Correction: If you reach the checkpoint of either half of a special stage without enough spheres, you don't get kicked out Sonic 2-style. Instead, you loop around and have to play the same half over again, using whatever ring supply you have left (with the blue spheres you've already collected carrying over). This of course wastes time, but it's not a total loss--the idea is that in stages with branched paths, you might want to explore the other branch next time.
The objectives say "Disallow hyper transformation" under the guise of making the gameplay more natural, but besides the unavoidable extra boss, you use it anyway at the end of Lava Reef 1 and, in the ultimate taunt to your metallic lookalike, Sky Sanctuary as well.
Rather, I believe there's an unspoken subtext here, one that's *gasp* financially motivated: staying in hyper form makes you lose rings, of course, and it's simply that in these cases you can end the level within 1 second so the rings never start getting deducted. Someone clearly ought to launch an SEC investigation to find out if this trail of clues into a potential money-laundering operation and cover-up leads any deeper.
Speaking of things so close, did anyone ever check to see if the Pumpkin Hill 5 "suicide launch" is possible with perfect precision, getting the high piece in the 2.9 seconds you have between death and fade out?
Level is not the primitive value, experience is. If the level disagrees with the value it derives from experience, the experience-derived value reigns supreme, and if necessary the stats are recalculated accordingly.
For fading-group level 1s, the formula at that point dictates that experience should be -54, but since the game never imagines a reason to treat that value as signed, it takes the unsigned 3-byte value and interprets it as 16,777,162. Recalculating the level from that, it should be enough for level 245, but of course Stadium also sanitizes anything above 100 down to that level immediately (without even waiting for an experience-gaining event like it does in the GB carts), so that's what you end up with.
Gold and Crystal can each get their own Tyrogue, so Yellow part 1 doesn't even need to worry about the Hitmon: it can just be a race to get Surf and head to Cinnabar as fast as possible, ignoring everything else that isn't a direct prerequisite.
Granted, that's most of the game, and part 2 would have to play even more of the game because Yellow is going to have to visit all of Seafoam Islands, Power Plant, Victory Road, and Cerulean Cave, but compared to the bigger games it shouldn't have a problem finishing on time. Yellow will probably even be responsible for Porygon.
Perhaps an indicator of the time scale involved is that you absolutely need two Sun Stones to fill out the Pokedex. One of Gold or Crystal, then, should start in the middle of a bug-catching contest day (probably Saturday 10:00 AM, which takes the fewest button pushes), and focus on getting daytime catches (including Espeon). The other should start around 11:30 PM on Thursday, as late as it can get away with while still catching the window for the bug-catching contest, and then proceed to fill out the nighttime catches (with Umbreon) and Lapras once Friday rolls along. If there are any morning-only habitats, those will finally open up after 4½ hours, and given all the catching and trading, the run will probably last long enough to get there naturally.
Among all the teleporting going on in 2001:M3, you have a level teleport (via trap) slated to go from 44 to 1, with no auxiliary branches involved. Is that even a legal destination due to having to cross over 26?
The other glitch requires playing Story Mode for a very long time (IIRC, the required Virtual Training only unlocks right before the last boss, some 80ish fights in) and then switching to Challenge Mode. So again practically using NG+ data.
Earlier on in the game, during Rouge's chapter, she challenges Emerl to a game of "run away": if you receive or deal any damage before time runs out, the fight immediately ends and you have to try again. If you save out of that fight and head immediately to challenge mode, you still have the pacifist restriction in effect, but triggering the abort in this case counts as a win rather than a loss. Being able to end the fight on your first attack is obviously even faster than waiting to get KO'd, and keeps you eligible for more bonus points as well if you're judging on score.
PP-restoring items are pretty limited, as they cannot be bought.
Oh, that makes sense. Thought you could buy them.
In a pinch you could buy multiple copies of TM07 and any other buyable TM it can learn, overwriting the moves with each other as a crude way of restoring PP, but the "can't learn more than 4 moves" dialog boxes are rather time-consuming every time.
In the third series of trades, wouldn't it be better for Red to send over a Wigglytuff instead of Pikachu? That would let Blue trim out the Wigglytuff encounter in Cerulean Cave, and let Red skip catching a second Pikachu at the Power Plant, since it still has the first one and can just evolve that instead.
The particular timing of the reversion was that he needed to get the ocarina/drums out at that point anyway, so it's just one additional song. It was also 3:34 AM when time sped back up, so Kafei doesn't make it back to the room for another 56 minutes. Doing everything else at the same speed, Link would have arrived there too early by keeping the flow of time slow.
Here's a sheet that should list all enemy stats: https://www.sendspace.com/file/nn4t89 For example, it shows Surge's R1 Raichu with 148 HP/88 Defense instead of the rental's 143 and 84. Some of the constituent IV and EV components are known to be erroneously pulled from the wrong data, but as long as the final stats are accurate, there are no elements in G1 that care about the difference on that level.
If TASes are required to be played in the highest difficulty, wouldn't a Claire B run without the alligator boss be considered easier difficulty than one with it? The one fighting the alligator could be submitted as an "all bosses" branch?
How dare the Super Mario 64 0-star run not fight King Bob-omb. Or King Whomp. Or Big Boo. Or Eyerok. Or Wiggler. All of those bosses are supposed to add to difficulty, so it's obviously not setting the bar as hard as it could!
Hell, the run could pause and select "Exit Course" after beating the boss but before collecting its star, so (except in Big Boo's case) you could keep all the difficulty from the bosses, while sticking to the branch name!
The fact that it mentions saving frames in quantities like 2 and 8 seems to indicate that the NES frame rule doesn't apply here, so in this version you're limited to motions that are in fact frame-perfect, while in NES you can get away with movement that looks cooler but takes a few frames longer, as long as it's not so much longer that you get pushed down beyond the next frame rule. That sounds like a fairly big constraint.
An optimized AI is more-or-less equivalent to a TAS, with perhaps a few concessions depending on whether you allow it to probe into the game's internal memory banks at any time.
For physics-based games like Arkanoid, it's a fairly simple matter to completely solve the relevant equations for any possible contingency and easily keep the ball in play and direct it to particular spots. The only place this exhaustive analysis might fall short is if there's a need for luck manipulation, provided the AI isn't able to determine what the RNG seed's value is at any point in time (if it ever knows the value accurately, it can keep its "mental image" of the game state up-to-date by running a copy of the same RNG algorithm in parallel with the game itself).
There's also that gambling game that was accepted too. I don't have a problem with that sort of blackjack TAS. If it keeps track of score with money you could even use it to max out the score with consecutive blackjacks.
Or getting blackjack by hitting on a 20, etc.
By definition, a blackjack is not something you can get by hitting: if you have 20 and get an ace, that's just a regular hand of 21 in 3 or more cards, and will only pay even money for a win, or return the bet if the dealer ties it.
Even if you split 10s, and get an ace to come up on each hand, those don't count as blackjacks either and you only stand to win double the original bet, not triple.