About the Game(s):
Action 52 is an unlicensed game made for the NES and Sega Genesis, featuring - you guessed it - 52 different video games. The NES version was published in 1991, whereas the Genesis version was published in 1993. Both versions were published by Active Enterprises.
Jigsaw is game 49/52 in the NES version of Action 52. You play as a handyman dressed in light blue, shooting dark blue pins at brown tools such as pliers and hammers for 3 levels. If this game is selected on an unrevised cartridge, the ROM will crash. Luckily, the Rev A cartridge loads the game just fine.
About the TAS:
This TAS aims for fastest completion, which means completing all 3 unique levels.
Gameplay/Tech:
The gameplay is mostly the same each level and consists of running to the right and stopping every now to land and/or squash an enemy, so I'll be highlighting some key details.
- After waiting through the Action 52 cutscene and selecting 49. JIGSAW on the menu screen, we can start the game on frame 963.
- Each jump loses 1 non-lag frame, so we have to try and minimise how much we jump, as well as taking the enemies into account.
- A couple of floor tiles were not coded properly, therefore we can clip right through them.
- Sometimes, due to a glitch in the code, we have to stop for 6-ish non-lag frames to shoot a pair of pliers. If we don't we'll go through them, and then the hitbox detection will kick and we'll lose a life.
- Occasionally we can fire at and take down enemies over a second before we reach them to save considerable chunks of time.
- On Level 3, there's a short staircase that slows us down by 2 non-lag frames.
- Input ends on frame 6478 when Level 3 abruptly ends.
Thanks for reading. As usual, if you implement any improvements, I'll add you as a co-author.
nymx: Claiming for judging.
nymx: Ok...thanks
LogansGamingRoom for correcting the optimization errors that I found. I saw other weird parts that I can't explain, but delaying in those areas were necessary. There might be a way around them, but they are not obvious and probably would require some custom tools to do further analysis.
This satisfies my concerns. Accepting.
