also, I got a board set up on speedrun.com :)
https://www.speedrun.com/nes_fish
I dig that this is mostly all down to skill, and it's a super quick run so if you scuff up it's not a big deal. Sure it's not the hardest or most technical game to run, but I'm still having a fun time with it! I think I can probably get my time under a minute with a bit more practice 😁
Got my run down to 57 seconds :) There's a weird glitch in the latest release where you can get stuck on an invisible wall near the start. There's those 4 blocks that you can jump across, but if you walk off the first one on to the second, occasionally the fish will get stuck. Here's a clip where it happened to me the first time lol: https://clips.twitch.tv/MotionlessAmericanCattleJKanStyle-P-gFtN6QbbavOgOu
Later on, I realized it was better to just wrap the screen off the right to land on the left, so it became less of a problem... but I was able to re-create it several times. I don't recall this ever happening in the previous version to the music.
Question for ya - what's the deal with the "run killer" section with the really tight gaps that you have to jump through near the start? Seems like sometimes we jump just a bit short of clearing the gap, while other times we can breeze through. I assume it's just really tight hitboxes and sometimes we just nick an edge?
Also - we've got 4 runners on the board now. Apparently there's 2 or so more that are running it but haven't submitted times yet :D
Real Games (tm) let you slide around corners you'd otherwise bump your head on when jumping, like Mario when he jumps with a few pixels of overlap into a solid block above. FISH does this too but in a slightly less player-friendly way, where you lose a frame of jump for each frame spent sliding sideways around a corner. Because the max jump height is only a few pixels more than the amount required to make the jump, any jump height lost to sliding around the corner means you probably won't be able to make the jump. Probably the easiest fix would be to increase the maximum jump height.
