Submission #8234: dekutony's GBA Super Mario: The Last GBA Quest in 12:55.30

In celebration of the new Mario movie that just came out, I decided to make this, hope you enjoy.

This is a TAS for the homebrew game Super Mario: The Last GBA Quest. This game was created by YodaJr, with some new graphics by Omg and a completely original soundtrack by Archilolo. The game (v2.0) was completed in 2008, originally hosted on the French fansite playeradvance.org

The game takes a lot of inspiration from Super Mario Land, taking the SFX, some of the enemies and even the Superball power up (which is a Fire Flower here for some reason) from that game into here for a rather short yet interesting little adventure.

This TAS beats every level available in the game, while collecting all 7 red "PlayerAdvance" coins, which is required to access the final 8th level in the game, beat the final boss and rescue the Princess.

I'll be honest, this game doesn't control very good, or runs very good. It's still rather impressive for a homebrew game made by essentially 2 or 3 people over 15 years ago, but still. The way the game runs is strange. Every like 8 frames or so it will produce 1 frame of lag... or 2. I'ts not exactly clear how or why the game runs like this, but it does, and it can have a really annoying effect on editing the TAS with TAStudio, specially if you're resyncing the run. It could desync just because it lagged an extra frame or it didn't lag an extra frame.

Extra tip: you can jump higher as Big Mario when holding Down+A. (Also yes, Mario's runs that slow in this game.)

Very simple level. I must collect a Mushroom at the start of the level, because when I enter the warp pipe with the PA Coin, I have to break a block in order to collect it, and obviously I can't break blocks as Small Mario. Each level has a warp pipe you can enter where it features a bonus room with a PA coin that you need to collect. To enter the pipe I have to wait for the Donut Block to fall down, and well... we'll talk about these blocks in a bit. You beat a level by entering the red warp pipe at the end.

Desert level. I need to take damage here in order to enter the small gap in order to access the warp pipe. I still have to collect another Mushroom though to break another block. Yeah, this game likes to do stuff like this sometimes. Originally I messed up the bonus room and broke the first 2 blocks instead of breaking the block in the middle which is faster. Thankfully I fixed it and resynced all the progress I had so far despite how painful it was to resync inputs in this game.

In this level I avoid getting hit as much as possible. I had to avoid the Fly enemy guarding the warp pipe that leaves to the PA coin, and I had to slightly slow down in order to avoid getting hit. In the section with the mushroom platforms, I had to slow down and jump over the Bombshell Koopa blocking the way so that I don't get hit.

In this level I have to break some blocks in order to progress, which is why I kept my powerup for this long. I unfortunately miss the 2nd moving platform at the start so I have to wait for a bit there. Then I'm just in time to jump into the vertical moving platform soon after. There's a tricky section where I have to avoid a Gon enemy (the sphinx) and it's homing projectiles and I have to slighly slow down in order to avoid getting hit. I have to slow down because of the difference between elevations of Mario, the Gon, and the Fly enemy behind them. Right after breaking the blocks, I intentionally take damage in order to enter another small gap as Small Mario and access the warp pipe guarded by a Goomba. It was faster for me to wait for the Goomba to fall from the pipe instead of jumping on it and wait for Mario to land on the ground.

In this cloud based level I once again miss the moving platform so I jump on a couple of enemies just to leg go my frustration. Later on there's a section with a Fly and a Donut Block where it expects you to backtrack by hitting some invisible blocks and then return to cross the small gap in the middle, but as Small Mario you can barely jump over the gap with a precise jump. This is not possible to do as Big Mario since he would bonk into the ceiling making it impossible to cross the gap. After carefully jumping over some Shy Guys, I slow down to hit an invisible block containing a Mushroom. I enter the warp pipe below where I need to break another block inside once again.

The cave level. I go for the upper route here since I don't have to wait for a platform to approach me, unlike the lower route where it takes too long to do so. Later on after waiting for another moving platform while also avoiding the Yuyarin (shooting seahorse's) projectile and some straightforward platforming, I must climb up the level by hitting a couple invisible blocks. The hidden warp pipe is located slighly more to the right of the end of level red pipe, and the only way of accessing it is by climbing all the way up the level and moving forward. Now let's get to talk about these dumb Donut Blocks because this is where it gets bizarre.

These blocks either do nothing special, keeping all your speed, or they don't. Sometimes it's fine to walk over them, other times they slow you down, and other OTHER times it doesn't matter because of deceptive screen shaking or extra lag frames or SOMETIMES a combination of both. In THIS specific instance, this slowdown was a benefit, as falling from these blocks while the game lagged at a specific point sligthly gave me a small boost that allowed me to enter the warp pipe earlier without having to slowdown in the next set of blocks. At this point I just gave up and I didn't even bothered checking all the other instances where I run over these blocks previously. This game is so weird and inconsistant like this and I'm not gonnna put up with it's shenanagans and resyncing the whole thing again.

Had to start by jumping over another Koopa slowly. I climb up to the top of the level again to enter the warp pipe and break 3 blocks this time in order to get the last PA coin. Later on a Shy Guy and a Fly get in my way so I have to slightly slow down to avoid them once again, this time because taking damage and waiting for the taking damage animation is too slow from this point onwards.

After collecting all 7 PA coins, it's time to beat the final level. This features both the, as I'm now calling them; "Good Donuts" and "Bad Donuts". There's a specific moment where a Bullet Biff is chasing me through a closed section filled with insta-death spikes and those dreaded "Bad Donuts". Jumping too high will result in death from spikes, even as Big Mario.

After many trials and tribulations, Mario faces off against his arch-nemesis, his mortal enemy, his number 1 rival... BIG GOOMBA WITH A SANTA HAT!!!

This fight is a classic "beat them by jumping on their head enough times" fight. The more times you hit the goomba, the faster he'll get and the harder it will to hit him and the more dangerous he'll become. With precise timing, you'll defeat him rather quickly. After beating that mean ol' goomba, Mario rescues the Princess and the game is over.

The one improvement I can think of is just not running over the "Bad Donuts" more frequently. It wouldn't be a massive, minute long time save, but it's a timesave nonetheless.

OK so another improvement I discovered is in the bonus room in Level 5. You can just break the right block instead of the middle block in order to obtain the coin and keep moving forward slightly earlier. This improves the TAS by 6 frames... but then I would have to resync the rest of the TAS and that's really annoying and it also seems to be some sort of frame rule going on when the game is loading levels and bonus rooms making me either gain or lose frames and that's a whole other thing I really don't wanna get into right now.

Special thanks to the devs of this game for making it. Despite my problems with it, I still had a fairly enjoyable time making this despite me having to resync the run that one time.

With all that said, thank you for reading and watching and have a nice rest of your weekend.

Darkman425: Claiming for judging.

Darkman425: This is an interesting fan game with a bit of jank making it noticeably less refined than official games. There's some neat level design ideas. This submission looks pretty good to me. The fact that the game polls inputs at roughly ~53 FPS and can still lag for longer which causes resync issues means that further improvements would likely require a fair amount of work after the first adjustment.

Accepting to Standard.

despoa: Processing...