Submission #7939: The8bitbeast's SMS Land of Illusion in 22:00.57
This is a tool-assisted speedrun. For more information, see https://tasvideos.org/7939S
TAS originally published on 2023-01-07
Shortly after publishing my 2017 TAS, a shortcut in the Toy Stage was discovered where you can go through a fake wall. Since that discovery, redoing this TAS has been on my todo list. I attempted it a couple of years ago and got up to Tiny Cavern, but lost motivation. However, now I got through it and found a few more optimisations along the way.
This TAS is a 3480 frame (58.07 second) Improvement over my published 2017 TAS. However, it will appear only as a 2859 frame (47.71 second) improvement as newer versions of Bizhawk include the 621 frame SMS BIOS screen.
By revisiting this, I realized how much I have learnt about TASing since 2017. I used more strategies involving watching RAM values precisely rather than going by feel. When I did the 2017 TAS, I did have various RAM watches, but didn’t have a good understanding of subpixels or lua scripting. Probably the most embarrassing part is that I didn’t realise jumping loses you one subpixel per frame rather than walking. So this TAS minimises jumping as much as possible. This would only save a couple of frames per level but is something I definitely should have noticed back then if I had a better understanding of subpixels.