Pitfall: the Mayan Adventure is a sequel to the 1982 Atari Pitfall game. It was ported on several systems, including the Sega Genesis, PC and the Gameboy Advance. Harry Pitfall must rescue his dad (the Atari Pitfall character himself!) who was kidnapped by an ancient Mayan deity.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.5.2
- Aims for fastest time
- Takes damage to save time
- Uses death to save time
- Abuses programming errors
- Destroys wildlife to save a pixelated dad
This is the same movie as my previous submission
here up to the last stage before the final boss, Temple of Tikal. All general knowledge and speed tricks were covered there, so I will only focus on the new trick which caused me to improve this TAS.
Tikal skip
In the second half of the level, right after the big swinging spiked balls, you can jump into the pit and clip through an invisible wall which normally prevents you from accessing later parts of the level. If done correctly, you can trigger the checkpoint before falling to your death, and then respawn there, skipping the second river part and some other bits of the level. This is precise but still RTA-viable. Dying after triggering the checkpoint is unavoidable because nothing is solid (walls and floors are not "active").
Credits go to ROTFLandmines for finding this trick. In this TAS, it saved 1008 frames (about 16.6s).
Final boss
I needed to redo the whole fight because I now start the fight on a different RNG setting than the previous TAS. This turned out to be slightly less lucky but still manageable. With some trial and error I managed to beat the boss before he jumps off the stage, and improved the DPS a bit, which made up for the worse luck and ended up being the same number of frames as my previous TAS. I am satisfied with this.
Suggested screenshots: 16824, 33529, 35128 and 35667.
Shoutouts to ROTFLandmines for finding the Tikal skip.
Enjoy the run!
