I'll just throw Giana Sisters DS on the pile. It's the sequel to a SMB ripoff from the C64 era. There are no warp zones but I think the levels can be finished fairly quickly when you're not going for 100%.
Also Chronos Twin because it's just mindbreakingly difficult.
Barnyard Blast is pretty retro as well.
Oh and DK Jungle Climber. I don't think we ever got a King of Swing TAS, DKJC would make up for that.
Does grabbing the armor finish the game or do you have to get some item that only shows in the second playthrough (I think the SNES one insists on that)?
Why does it say "practice" at the bottom? (EDIT: means low difficulty)
The game isn't finished when you end it but since this is a G&G game the whole second run through can arguably be ignored since watching the same thing again won't be much fun (not sure how much the requirement to get the magic armor and the "power" changes).
You have tons of missed shots, even when targetting bosses, I'm worried that that may have resulted in slower boss kills. OTOH the controls don't seem like they give a ton of flexibility. Did you make sure that you did land all the hits you could?
Was it necessary to kill those demon faces that turn into a molten demon face on death instead of jumping over them? That got you quite some delay in one case since those snake arms got a chance to extend while you were fighting the face.
Voted 7.5/6, the low technical score because of all the misses (in the scrolling stage you even aimed wrong at times so I don't think you were just manipulating the knife's spawn position or anything).
EDIT: Also from trying to play the game for a bit it looked to me like jumping might be faster for movement than running?
The general problem with restrictions on a TAS is obsoletion. The criteria must be defined very accurately because TASes involve bending everything to its limit and the same would go for any restrictions (e.g. if the restriction is defined as "must collect the soul orbs from all bosses" then skipping the bossfight itself would be valid if the orb can be obtained in another way, if the goal is to defeat a boss would it be valid to glitch the game into giving the boss 0 HP and having him die instantly? Would it be valid to glitch into a screen that sets the internal flag for "boss is defeated"?). A restriction like "natural route" is too arbitrary IMO. What would that entail? Do you have to reach certain checkpoints in order? Do you have to follow a certain sequence of screens? Do you just have to get all the intended items, in any order?
Banning specific glitches is stupid too, what if someone finds a new glitch that can do the same things as the old ones or does something similar but different? Would you alter the category?
As for a glitchless SotN run, I think most people wouldn't want to see that. Castlevania isn't terribly interesting to watch by itself, a large part of the entertainment in the current runs comes from seeing just how much the game can be broken. Noone would want e.g. boss fights that have the normal duration because they aren't a threat to a TASer anyway. A big part of a TAS's entertainment is the feeling of "holy shit, you can do that?". What would a glitchless run of SOTN show? Backdashing back and forth through the entire castle, occassionally killing a boss in splitseconds and watching long, badly written cutscenes? Maybe the occassional puzzle solution that someone who finished the game would know anyway? After all a glitchless run wouldn't be allowed to do things differently from how a human player would...
I think that may actually be a useful restriction like the Link's Awakening DX run that had the select warp fixed. Of course HoD already has other glitches that make doorwarps not very necessary for breaking the game like mad.
In the second to last stage, after the drill arm miniboss you hobble along for quite a while, it looked like you could have afforded to use the burner a bit more there?
In maze 8, I suppose it wasn't possiblwe to drop a bomb down the left hole and have it open the cage without going down there?
In maze 3, would it have saved time to open the left cage first and open the right on the way back so the left heart gets to the goal earlier? Or do enemies or the right heart make that slower?
Yes, and the software tries to do illegal hardware stuff while it's at that invalid pointer. The out of bounds glitch just interprets the wrong data as the room level, which isn't illegal at all to the SNES
But what about the L+R/U+D glitches employed in many movies? They trigger invalid actions too and can sometimes do some serious breaking.
For a heavily glitched run, I wouldn't argue against x-ray climb. However, the space/time beam is hardware-related glitchery. It's something more along the lines of beating an NES game really quick by having the cartridge a bit loose, so it's not all loaded correctly (there's probably an actual example of that somewhere or other). In Super Metroid it's triggered by software instead of hardware, but it's still an illegal hardware operation.
Isn't that still done in many TASes? OOT comes to mind. Seems to me like the game tries to get code for the beam handling but the combination causes an invalid pointer that goes who knows where, not much different from out of bounds glitches, the minus world or item replacement.
The one reason I could find against the xray climb is that watching it without fast forward can be extremely boring.