Metroid: Zero Mission 100% improvement by Dragonfangs
Alternative video with community reactions:
Emulator used: Bizhawk 2.2.2 with mGBA core
This is an improvement to the 100% category. It saves about 4 seconds of In-Game time, but uses a new route that removes a ton of door transitions, saving I would estimate ~20 seconds of realtime. Unfortunately, the previous run was on VBA which ran a lot faster (read: inaccurately) compared to BizHawk. And so the end time is actually slower than the previous run, even with a faster route and better movement throughout.
The new route is made possible because of a glitch where if you jump into a slope with near sub-pixel-perfect precision you can end up a little bit inside of the ground. From inside of a slope you can then do a shinespark DOWN the slope and start speedboosting that way the same way it's possible to shinespark into any slope and keep going. Using this it is possible to complete a certain room in Ridley without having Wave Beam, which makes it possible to not grab Wave until cleanup (affectionally known as Late Wave, a route that's been theorized for years and is finally possible). Not having Hi-Jump in Ridley and later not having Wave beam in Chozodia is a big detriment and causes enough timeloss to counteract pretty much the entire IGT timesave from the faster route, but it still cuts out ~15 seconds of transitions so it is clearly worth it.
Aside from the route change, there are a couple of new glitches related to Ice Beam that speeds up some rooms.
- If you stand on top of two frozen enemies at the same time and kill them both simultaneously, the death routine of the first enemy will try to place you on top of the other enemy, but if the 'other' enemy is something that respawns, it will already have had its position set to its spawn point, since it also died this frame. This forcefully changes Samus's y coordinate to the spawn point of said enemy. The only real practical use for this is in Ridley, letting us go through a set of speed booster blocks in the floor without having to go into a different room to get enough space to start a speed boost.
- It is also possible to clip through doors if you can get an enemy frozen on a specific subpixel away from the door which will push Samus a tiny bit into the wall, this only works on doors on the right side for some reason. It's only used a couple of times to clip through 2 gray doors in Tourian and one Power Bomb door in Chozodia (for ammo conservation purposes, it doesn't really let us sequence break anything).
Memory: Optimization was on point and the routing was very smooth.
The new tricks were very creative and fun to watch, but otherwise the run was more of the typical Metroid Zero Mission TAS work we've come to expect, which is far from a bad thing. The audience universally praised the run as well.
