This submission is for Athletic World, an NES Power Pad game that was the first in the Bandai Family Trainer series. Come join us as we run at inhuman speeds and phase through solid objects.

I'm sure most power pad game devs didn't expect people to be able to put in impossibly fast inputs but that just adds to the entertainment and shenanigan factor. Enjoy the superhuman speeds!

Hurdles. The great track event where you run really fast and jump over raised fence-like objects.

As it turns out, we can mash one of the movement butons at 30hz and gain speed to where it looks like the character is sliding. This is the fastest way to traverse the level, though jumping loses frames...

So we don't jump at all. There are 3 "heights" you can run in. If you're on the bottom row and move to the middle row on a certain frame, the game puts you past the hurdle and you don't have to jump. This saves around half a second since each jump would have cost a couple frames.

There are supposed to be animals running around blocking your path, but we make use of the TAS mashing to run fast enough to where none of the animals even bother to spawn. It's not like they would have caught us anyway.

Probably the trickiest event of the bunch since the old mash strats don't work in this level for whatever reason. I tried numerous different patterns and couldn't find anything better than what I used. The one button mash doesn't work, alernating with no gaps in between was too slow, etc.

Here we alternate between wooden planks and giant Swiss cake rolls, changing height when necessary. We maintain the 30hz cadence because if you leave a 2 frame gap after an input, you will automatically jump which loses time as we know.

The dreaded autoscroller. Not much to say here other than we dodge stuff. Since the end game menus play out automatically, we can end input ASAP in this final level by jumping before the goal as a nice time save.

The final 2 screens show our rating and eventually it moves to a certificate screen showing we got the best rank.

feos: Claiming for judging.

feos: I can't handle this.

Memory: Claiming for judging.

Memory: dropping for now, don't know if I have time to look into this one.

Samsara: Claiming for judging, and replacing the submission file with feos' improvement.

Samsara: It all looks good to me from here. I did find a single frame of improvement, but the nature of it is insignificant enough (one of the steps in the tunnel section was a frame slower than the rest) that I'll just throw it in for free without need for co-author credit. I did have a look at all the other stages, but the only things I could really do were make that man move funny in slightly different, but equally speedy ways.

Accepting!

despoa: Processing...