(Link to video)
Barry Biceps is competing to be the arm wrestling world champion in the 2022 NES homebrew The Arm Wrestling Classic. To reach the top spot he must beat many contestants throughout the tournament by mashing the button displayed on the board in the background at superhuman speeds. Barry breezes through the competition and easily becomes the world champion in a mere 8 minutes.
The game features 17 (if I'm counting correctly) fights that increase in difficulty the further into the game you are. As a TAS, they are pretty much just 17 identical fights that involve pressing a single button a variable amount of times. To make TASing not so simple, there is almost always one lag frame after each button press after the button's been pressed seven times. I say 'almost always' because sometimes there can be two or none or some other amount and while it's not difficult to get around, it's just an annoying inconvenience. After every few fights, Barry is pulled into the training room to strengthen his right arm and these workouts are much simpler to TAS. The first Up press happens 17 frames after the Down press but that is shortened to 16 afterwards for the rest of the session. It's obviously faster to complete these than wait for the timer to run out. The following fight is relatively quick with Barry's even stronger arm.
Each fight ends in 400 frames of victory laps where the player can collect as many money bags as they possibly can. These money bags only increase the score and don't actually have any benefits. I could have collected a certain amount of bags so the score ended up being 42000 because 420 harhar but that'd probably mean a lot more standing around not making annoyingly loud and repetitive bleeps and I'd rather make it visually 'entertaining'.
You'll also notice, particularly in the Moe Hawk fight, that we lose two portions of the bar at the start. There doesn't seem to be any RNG involved so we can't really speed up any fights other than mash as quickly as possible.
You can get the game here: https://5kids2feed.itch.io/tawc

Judgin' Jamsara: I can't trust someone who calls himself Barry Biceps and isn't already the champion. I'm gonna have to judge this to ensure he's legit.
Samsara, without alliteration: Yeah, Barry's legit. You gotta hand it to this guy, he's armed and dangerous. Ironically, he's got a leg up on the competition. I think his journey is worthy of acceptance.
I've noted an extremely minor improvement in the thread, though it's not enough to warrant a complete redo of the run to implement. It can wait until a new submission.

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TASVideoAgent
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #7955: Cephla's NES The Arm Wrestling Classic in 08:34.55
Samsara
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Going to make a quick note of this for future runs: The first input per match can be done two frames earlier (before the first lag frame instead of after it). From what I tested, this seems to save 3 frames per fight, though it would require completely redoing the run to account for the different RNG. Nowhere near enough to reject, of course, this is less than a second of total improvement and the rest of the run looks optimal.
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LoganTheTASer
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Samsara wrote:
Going to make a quick note of this for future runs: The first input per match can be done two frames earlier (before the first lag frame instead of after it). From what I tested, this seems to save 3 frames per fight, though it would require completely redoing the run to account for the different RNG. Nowhere near enough to reject, of course, this is less than a second of total improvement and the rest of the run looks optimal.
cool find. i‘ll start implementing this improvement after school.
LoganTheTASer
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Post subject: Movie published
TASVideoAgent
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This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [5126] NES The Arm Wrestling Classic by Cephla in 08:34.55