Released on the GBA in 2004, Elf: The Movie is a movie tie-in game that loosely follows the events of the 2003 film, Elf. In this TAS, Buddy starts of his journey in the North Pole, making his way to New York. Along the way he collects letters to spell "NEW YORK", Christmas bulbs (which the game calls "Christmas decorations"), and bolts to fix Santa's sleigh. Buddy can only run and jump, but he can also moonwalk if you hold Left+Right in some levels. I definitely don't remember Will Ferrell doing any of that in the movie.
Emulator and Roms used
- Emulator used:
Bizhawk 2.10 using the mGBA core
- BIOS used:
BIOS Nintendo Game Boy Advance Boot ROM (World).bin
- Rom used:
Elf - The Movie (USA) (En,Fr,De,Es,It).gba.
- SHA1 checksum:
06b313920e7adc05a0f4c968d05f9db70926c0ab
Objective
Beat the game as fast as possible and save Christmas!
Summary
Elf: The Movie is a tie-in movie game that was released a year after the movie came out and it received a ton of negative reviews. This makes it the perfect game to TAS! This game is mostly a 2D platformer with some isometric camera stages scattered in. There are also mini-games like fixing pipes and delivering presents to different floors. 2 mini-games, The Snowball Fight and Delivering Presents with Santa, don't have a goal, instead they are time based, which means waiting for the clock to tick down to 0.
Movement
Buddy can only walk and jump for most of the game, which means the goal is to never slow down, In some of the levels, Buddy can do the moonwalk while holding Left+Right (most obvious in the level where Buddy collects "Christmas decorations"). In most situations, it is slower to use Left+Right as it acts as just holding left. Other times, it looks cool and doesn't slow Buddy down in any way. There is some tight platforming in the Iceberg Stage, in which I uses frame perfect jumps and tight lines to get Buddy through the course in a speedy fashion.
The small improvements over Adorabull's movie generally come from better movement and RNG in the mini-games that are RNG dependent (Ex: The Pipe Room). For the movement end, it was mostly just improving small things like instead of jumping 3 times to get the letter "K" in the level where you are suppose to spell New York, You can just jump 2 times, get on the ground and then jump to grab the "K" saving time. For the RNG side of things, I got really lucky with what I got (I'm not talented enough to figure out RNG seeds in this game). The only section that was slower than Adorabull's movie was the 3rd time you have to do the pipe section, I lost about 37 frames due to bad RNG, but it cancelled out due to the better RNG before and after this section.
Now, the biggest time save over their movie was in the Park Ranger section near the end of the game. In normal gameplay, there are 2 Park Rangers and they can either be slow as a snail or fast as a horse (because they are literally on a horse). Their speed is dependent on where you are on the screen and how close you are to them. You can avoid this by going up to the trees, which you need to go onto anyways to grab the bolts for Santa's sleigh. By jumping off of the 6th tree and over the 2nd Park Ranger, you can skip them entirely, saving nearly 40 seconds. (This trick has been known for awhile in RTA speedruns of the game)
Final Thoughts + Future Improvements
Some improvements that could be made are figuring out the RNG seed system in this game and getting the best outcomes, Also, maybe some slight platforming tweaks that could cut off some frames from the movie. As this is my first movie that I feel proud of to submit to the website, there is always room for improvement.
Shoutouts to Adorabull for making the first TAS of this game, and to SHiFT for playing this game on his stream and making me aware that this game exists.
If you have any comments feel free to ask away and I hope you enjoy the movie!
