It was the best dinner ever! This is an NES homebrew game released in 2018 (available for download
here) about lizards with an eating disorder. This run goes through the game's 2-player co-op mode.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: Bizhawk 2.2.2
- Completes the 2-player mode on normal difficulty as fast as possible
First time TASing in a long while, figured this would be a fun pick. My only regret with it is that I didn't get to do quite as much fancy movement during the score tally at the end of each level. I finished the whole TAS first with the intention of going back to add the play-around later, but it turns out that even the smallest change in movement can affect later levels, so I gave up on that. Something to keep in mind in case anyone runs the game in the future.
There are a couple of glitches used in the run to go a little faster:
- Dive-jump: Pressing both A (jump) and B (attack) on the same frame will launch the player upwards while retaining an attack during the jump. This is incredibly useful as there's no other way to attack while ascending, but it has a few drawbacks: one, you can't move during the entire jump, and two, it has a fixed height. Because attacks slow the player down the longer they spend in air, this limits its usability.
- Starting invulnerability: If the player taps A or B on the frame the level starts, they'll jump/attack without actually starting the level; this can even be carried into additional button presses under certain circumstances. The effect of this is that the player will be invulnerable to enemies so long as the game doesn't register an input to actually signal the level start. However, it also has the drawback that the level clock does not start, which can lose frames on the score tally.
slamo: This is a really fun run! The two player coordination looks well optimized. Anything that looked unoptimized was just due to the fact that you can't change direction or slow down while attacking, and you did a good job recognizing the bottlenecks in each level.
Since this is an unofficial game, it's subject to our notability and quality standards. Quality is obviously not an issue here, and the game is considered finished. The game is well-regarded within the NES homebrew community, having been worked on and anticipated for a few years. It's also had a few speedrunners. It's not very well-known outside of these circles, but I think our general audience will appreciate this run, even if they've never heard of the game.
This game is a bit interesting in that 2 player and 1 player mode contain different level sets. There is only a little bit of overlap; by my count, 27 out of 33 (82%) levels in each mode are unique to that mode. For this reason I believe that 1 player and 2 player are considered separate game modes and are both Vaultable. Basically what this means is that we will keep the "2 player" branch on this run, and if a "1 player" branch is submitted at some point, they can both coexist on the site with no risk of one obsoleting the other.
Was this run entertaining? I thought so, and the audience feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Accepting to Moons.
