn around.
  • Drakken can either jump or do a laser attack. You absolutely do not want Drakken to laser and you can use jumps and grappling hooks to manipulate his RNG.
• After the first hit, I take a death. This resets Drakken's position while keeping the platform damaged. This was 2/3rds of a second faster than not dying. Grappling onto the platform is 2 frames faster than just letting him land on you (and no, you can't get onto the platforms, there is an invisible ceiling).
• After getting Drakken to get hit twice, using a setup where he doesn't have to turn around, I take another death. This sets up Drakken in a favourable position and I can get hit to land on the last platform for the final hit much quicker.
• For the end of the run, I opted to skim through the last cutscene instead of skipping it entirely. The run is over so I thought I might as well show the whole ending. I end the run on activating the credits.

Conclusion