Okay, so uh... guys... I think I might have to cancel this submission.
You may be wondering why though... Well...
As it turns out, ruffle isn't emulating this game correctly. You know how in Level 2 there is a moving block obstacle with spikes that can kill you? Well, there is supposed to be more of these throughout the entire game, but for some reason, most of these blocks get shifted to the very right edge of the screen at the end of a level, making the game (unintentionally) easier. Thing is that
this isn't supposed to happen. Level 4 skip somehow still works on Flash Player though.
On a real Flash Player, all the obstacles are in the correct place as they should be, and even though this makes the game harder, this is the intended, accurate behaviour the game is supposed to have. As you can see in
this speedrun, it's using Flash Player, as ruffle didn't really exist back then, and it has all the obstacles in the correct place.
The worst part of all this, is that this
didn't used to be an issue before in ruffle. The nightly 2021-04-27 build of ruffle (which is really old at this point) is indeed emulating the game correctly, with all the obstacles in the correct place, as you can witness
here. This bug somehow only exists on more recent ruffle builds (a regression of sorts) and completely invalidates not just this TAS, but
ALSO the current RTA world record. Like... dang dude.
Now I WAS going to redo the TAS on this specific nightly 2021-04-27 build, but it doesn't boot with libTAS. So, I'm kind of stuck. If anyone wants to go through the effort of finding a build that both works with libTAS AND properly emulates the game, go right ahead, but there are so many builds to go through that I simply don't have the energy to bother with that myself. I realize this is kind of my fault for not testing this as much as I could have, but still, the fact that this is an issue in the first place still sucks.
With all that said, does anyone has some final thoughts on this situation before I move on?
