I watched this and found it decent in terms of entertainment. I have some questions.
From the first SNES Top Gear game I know that managing the gears is extremely important: there you can accelerate way faster while being at the 4th gear. Also, the frame you switch the gear at greatly influences the distance and speed you reach, because it would accelerate you differently depending on some tricky internal mechanics. Does gear switching have the same effects here? If yes, was it as carefully managed?
From the first game I also noticed that if you reach a sharp turn with too high speed, for instance from having used nitro, you either get thrown off-road, or you have to brake not too lose too much speed to this. Isn't spending nitro only on (relatively) straight track segments faster?
Was all the menuing optimized to death? I see tons of mashing there, and also that sometimes the game would just not react at certain buttons. If this run is to be redone and made more optimal, leaving any sloppiness in the menus would be disappointing.
Similarly, the movie should be stopped when the last necessary input is entered - input that results in the fastest game completion, so it should also be entered ASAP. We measure movie time by this last input, not by anything else.
How much time would wall glitch save overall?
Do all the cars have identical parameters that don't affect time?
Is it correct that once you've entered the track using the password glitch, you get money just as a reward for quitting?
Have you used the tool that provides the most control over your tas for a newcomer - tastudio? This run syncs on the latest bizhawk release, which got a whole bunch of tastudio improvements. This thing lets you spend the least effort on checking minor things back in the past without having to rerecord the future inputs once again, as well as tons of other helpful features.
Can you guys upload TheRallyFTW's movie file to
our userfiles so we could do proper comparison? If this run
loses to some existing records, or is overall not optimal enough (for example, if some of us can easily and significantly improve it), it will have to be rejected.