About the Game
Tom and Jerry: The Movie was released for the Sega Master System in 1992. You play as Tom and your goal is to catch Jerry. The intended method is to chase jerry to the end of each level where he will be cornered and you can catch him. But if you’re fast enough, you can catch him before the end of the level.
This is my third TAS of this game and it saves 56.228 seconds over the gameplay in my previous TAS. The actual time difference is 45.878 seconds, but the old TAS does not include the BIOS which takes 10.35 seconds.
My 3 revisions of this TAS:
Walk through walls glitch
I’d like to give a big special thanks to wrayal, who inspired me to pick up this TAS game again. Wrayal started doing IL runs of this game RTA and they found a new walk through walls glitch! They used this to improve their RTA times. The glitch can be done by letting go of right on particular frames when Tom is bonking into a wall. If you are not pressing right on the correct frames, you’ll walk through the wall. In RTA this will feel like tapping right with a particular rhythm.
Unfortunately (or fortunately), I finish each level too quickly to ever use the walk through walls glitch, but the inspiration from the glitch helped me to revisit the game with fresh eyes and find many improvements.
Strategies for catching Jerry
Bomb Strat
This strat was used in level 3 and 5 of the previous TAS. In this TAS I was able to pull it off in level 1. Essentially you want to manipulate Jerry to lay a landmine, then after you hit the landmine you manipulate him to throw a bomb. Throwing the bomb causes Jerry to slow down a lot. Thanks to your iFrames, you can run through the bomb to catch Jerry. The timing on this is very tight, so you have to make sure he’s throwing the bomb at the right time in order to catch him. Usually the result is that you will chase him extremely closely and just barely miss him.
To do the manipulation, I have the window where I start the level and the window after being hit by the land mine. Usually in these 2 windows, I start off by walking and then launch into a run. Once committing to a run, stopping loses a lot of time, so once I commit to a run I keep running until I hit the land mine or catch Jerry. During the walk before the run, I play around with letting go of right on particular frames. You can also slightly alter RNG by pressing L+R. A small thing to note about this game is that it only polls your inputs every 4 frames, so this drastically reduces movement and rng manipulation options.
Climb Strat
This strat is used in this TAS and was not known at the time of the previous TAS. As such, it saved the most time over the old TAS. Essentially I have to manipulate Jerry using similar methods to the bomb strat to climb up a ledge near the start of the level. From there I can run at him and catch him during the climb.
Memory: Optimization seems good even though some things appear janky due to the nature of the game and strategies used. Excellent work put into RNG manipulation.
While the run did receive some good feedback, I can't help but feel it is fairly repetitive relying on the same few simple strategies over and over. A couple of other people did share the same sentiment. The only sorta amusing thing is just how short it is and the submission text.
