Fun little run for a fun little game. However, I personally feel slight iffy about the difficulty choice. I agree that hard would make the game too tedious for many reasons - you also forgot to mention that the default weapon is nerfed - but easy is, well, easy. I think Normal would be a good compromise. Also, are you aware of the secret moves Snake has at his disposal? These include brief invulnerability, launching some small fireballs, and firing off a huge plasma bolt.I wonder if any of those could save some time.

Would the secret moves be considered cheats?

I was under the impression that we should go with either the fastest difficulty or the hardest, but I'll keep that feedback in mind.

Select your difficulty well When a game has multiple difficulty levels, it is preferred to play on the difficulty that would make the most interesting and entertaining run. Usually, this is the hardest difficulty, and as such it is the most preferred choice for a TAS. However, there are cases where harder difficulties do nothing but add repetition to runs, such as only giving enemies and bosses more HP, where the extra work required to kill them is uninteresting. In these cases, it is preferred to use an easier difficulty in the interest of reducing repetitive actions which do little to entertain upon frequent use. Good reasons to use the hardest difficulty are: More stages, such as Contra III More interesting boss fights, such as new attack patterns, and new variety of methods used to whittle down their HP More overall action without repetition, such as more enemies in a game that are interesting to kill Miniscule time differences between difficulties If you're unsure, always go with hardest Good reasons to use easier difficulties are: More health for damage boosts Less boring enemies leading to less lag Faster bossfights on repetitive bosses, especially if their lower health can lead them to be one-cycled, and they are not interesting to fight for longer periods Note that every game is judged on a case-by-case basis, so these reasons do not always apply. For example, if a bossfight only requires an extra hit or two because of higher health, that may not be repetitive enough to warrant using a lower difficulty. In cases where the difficulty does not matter at all, such as in glitched runs that skip straight to the credits, then you do not need to change the difficulty at all. Using an in-game password to unlock harder difficulties is perfectly acceptable, as long as no other passwords are used, and the password does nothing more than make the game harder or unlock extra areas which will be played.

I know about the secret moves, and I talked to Mothrayas about whether they would be permissible before I started the run. We leaned towards calling them cheats because they certainly resemble them (obscure button combinations giving you an advantage), despite not being listed in the cheats section in the hint manual.

Right. So the point shouldn't be whether somebody calls it a cheat mode, but what the option actually does. For instance, site precedent shows that cheat codes that unlock a higher difficulty mode are perfectly valid for a TAS. Because instantly skipping to the last level or getting permanent invincibility (both common codes in Apogee games) are a whole different cup of tea than spending two seconds and one hit point to launch an energy bolt. Anyway, I would be interested in hearing slamo's assesment on whether these codes would be a time saver in the first place (because it appears they require you to stand still for two seconds). That may make the issue moot without setting precedent against secret special moves in other games.

SECRET BATTLE MOVES whose input they provide are allowed as officially encouraged means of normal play. SECRET BATTLE MOVES whose input they don't provide are officially meant to be discovered first, and then used, on the same grounds as the first 2. SECRET CHEAT KEYS are explicitly and officially labeled as cheats, in both the manual and the game, and it gives unfair advantage of unlimited resources, and even those resources don't showcase any unique abilities that can't be accessed otherwise, just some regular thing, only unlimited now.All it does is making the game much simpler, and that's not what we want in TASes. I think banning those cheat keys will be reasonable: for legitimacy of the movie, complexity of execution, and impressiveness of a result. And just like we magically know all passwords and other in-game codes used for extra content like unique levels, characters, or harder mode, we can magically know those 2 combinations they want us to discover on our own. So SECRET BATTLE MOVES should be allowed.