I'm having trouble practicing things with RNG involved (e.g. boss fights, hammer bros) because with save states, I seem to get the same pattern every time. Does anybody have a good way to work around this?

Also, is it bad to start runs from a savestate on the title screen? Does that save your RNG seed in any non-kosher way?

Up until now I've been moving in the overworld by tapping the direction I want to go only after mario is free to move. Recently I saw that you can skip hammer bros on screen transitions by holding down a direction during the transition. This made me wonder if you could move more perfectly by pre-selecting your movement direction before you're actually able to move. When I tested this out it seemed like it worked perfectly sometimes, but sometimes you're stuck in place for awhile before you can move. I couldn't find a pattern to when it works and when it doesn't. Does anybody know how this works?