This submission is for Home Alone for the NES which is a psuedo-survival-tower defense-type-game. You must survive for 20 minutes against the wet bandits without being caught.
With the ban on triviality lifted I felt like it would be a good time to let these Home Alone games shine. Since we end time on final input in the TAS, we can optimize a bit, nail down the bare minimum of things we need to do to win the game, and let it run out. The NES version is infamous for basically being a free RTA WR tie but in the world of TAS, I aimed to see how quickly we can end input.
We make use of various glitches/bad AI pathing/etc through these runs to get our objective done very quickly. In this version we set traps in specific spots to break the AI's pathing causing them to climb up the pole to try and catch us, but due to a bug in how movement is handled in certain areas they end up just stopping in place, unable to interact with us at all as long as we don't move. The delayed movement in the beginning is intentional to manip the AI a bit, and it was faster than anything else I'd found.
While it may be boring to watch the game play itself out without anything really happening on the screen for dozens of minutes, I felt it was still worth making TASes for these to see just how quickly they could be "completed."
Who knows, maybe I missed something and we'll get a frame war going on some fresh new content that wouldn't have been allowed on TASvideos even a year ago.
Enjoy!
Samsara: Triple Review-powered claim combo!
No but seriously, great work finding strategies for all three.
