While I'm not sure if this such a good game for TASing, I played through it recently after I
found this game's name again. And wanted to put some info here.
The objective is to find your missing friend, a red mouse. You start out in a room in a square maze that's up by 36 rooms. Every 20 steps you take, or every time you leave a room, you lose cheese. You start out with 8 cheese and gain 3 cheese for every cheese piece that you obtain. When killing cats (by trapping them) a cheese piece will spawn in the room. But items such as cheese, cans or bombs can also lie around in rooms randomly. Bombs can be used to destroy blocks. You can push blocks in order to trap cats, but only 1 tile - you cannot push 2 tiles at once.
There are 1~3 holes in each room that you can walk into that cause you to lose or gain items. This is frame dependent so it could be abused in a TAS to gain points quicker. Parts later in the game also require you to bomb through rooms that are practically full of blocks, so you could manipulate for bombs too. However, walking into a hole is kind of slow... I imagine a TAS could have a lot of control, just walking everywhere at high speed and with precision, killing cats and collecting items that lie on the floor already.
When you reenter a room you've been to, cats and holes will reappear. I think items don't reappear (it might require a death or you might have to walk further away, I'm not sure).
In order to advance the game, you have to first collect 10,000 points.
Then one room will have a hole that has a key in it. In my playthrough it was a corner room (or close to it?) in the bottom left.
Then you have to find a room with a door in it. In my playthrough it was bottom right corner room.
Then the game tells you to look into another corner room. (Wrong ones are filled with impassable walls, the right one will have a hole in it)
When you walk into the hole in the correct room (my playthrough: bottom left corner room again), you will enter a "dark maze" in which you have to find the correct input sequence to move on. If you fail, you have to redo the input sequence from the beginning. So it's trial-and-error but TAS could just get it right immediately.
When you finish that, you will enter a new maze, and you won't have a map this time. You have to find the room where your missing friend is. Here is where I walked:
Once you reach the final room, you will see the red mouse is surrounded by impassable walls. Game tells you for each cat you kill now, one of those wall tiles will be removed. Maybe with luck manipulation you need to just kill 3 cats at the correct frame. I needed to kill a dozen cats until there was a free way.
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I took 3 hours to finish this, with savestates in Dosbox. But I think TAS could do it in 4~8 minutes. I don't know if the location of the key, the door and the warp hole are random. If they are, it may be possible to cut more time off by manipulating such thigns to be nearby.
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I didn't find any glitches btw.
I played Shareware 1.2.
There might be bugs in 1.0 ?
- Green and red dots are Luigi and Mario.
- Black line is the path, that the back brother is following to try to catch up with the front brother. The game uses a list of X/Y-coordinates which is located in 020057E8 ~ 02005FE4 (X and Y are dwords respectively). For each such coordinate, I have drawn a black pixel.
- The cross is where the game is currently going to overwrite the next element in the list. The address it uses is 02006F60(word). (The implementation of this might be bugged because it doesn't stay until the tail is right on top of the cross... but that should be a minor issue.)
So using this, we may be able to understand the teleportation glitch a lot better. We may be able to understand why we are teleported screen lengths away at some times and aren't at other times.
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EDIT:
It seems I already discovered something.
The screen length-long teleportation seems to occur when
- you visit a new room. Because when you visit a new room, some part of the "follow path" will be completely elsewhere.
- you walk in a direction and switch places a few times. Doing that, a segment of the "follow path" can be left behind, sufficiently far away.
I will do more investigation later.