The leap year submission!
(Ironic how it's a TAS about not jumping)
About two years ago, I made a TAS of Ristar where I tried to beat the game while jumping as few times as possible. It wasn't optimized (that wasn't the goal anyways) but now I decided to optimize it, you can see the old TAS here:
Something I have to mention regarding the TAS (the one I just made, not the old one) is that it has commentary in the form of Youtube subtitles.
What is a jump?
In this game, you usually jump using the jump button (in this case it's A and C), but there are many situations where pressing the A button doesn't trigger a jump (Swimming, escaping wind/ice, etc...). There are only two situation that aren't explicitly jumps, yet I still count them as jumps. Those situations are: Whenever you jump out of a body of water, and whenever you jump out of monkey bars (by pressing the jump button). The former one is required to beat the game, while the latter would just make it faster
Required jumps
- 4-1
A jump is required here to jump over the fan, the only way you could possibly skip this jump is by grabbing and climbing a wall that skips the fan, but I couldn't grab the wall, it's just too far out of reach.
Here's an image of what it looks like:
- 5-2
This stage requires an absurd amount of thirteen jumps to clear, with two thirds of them being on the slope section at the very end. Most of these jumps aren't skippable due to the fact that you can't grab walls in 5-1 and 5-2, severely limiting your movement.
- 6-2
This stage requires six jumps, and all of them are basically the same, those being jumps into the teleporters, the reason why you can't skip these jumps is because there's just nothing that you can grab that can help you clear them, unlike every other room that has teleporters. This is still my favorite stage in the challenge though.
In total, it takes 20 jumps to beat the game.
Suggested screenshot
Frame 85004
eien86: A fitting submission for a leap year, indeed. This movie solves
Sonic Megaman Ristar for the Sega Genesis with the (so far) least possible number of jumps. This particular goal fits the game, as Ristar has a grabbing ability that serves well to engage in vertical movement. The author makes extensive use of this move to navigate the levels and defeat the bosses.
The movie is conspicuously optimized and full of entertaining tricks (wall climbs with repeated grabs being my favourite). The few jumps are properly justified and pointed out by the author in the
comment video.
Note the Japanese (also Korean) version is employed since it contains faster/fewer cutscenes and therefore achieves a faster end.
Any submission attempting to improve on this movie should meet either of these criteria sets:
- Perform at least one less jump than this one
- Be sufficiently optimized (not necessarily faster than this one)
or
- Perform the same amount of jumps
- Be faster than this movie
