I've been really getting into this speedrun since running a 12-hour challenge on it a few months ago. I played this game so much as a kid and the speedrun has been equally as fun. I honestly wish more people knew about this game!

I wanted to share a few additional skips/tech that I've started implementing in my runs in case anyone wants to try and push their times down a bit further.

Swing Skip (Scene 1): I borrowed this one from the TAS. At the very start of the stage it's possible to switch to Dot fast enough to jump up to the swing, kiss the pigeon, and land on the platform all in one go. This prevents you from needing to wait a cycle and saves about 3 seconds.

Hay Bale Skip (Scene 4): This is a big one. I started playing around with this, because it was something I used to do when I played the game as a kid, but I never knew how I pulled it off. Essentially what you want to do is fall off of the upper ledge to the top left of the hay bale, jump and land on the top right corner of the hay bale, while continuing to hold right, change characters and then mash quick taps of the jump button. This will allow the charcter to jump off the ground and prevent the game from launching the characters off the top of the screen. The game will only send you back to the beginning of the stage if you are sent off the top of the screen. If you can prevent this, you won't get sent back. This skip saves around 13 seconds since you don't have to bother with any of the gravestone pushing or block breaking.

Helicopter Switch Hit (Scene 5): Named "Wacko's Wacky Hammer" by Darkarmist in my chat. Wacko's hammer is able to reach the switch that opens the door at the end of the helicopter room in Scene 5 as long as you swing his hammer at the very top of a full jump. There is no need to pull the box over to hit that switch. This can save about 5-6 seconds.

Anyway - there's about 20-25 seconds worth of time saves for anyone who might want to revisit the game! It doesn't seem like there is much more to squeeze out in terms of time saves, but I'll continue playing around with things and let y'all know what I find!

Good stuff, Zero! I'm not sure when I'll come back to this, but I'll definitely check this out! And you're right, there should be more runners for this game. Glad you picked it up!

I KNOW that it is possible to jump off the "plunger" stage 4 without plugging the pipe, but I've never been able to get it comfortably consistent, its an 8ish second save if you can get it on the first try IIRC from my timing a couple years back as long as you can manage it in the first two tries it still saves time and on the third it's break even. It was the one thing I had vaguely up my sleeve, but this game esp. spikes my temper to much to go in on attempts myself anymore, so it's high time I tossed it on the table for somebody else to make use of. Maybe someday I'll find my copy of the gameboy version and actually get a run of that done since it's what made me go in hard for a few days on labbing out if that was actually possible on Genesis as well

Rash does the plunger jump. I've tried, but have never been able to get it consistently. Is it really an 8 second time save though? You still need to wait for the log to float over, but I suppose that would cut out a good chunk of box pushing. I'll have to lab it a little more and see what the actual time save is. It'd be nice to have a consistent strat for the plunger jump if it saves that much time!