At the request of Dojiro in their recent 24:04 TG-16 run, I have split the two platforms into two separate leaderboards, and have moved both Dojiro's 24:04 and Amune's 30:27 into a new "Any% (TG-16) category.

Hopefully this will help invigorate a little bit more competition into this other version of the game, especially since they don't have to compete against the significantly shorter NES version on the same leaderboard.

So I encountered this during a run earlier today and was genuinely shocked by it, as I'd never seen this before.

Holding jump through a screen transition usually allows you to buffer the jump input, so that you jump on the first possible frame and gain momentum. This saves a few frames every screen transition and is best practice.

What I did here was hold jump into the screen transition, then once the jump started, I let go then immediately repressed and held jump, and it led to this SUPER JUMP

This works in every screen transition as far as I can tell, although it's much easier to perform on horizontal screens vs vertical screens. However, it does work on vertical screens. I just think the window is tighter on vertical screens, although I have no proof of that.

The Laser Climb in Stage 5 is the only place I could immediately think of where this trick would save time. But I wonder if there are other spots it can be used? Would be really cool if we could find a way to trigger it whenever we wanted.

Does anyone know the differences between the Famicom and US releases of the game?

The only thing I noticed was the health/powerup refills of 50 orbs on Famicom versus 30 orbs on US.

Are there any other differences that would make one a preference over the other? More/less health on bosses, faster cutscenes, etc?

Just looking for clarification on the timer start.

The rules state timer starts when you select "Press Start" on the title screen.

When you first boot up the game, the waterfall cutscene plays and takes about 12s to run through. When you reset the game, the cutscene is omitted and you're tossed right into the game. You have to power cycle the console to get the cutscene to play again, as far as I can tell.

The top 3 times by HanSan, faulteroyy and dreamofsha all play the opening cutscene, but 00greanbean00 starts from reset and skips the cutscene, saving 12s. His is also the oldest run on the leaderboards, though.

Just looking for clarification before I start running. A free time save of 12s at the start of the game is pretty huge, but I don't want runs to be retroactively disqualified if the rules change in the future. I also don't want to give up a free 12s time save if we don't need to run the cutscene either.