For your amusement:
This should help to answer the question, what is the fastest run possible?
At 60fps, this is 7:21.25, but timed on YouTube, it's 7:20.5 or thereabouts, within +- .2 seconds, I think. Not sure what accounts for the discrepancy. Emulator is BizHawk.
A few features of this TAS:
- no tackles, including the kick returner
- running out of bounds right at zero
- no possession by the CPU
- getting onside kick return or kickoff fumble return
This run features Tim Brown not getting tackled on the kick return for the entire first quarter. I have been able to evade tacklers with Tim Brown for about 1:30 of game time, but doing this for a whole quarter is unlikely.
If I could have gotten a one-cycle kickoff resulting in an onside return, that would have saved a few frames, and if the CPU would have kicked a bit sooner, that also might have saved a few frames, but I'm not aware of any major time savings to be had. I tried to hike the ball and select the plays and so forth at the first available frame to do so. Maybe with trimming every excess frame, I might be just under 7:21, but that's about it.
By contrast with NESCardinality's run:
- only three tackles (including a Tim Brown fumble resulting in a Bo Jackson recovery, I didn't know Bo was on special teams!)
- score was a touchdown (maybe a second or three more than an intentional out of bounds/play selection/field goal animation, I haven't done a time comparison there)
- a few fractions of a second going out of bounds on the first quarter
Time to save, but it wouldn't be easy. You need a lot of things going your way, like maybe only one tackle in the whole game.
Looks like a WR record, and a significantly faster (several seconds) TAS, require getting a safety. There is indeed time to save. As far as the WR is concerned, I guess it depends on how mad the lads are. I expect the current WR will stand for a long time since it's such a slog to line up all the ideal conditions just to have an eligible run.
When I took over moderation of this game 2 months ago, I decided to make a few changes. For example, data resets were initially required to be shown in Single Game by previous moderators. I met this requirement myself in my first submission, then I became a mod and realized that half the accepted ru