Game objectives
- Emulator used: Bizhawk 2.10
- Primary objective: speed
- Best ending
About the category
Each stage has a unique Krusty treasure that Bart can collect with the help of one of the other family members. If all treasures are collected (9 in total), Bart is sent to a new level, soundstage 3 (the "film reel" level) before meeting the final boss and is then awarded with a different and better ending. While this TAS ends input as early as possible, it's possible to interact during the ending by throwing pies at Smithers and Mr Burns.
China
Boss - Excellent fight, but at the cost of delaying the start of the fight by 4f to get an acceptable seed to work with.
North pole
Ice cave -A 4f delay was introduced at the map screen before this level to get a workable RNG seed. It's worth to briefly talk about the unique Krusty treasure in this level. Marge throws a snowball when the global timer ($1D) is a multiple of 0x7F (so every 128f). The timing in this TAS was not the best with a fair amount of waiting before Marge threw the first snowball.
Frozen river - While most of the unique Krusty items only require Bart to touch the family member and then collect the treasure, this one requires some additional effort. Each firecracker ball will destroy 3 blocks of the igloo (occasionally only 1, for unknown reasons). Sometimes three horizontal, sometimes 3 vertical, sometimes "2+1". This can be controlled to some extent by throwing at different frames. There are 18 blocks that hide the treasure, so a minimum of 6 balls are needed. This TAS does it in 7 throws. The additional throw was to create a path towards the center blocks (which are the ones of interest) when throwing from a distance.
Boss - Starting the level on a very good global timer, making the boss retreat very quickly in the 1st cycle.
Egypt
Great pyramid - The first "snake block section" was completed quite a bit slower than in the any% TAS. For unknown reasons, the screen refused to scroll when jumping down to the treasure if trying to complete it like in the any%.
Hollywood
Soundstage 1 - With luck, some sea gulls can be avoided by moving sideways. However, in this attempt, every single sea gull was blocking the path and had to be manipulated (1f/sea gull). On top of that, a cannonball that doesn't always appear also had to be despawned in this attempt for the cost of 1f.
Darkman425: The movement and routing to the levels and detours for the pickups needed for the best ending look well optimized. A shame that a 128 frame rule blocked off a potential time save but that's just how it is sometimes. Nice work!
Accepting to Standard under the "best ending" branch.
Note to publishers: there's a bit of extra possible inputs when Smithers and Burns are on screen after the final input. Bart can move left and right and throw pies with A or B. Pressing Select leaves this screen and goes back to the intro sequence before the title screen. Take this info as you will how you see fit.
Darkman425: Setting to Delayed by author request as they check for potential improvements.
