Submission #8097: Cephla's GBA Lego Island 2: The Brickster's Revenge in 07:29.99

The Brickster's Revenge is the sequel to Lego Island in which the player is tasked with bringing the Brickster to justice after he travels to the planet Ogel. This TAS ends up skipping two thirds of the game using an out of bounds glitch to reach the space launch location which is initially in an inaccessible area at the start of the game and is an improvement of 861 frames over the previous submission.

To perform the OoB glitch, we need to board the ferry and the location we are teleported to has some weird side effects when reloading a save.

The movement is very basic: we can only move in all 8 directions, with the diagonal directions having the same vertical and horizontal speed as just holding one direction, along the pavement and on crossings. This entire first segment is basically just story progression with the goal being to get from A to B to C etc. The skateboard does increase our speed but it can only be used here as it doesn't work in the space stages.

Once we load after the ferry trip, we instantly save, quit and reload. For whatever reason, the game briefly loads into an area out of bounds and the menu can be opened during this frame which warps Pepper to this point and so closing the menu gives us free range of this out of bounds area. Conveniently, this area is just above the space launch area and we have a nearly straight and direct path to it

The first mini-game in a series of end-game mini-games is an autoscroller where a bunch of asteroids must be avoided. At the 39 second mark, the end of the screen is unlocked and we can start the landing minigame which is just trying to land on a pad without landing too fast.

The mazes were by far the worst bits to TAS. All the Brickster Bots work on a timer, so no RNG is involved, and they will all turn 90 degrees at regular intervals, with the goal being not to get in their eyeline. For the most part, this is pretty easy and the timer is pretty generous but there are a couple spots (one in the first maze being very noticeable) where we do have to stop and wait for them to turn around. This loses a lot of time but I can't see these sections being improved without better movement and even then only the first brickbot should be able to be passed since we almost get past it if we don't stop.

This game really seems to like timed sections. To climb the tower, we need to hop on a series of moving blocks that take us upwards. There really isn't any way to improve this as again, there is no RNG at play here. All but one Brickbot can be jumped over and I also managed to find a glitch that resembled a double jump by getting damaged and then jumping. I experimented with this to try and skip some moving blocks but had no luck.

For the final fight, we need to fire three pizzas at the Brickster who has a ring of moving bricks protecting him. There needs to be a 4x2 gap for the pizza to hit and I was only able to get one 4x2 spot open because of unlucky falling bricks (the pattern seemed to depend on the frame the fight was loaded in on) although I don't think this lost all too much time and the fight was fairly quick regardless.

For the endpoint, this submission chooses to have the credits play but it is possible to completely skip the credits before the pre-credits conversation places by pressing B which ends up saving 34 frames. After the credits is a looping conversation which ultimately softlocks the game.

ThunderAxe31: Claiming for judging.

ThunderAxe31: All righty, this is enough optimized. And the ending can be considered valid. Accepting.

despoa: Processing...