heyo. i've been lurking here for a while and ive decided to make a post in hopes of getting some help with a potential skip.

the skip in question is in the first level, count slobula's castle. in the attached video (captured by JessInReal) garfield grabs the far right tongue lever thing in the second tomb and, instead of falling off, clips into the ceiling and quickly moves to the left while still inside the ceiling before falling out. immediately i thought of the zip glitch in sonic 3, where the player can get logged in a wall and zip to the end of an act in seconds. could this same glitch be possible in caught in the act?

i tried recreating the glitch myself, but had no luck as im not experienced with speedrunning this game, nor with tas tools. help me out pls 🙏

Hey hey! So this glitch is rather precise, so don't feel too bad if you haven't had luck in getting it to work. The frame window for it is really small - I just did a brief TAS check and I was able to get it working for 2 frames.

It's also a bit hard to describe how to exactly get it, but I'll try my best. It involves a series of jumps (one to the tomb and one on it) that can be set up in multiple ways, followed by a tongue grab. What I personally found most effective was roughly this:

• Instantly go right when dropping into the tomb
• The moment around when your sprite touches the side of the right coffin, do a jump (I go for a small one here)
• When you land on the coffin, jump again towards the tongue - you might need to keep heading right for this if you land on the left side
• Grab the tongue, keep in mind that it should be barely visible!

I added an image I put together quickly, to show what I did in my PB. (A - the moment I jump, B - where I land and do the next jump, C - the moment I grab the tongue, D - what it looks like before I get launched)

I think it's ultimately something you may want to tinker with a bit, as you can slightly vary with the jumps, with the timing and the height - as long as you grab the tongue at the right moment. If you find a way you prefer using, I feel it might also help with consistency.

This is a cool trick that can save roughly 10 seconds, but if you don't feel you can get it consistently enough, I wouldn't worry too much about it. If you try and don't get it, you may still end up taking the regular route (grab the left tongue) to get out of the tomb again, so in that case you'd lose some time. But even without it, you can still get really fast times - I didn't get it in a run until after I got my first sub-19.

Hopefully this helps, good luck!

appreciate the response, though there may have been a misunderstanding- im aware of the tomb glitch, as i was there when it was discovered. what im referring to may be a new skip, where garfield zips through this tomb, through the pit later on in the level, and finally into the boss tomb. not sure if the zip could take you that far but i thought it was worth workshopping to see how much time it could save

im not a speedrunner myself but i do watch a lot of speedruns of this game and, if i remember correctly, every tomb in this level is on the same plane. so, hypothetically, if this zip were to take you far enough, it might be possible to skip the last leg of the level and jump straight to the boss, which could shave about 30 seconds, as long as it works as predicted

Oh, I see what you mean now! Sorry that I missed it. I'm not sure if it's actually possible (never seen anyone try it at least), but I guess it's worth trying out! Perhaps debug mode (using the cheat code) may help to gather some info.

yeah good call. gonna try my hand at TASing something. will report back with results

ive returned from my tinkering with new information

firstly, if this zip were to be possible, it is unbelievably precise. while i have not yet been able to replicate the clip exactly, i have learned the following:

• the zip requires the player to be in a very specific position. attached to this post is a series of labelled screenshots from one of JessInReal's speedrun attempts, where she accidentally performs the trick described in my initial post.

exhibit A: garfield is about to grab the tongue.

exhibit B: garfield has jumped off the tongue and is about to clip into the ceiling.

exhibit C: garfield is jumping straight up instead of to the right to exit the tomb. you can tell the zip is working because only his lower body is visible, compared to tomb skip where he jumps into the ceiling entirely.

exhibit D: garfield shoots off to the left.

so you have to perform the usual tomb skip maneuverers, but change your trajectory multiple times while in mid-air in order to position yourself properly for the zip to work. which leads me to my second discovery:

• theres almost no time to perform the trick. while experimenting with TAS tools, i learned that, in order to get the zip to work, the player has what i believe to be a 3 frame window to start moving left once lodged in the ceiling. the attached screenshots were captured from a stream vod on youtube so, when accounting for some delay in playback, this seems to line up. the problem is that, once you're in position to get the trick, theres a delay when changing directions mid-air. so unless your reaction time is godlike, you have to guess when to start holding left.

all of these factors lead me to believe that there is a very, very likely chance that this glitch, should it turn out to exist, is TAS only, which would suck. im gonna keep experimenting and one way or the other i'll find out if its possible for a human to pull it off.