Cheesy is a platform game developed by CTA Developments and published by Ocean Software for the Sony PlayStation in 1996 in Europe, and Japan in 1997 by Jaleco. The game stars a yellow mouse named Cheesy who's captured by the mad scientist Dr. Chem in his castle. After being unintentionally freed from his cage, Cheesy sets off to escape the place. The goal is to collect ingredients for a teleportation spell to escape Dr. Chem's castle whilst overcoming various enemies and bosses along the way. The game was heavily criticized for its poor controls, graphics and inconsistent game design.
In this TAS, R7CrazyCanucks, running the Japanese version of the game, takes full advantage of the (slightly improved) poor controls by getting through each level and defeating all of the bosses in record time, while also showing off a brand-new glitch which makes Cheesy permanently invincible throughout the game.
In the leaf-riding level, towards the very end, if you very precisely hit the corner of the hitbox to one of the rock obstacles, Cheesy will die with all of his health gone, but it skips the trigger for his death animation, causing your controls to be locked while also completing the level at the same time. As long as you don't collect any more hearts after that which will fix the glitch, and keep taking damage, Cheesy's health will be in the negative values meaning you can take as much damage as you like, which is very helpful throughout the run considering you would normally run into so many enemies meaning you would waste a bit of time trying to take them out and having to conserve a lot of your health in order to make it to the end.
Certain parts in the run where I slow down Cheesy's movement such as the maze level with the UFO that follows you, the first rooftop level with the flying skull enemies, or the vertical-climbing rising fire levels are mostly used to set up certain skips in order to save quite a bit of frames.
Extended input for encoding with the name entry screen: https://tasvideos.org/UserFiles/Info/639057652219069155
The TAS shatters the super fast name entry screen too, lol.
Darkman425: Claiming for judging.
Darkman425: It would be nice to have more descriptive submission notes. An explanation on why the health underflow by dying to a wall collision at the same time as completing the sewer surfing level, how helpful underflowed health enables lots of ignoring or even using enemies to bounce up and skip obstacles, or even just an explanation of how what looks like slower movement is needed to offset the heavy inertia Cheesy has when moving to avoid going to a dead stop hitting a wall would be nice to have more details explained. Alas, I know writing up that kind of explanation is hard but I would at least encourage you to try to add more descriptive submission notes.
That being said, the optimization for this submission is fine. I didn't see anything outright off after watching and having to figure out why some movement choices are done throughout the game. Nice work!
Accepting to Standard.
Notes to publishers: this definitely needs a motion sickness warning for the UFO surfing levels and maybe the mine cart levels (not 100% sure on that). There's also some flashing on the final boss to maybe note. Also worth noting, although less urgent: the input file ends on the last input to beat the last boss and play the ending cutscene. After the cutscene there's a name entry screen, where credits play after entering a name. If it's necessary, please check with the author if they want any personalized name entry for the encode.
despoa: Processing...