Underground Adventure is an NES homebrew demo entered for the 2019 NESmaker Byte-Off Competition. It follows Harry and Jack's adventure into a mysterious network of dangerous caves. They need to collect all the gems in each cave to progress through the game to reach the exit. This TAS isn't brave enough to face the countless monsters and instead heads straight back out the exit in record time.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.8
- Aims for fastest completion
I had a lot of fun trying to optimise this as far as possible, watching frames drop off one at a time was incredibly satisfying. Trying to optimise a 3 second-long game is really quite enjoyable. Trying to figure out why everything worked was quite a challenge, and one I haven't fully been able to complete but I do think I have some sort of understanding that is sufficient enough.
Clipping through the ground
It seems like there is no downwards speedcap (and why would there be?) so the player is able to gain a ton of speed if given the space, which is fortunately available in the very first level. We are able to gain just barely enough speed to bypass the floor in a single frame.
Getting to the credits
The screens continue to change up until the credits because the player keeps sliding across the screen to the left as long as left is held on the last frame before the screen transition. Because of this, I think that the game is made of a grid of all screens and the credits screens just so happens to be on the same row as the first level. To get there, we need to go through the game over screen and the exiting the game screen (3 times, strangely) before having the continued sliding halted and allowing the credits to play.
Can this be improved?
Hopefully not: there is no faster way to set up the final jump and there is no faster way to do the jump or get across to the edge of the screen. I will be very surprised if there is a faster alternative.
Samsara: Claiming for judging. The file has been replaced with an 11 frame improvement.
Samsara: 200 blistering frames of gameplay! One of my favorite TAS "genres" is when gameplay doesn't last nearly as long as the time it takes to get there, and this definitely qualifies as such. Plus, fun little glitchy ending. I dig it. Accepting!
