About the Game
Tom and Jerry: The Movie was released for the Sega Master System in 1992. You play as Tom and your goal is to catch Jerry. The intended method is to chase jerry to the end of each level where he will be cornered and you can catch him. But if you’re fast enough, you can catch him before the end of the level.
This is my fourth TAS of this game and it saves 85 frames (1.42 seconds) over the gameplay in my previous TAS.
My revisions of this TAS:
| Version | Time | Year | Video |
|---|---|---|---|
| V1 | 4:53 | 2012 | https://youtu.be/6TRjThIr38g |
| V2 | 2:03.041 | 2016 | https://youtu.be/t4Y2MHEjos0 |
| V3 | 1:17.182 | 2020 | https://youtu.be/1AZP6LiiiaU |
| V4 (this TAS) | 1:15.897 | 2023 | https://youtu.be/TEjY8fSFzTY |
While the submission text should explain everything important, I also have put together this video reviewing the game's speedrun and exploring the interesting tech used in this TAS: https://youtu.be/BhY61X8PPm4
Level by Level Summary
Since my last TAS, RTA has come a long way to nearly match it. The below table summarises the improvements per level compared to my old TAS and the RTA WR: https://youtu.be/pKB6q5pYK40
| Level | Frames saved over old TAS | Frames saved over RTA WR |
|---|---|---|
| Level 1 | 0 | 23 |
| Level 2 | 48 | 40 |
| Level 3 | 0* | 0 |
| Level 4 | 0 | 0 |
| Level 5 | 9 | 232 |
| Level 6 | 28 | 72 |
- My old Downtown TAS route used Jerry’s bomb throw to catch him, but the RNG didn’t line up the same this time to get that. Instead I had to get him while he was climbing up a ledge, and it turned out to be exactly the same speed.
Walk through walls glitch
I’d like to give a big special thanks to wrayal, who inspired me to do the V3 of this TAS. Wrayal started doing IL runs of this game RTA and they found a new walk through walls glitch! They used this to improve their RTA times. The glitch can be done by letting go of right on particular frames when Tom is bonking into a wall. If you are not pressing right on the correct frames, you’ll walk through the wall. In RTA this will feel like tapping right with a particular rhythm.
Unfortunately (or fortunately), I finish each level too quickly to ever use the walk through walls glitch, but the inspiration from the glitch helped me to revisit the game with fresh eyes and find many improvements.
Strategies for catching Jerry
Bomb Strat
This strat is used in places where it's quicker than waiting for a ledge for Jerry to climb. Essentially you want to manipulate Jerry to lay a landmine, then after you hit the landmine you manipulate him to throw a bomb. Throwing the bomb causes Jerry to slow down a lot. Thanks to your iFrames, you can run through the bomb to catch Jerry. The timing on this is very tight, so you have to make sure he’s throwing the bomb at the right time in order to catch him. Usually the result is that you will chase him extremely closely and just barely miss him.
To do the manipulation, I have the window where I start the level and the window after being hit by the land mine. Usually in these 2 windows, I start off by walking and then launch into a run. Once committing to a run, stopping loses a lot of time, so once I commit to a run I keep running until I hit the land mine or catch Jerry. During the walk before the run, I play around with letting go of right on particular frames. You can also slightly alter RNG by pressing L+R. A small thing to note about this game is that it only polls your inputs every 4 frames, so this drastically reduces movement and rng manipulation options.
Climb Strat
This strat is used in this TAS and also very heavily in RTA. Essentially I have to manipulate Jerry using similar methods to the bomb strat to climb up a ledge near the start of the level. From there I can run at him and catch him during the climb.
The biggest timesave in V4 compared to V3 was in Level 2 (Garden). I was able to get Jerry to climb by letting go of walk before starting to run, compared to my previous strategies which just swapped between the two.
Screen Underflow
Just a theoretical glitch, but apparently Emsemts managed to get Tom off the left side of the screen and had Tom come out of the right side. I did manage to replicate this, and get Tom out of the right side, but he immediately died due to the death trigger on the left side of the screen. If this could be pulled off without dying, it could save some more time in the TAS.
Special Thanks
Thanks to Wrayal for inspiring me to do V3 of this TAS by finding the walk through walls glitch.
Thanks to arnaud33200 who currently holds the RTA WR for this game. Arnaud talked to me a lot in the weeks leading up to this submission about the game and RTA strategy, this was a good inspiration to stick with it and squeeze out all of the extra frames. Arnaud was able to help me adapt the new RTA finds into the TAS and suggested some further areas for exploration.
Darkman425: Claiming for judging.
Darkman425: Nice improvements with the movement manipulations! Accepting as an improvement over [4240] SMS Tom and Jerry: The Movie by The8bitbeast in 01:17.18.
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