A TAS I made to collect as few score points as possible in Super Mario Advance.
The previous lowest high score was set by **KawaiiDawn** back in 2020, with a score of 19120.
Two years ago, I found a way to improve it to 19040, and only now I finally turned it into a real TAS.
Also, this is my first ever TAS, so don't judge too harshly.
Frame Count: 30234
Rerecord Count: 1075
Darkman425: Input file replaced with a .bk2 input that truncates 11619 frames of blank input at the end to better reflect the actual TAS time.
Darkman425: Branch changed to specify Luigi only for reasons explained below.
I like the idea of a minimum score challenge since this adds some interesting restrictions on shortcuts that aren't available anymore due to extra score. Restricting it to Luigi may or may not have been a conscious choice but it does add an interesting bit of complications since Luigi moves and grabs items slower than Toad, leading to different strats. For a first pass, this isn't too bad of an effort!
However, there's a lot of optimization issues found throughout. When compared to
[2482] GBA Super Mario Advance by mtvf1 & got4n in 07:00.58 there's a lot of general momentum preservation, glitches, and other various techniques that weren't used. There's even comparable strats from the publication that can be directly applied since there's sections in it that use Luigi and also score as minimal points as possible. If you do tackle this challenge again, I highly recommend checking out
the authors' notes for their run to learn about techniques you can apply yourself as well as checking out the
TASVideos Wiki page about common tricks. Applying the knowledge found there and potentially other games on the site will help you make a more optimized submission in the future.
