Submission #8846: Cephla's NES Curse of the Shadow in 00:29.05

Curse of the Shadow is an NES game/prototype submitted for the ByteOff2020 competition in which evil has awoken underground and the player must defeat it, or at least at the stage where the game is at, reach a room with the words 'THE END' in the background. Instead of valiantly face the monsters, this TAS choose to exploit an out of bounds glitch to swiftly make its way to the ending.

If there's one thing I've found when working with NESMaker games, its that there's almost always, no matter how polished or late into development it is, there will often be potential to break them one way or another. And this game is no exception. I suppose its prototype status (which I can't see being changed anytime soon, instead just serving as a competition submission) helps with this OoB glitch, as it likely would have been patched out through improvements to the way the game works as a whole at some point. Despite how uninteresting they can be for an audience, I really enjoy these types of runs that are quick and easy clips through the floor or a wall and walking/falling to the end of the game.

For this TAS, the way we get out of bounds is by taking damage in the water to the left of the starting location and alternating between up and down on the d-pad. This prevents us from respawning immedately and we just keep falling slowly through the water until we end up on the screen below. From here, its just a simple job of walking to the right until we get to the grassy screen when we need to get the screen directly below which is conveniently the end screen.

This sounds simple but I really enjoyed making this TAS because of the small places you could save 1 or 2 frames at a time. At the start, I tried to hold right as much as possible to save time on walking OoB while also balancing up and down inputs. In the end, I managed to get OoB in 99 frames which seemed to be the quickest possible. Oddly, I found, was that depending on how long and where you held R influenced whether you landed on top of the armour shop or the castle first. Ideally we want the castle as it is further along but I just found this to be something slightly annoying but it wasn't such a big deal.

nymx: Claiming for judging.

nymx: Great exploit. I wasn't a fan of OoB, years ago, but they have grown on me quite a bit. I started getting a love for these kinds of runs, after being in the Super Metroid community for a while. I have to also say that I am looking forward to the in-bound movie, which LogansGamingRoom has done.

Everything looks good here. Accepting as "Fastest Completion".

despoa: Processing...