Game objectives
- Emulator used: Bizhawk 1.13.1
- Primary objective: speed
- Takes damage and deaths to save time
Improvements
This movie is a minor improvement/clean-up of my previous TAS for this game,
#5988: ktwo's NES Beetlejuice in 07:23.17. The comments in that submission are still valid, so here I'm just quickly going to go through what has changed.
After having completed my previous submission, I worked on a console speedrun and then found a new trick. It turns out that the entrance to the tower in the graveyard stage is activated even when off-screen, which saves time both in a TAS and on console. In a TAS, the time save is 30 frames to be more precise. With the possibility of finding more time savers while doing console attempts, I decided to hold off submitting a new TAS until I was done with the game on console.
When updating the TAS with the new trick, the movie de-synched by not providing the invincibility flower inside the tower. The options for manipulating the flower were basically
- delaying screen transitions
- going even further back in the movie and start re-doing some of the fights in the overhead section
With 1. not giving any acceptable results, I went back to the stool fight. Having a second look at that fight made wonders. I managed to squeeze out all waiting frames and it's now a "perfect" fight with all frames being used for forward movement (60 frames saved). This changed the RNG for the upcoming rooms and they had to be re-done. Luck was on my side and the new set of RNG was possible to be turned into a perfect mouse catch (2-frame improvement) and getting through Lydia's set of rooms without taking damage (2-frame improvement).
Once back in the graveyard stage, I did some further testing and found minor improvements in the platforming. Basically whether you should jump one or several platforms at a time (24 frames improvement). Fortunately, it all synched up in the end with the flower inside the tower (2-frame improvement).
For reasons unknown to me, 4 frames were then lost on the graveyard boss fight and another frame in the transition to the final stage.
All in all, it's an improvement of 60 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 30 + 24 - 4 - 1 = 115 frames.
