#4907: YamiAmarillo's Genesis Earthworm Jim 2 in 21:15.06

We follow our hero, Earthworm Jim, as he attempts to foil the evil Psycrows' plan to steal away the beautiful Princess What's-Her-Name

Emulator used: BizHawk 1.9.1
Aims for fastest time
Manipulates luck to save time
Takes Damage to save time
Abuses programming errors to save time
Played on easiest difficulty to avoid unnecesary puppy love rounds

Comments

Jumping from Gens 11b to BizHawk to make this movie was somewhat of a nightmare. I had previously completed this TAS on Gens months prior and importing the movie over, cause an immediate desync. Thankfully, re-doing the entire thing allowed me to find more time saves everywhere, so I see it as a blessing in disguise. As such, the re-record count on the BizHawk file is small. Combined with all the old movies and this one, I am well over 21K re-records

Background on this TAS

I originally started working on a TAS for Jim 2 back in 2013, but quickly lost interest after only finishing the first level, Anything but tangerines. Fast forward 2 years, and I got hit with a sudden drive to complete it and I completed it shortly after. Fast forward again, I get in contact with Athens, a known Jim speedrunner on twitch, and he and Falasion, another user on twitch, and I made new discoveries on both Jim 1 and 2. Later on, I completely re-do my old TAS and brought the time down more with new tricks and optimizations. The jump to Bizhawk allowed us to find more skips and clips, along with more optimizations, and brought down the time even more.

Tricks

Double Jump

When Jim is jumping, if you initiate a snot swing, the game thinks Jim is standing on the floor and sets his value to 0 for a short amount of frames. Pressing jump again, allows you to jump again. Depending on what kind of floor you are standing, timing for getting the double jump has either a tight timing or lenient window

Snot Swing

Initiating a snot swing while jumping, changes Jim's hitbox and allows him to go through certain walls and platforms

Manta Shield

Gives Jim invincibility for a certain amount of time but keeps him in a static position

Pressing B in Flying King

Orders you a large pepperoni pizza

The Whip

Allows you to kill enemies faster than shooting and getting rid of obstacles without stopping

Randomly Jumping

While it seems like I'm just jumping for no reason, if Jim is walking up steps or slopes, he takes longer to get to the top. Jumping up steps or slopes saves frames over just running

Easy/Difficult differences

Three rounds of Puppy Love over Five rounds
Less damage inflicted, 5% on Easy and 15% on Difficult
Pedro requires 12 hits (including hit to start the fight) on Easy and 42 on Difficult
If swallowed, Pedro deals 40% of damage on Difficult, 10% on Easy
The cheese of the pizza on Flaming Yawn, sinks you quickly on Difficult, it doesn't do this at all on Easy
Psycrows' speed on See Jim Run is about half your top speed, he's almost 1/1 to Jim on Difficult

Levels

Anything but Tangerines

The very first thing you see, is Jim snot swinging from a snot trail up above. This is not normally possible as Jim's jump height isn't enough to reach up there. Using a double jump gives you enough height to reach up there. Another double jump is used to skip grabbing a pig to get rid of Bob and Number Four. There is one frame when Jim is falling off while falling from a hanging state, where he can jump, thus allowing a snot swing to save time. At the end of the level, you notice that Jim stops before Bob's fight scene, this is due to what we call, the Bob Despawn. Found by Athens by complete accident, having two squids on screen and shooting at the same time, causes Bob to not spawn when entering his cutscene trigger and ends the level immediately.

Lorenzo's Soil

The soil has weird properties in this game. You can jump through them, ledge grab, land on certain clumps even though it seems like you can't, and can even soft lock you by trapping you in unshootable dirt. With shooting the dirt on the right side of the screen and a well placed jump, you can avoid going down the opening and having to shoot away soil to get back up. Here's our first clip, using the snot swing, allows you to grab onto soil from below and skip going around. On Genesis, it's sometimes faster to mash shoot the dirt to avoid lag from occurring, which is big help during certain sections. Using another double jump, allows us to grab the chip butty faster and doing a snot swing ledge grab, skips shooting soil. The next ledge grab is what we call, the hard jump, due to being very easy to miss. If you jump and try to grab onto the ledge, it doesn't work. You have to be in a falling state for a ledge grab to occur. Another snot swing ledge grab, more double jumping, and we are at Pedro, the boss of this level. This is the hardest thing to do on difficult, due to how much damage Pedro can do and how shooting his larva is a task on it's own

Puppy Love 1

Round 1 always has set patterns, you save time by dropping the flag and the first two puppies. Round 2 is where the randomness begins. Depending on where Jim stands and what he does with the puppies will determine what patterns you get. Taking damage from Peter saves time as opposed to catching all the puppies. The next round is just RNG manipulation to get the best patterns possible.

Villi People / Jim is now a blind salamander

The first thing you see is Jim floating around while waiting for the floating sheep, which we dub granny due to the noise they make when they pop. Manipulating the sheep to follow Jim over to the wall, allows Jim to clip into the wall and skip the entire level. Manipulating the next set of sheep to clip again, allows us to skip the quiz and make our way to the end of the level.

Flying King

Manipulating the balloon to go where you want it go is a lot harder than it looks. At the end of the level, Major Mucus is defeated at a certain frame to give better odds for good puppy patterns on Puppy Love 2

Puppy Love 2

This puppy love is the worst when it comes to manipulation. Everything I do is for a reason, even though it seems like I'm just standing still or diving for nothing

Udderly Abducted

The first thing you notice, is that I do not pick up the cow as intended and go in a completely different path. Doing two double jumps in the section above, where the worm flag is, allows Jim to go past the barrier of the first milking barn, which extends really high up. Doing so, allows Jim to skip collecting all the cows and walk to the end of the level. Because you do not collect the first cow, the game does not load the next cow, which is needed for the barn gate to be lowered.

Inflated Head

If Jim hit any light bulb when his animation is bouncing upwards, he gets an extra boost up. Being on Easy, taking extra damage for boosts is basically the way to go. If you finsih the level without collecting any worms, the game will give you two worms for Hammer Head, thus, it's faster to collect only one worm.

Iso 9000

This level is completely broken. Originally, you have to collect two hamster wheels to power up incinerators so that Jim can go to the next section. Doing a somewhat precise jump, allows Jim to clip into the paper and fall under to the next section. Another jump towards the wall of paper to get somewhat out of bounds, lets Jim fall to the final section and to the exit. Door chase is pretty straight forward, nothing really noteworthy here. Doing a double jump saves you from having to ledge grab to the top platform

Puppy Love 3

This puppy love was a nightmare to manipulate, but nothing like round 2. Dropping puppies and taking a beating from Peter saves time, nothing else to explain

Level Ate

Pretty straight forward level, just get to the end without dying. By whipping the off switch and snot swinging at certain times, lets Jim land on the final grills without needing to turn them off. Shooting and walking over the middle pepperoni, manipulates Flaming Yawn to stay in the middle and come down immediately, instead of attacking first.

See Jim Run, Run Jim Run

The final level, Jim must race Psycrow to the alter to save Princess What's-Her-Name. Jumping after shooting the plasma gun, allows us to pass the fan blades from hitting Jim. One section of fan blades is spinning clockwise, which sends Jim right at a high rate of speed, letting him skip the falling walls or destroy them before they fall down. Because of weird hitboxes, you can jump in and out of the final fan blades without being damaged, using a snot-chute gives Jim enough distance to land on the end of the fan to avoid damage. Using a snot-chute to catch the falling 'J' was the fastest way, by frames, to win the race and once again, Psycrow has been thwarted so hard, he doesn't even make it to the altar to take a plasma shot to the face

Possible Improvements

In Tangerines, if you can somehow get enough height from a double jump, it's theoretically possible to skip the entire level. All three Puppy Loves are improvable if you can get consistent fast starts. Fast starts are when the game lags enough and psycrows feathers come out in a certain way after being hit with the bomb. If this happens, the next round text will show immediately and the next round begins. Every single round, aside from the first, has the possibility of this happening, but we haven't figured out how to make it consistent. If you can somehow despawn the first cow in Udderly or go past the first gate without having the need to go from above, that would save a bit of time.

Level Comparisons

Level	Easy	Difficult	Time saved in sec/mins
Anything but Tangerines	4050	4052	0.033
Lorenzo's Soil	5048	5868	13.68
Puppy Love 1	20497	28231	1:55.74
Villi People	4164	4113	-0.81
Flying King	2339	2272	-1.117
Puppy Love 2	12091	22072	2:46.38
Udderly Abducted	3690	3693	0.048
Inflated Head	4359	4425	1.1
Iso 9000	2144	2136	-0.13
Puppy Love 3	12457	22140	2:41.4
Level Ate	7306	7314	0.132
See Jim Run, Run Jim Run	4340	4360	0.36

Reasons for time loss

Bad granny movement in Villi People
Bad movement in Flying King and Iso 9000

Special thanks to

Falasion - for helping figure out how stuff works, giving inspiration to the clips on Villi People, and being around in the middle of the night to bounce ideas off of
Athens - for figuring out certain strats and accidentally finding the Bob despawn
To the rest of the crew on Annelids with Attitude, you know who you are
To everyone who supported me while I beat my head against the wall during my TAS streams

I hope you enjoy this run as much as I had while making it.