Hello there. My experience with the game, I used to play this game when I was younger, even did my own Speedrun attempts with a notebook and hand-timer to keep track of my times.

In my time playing it, I discovered that you could skip the 1st level of the China, Italy & Mexico levels. The way that I performed this skip was by finishing the last level in the previous location and being taken back to the World Map. Once there, after the airplane animation finishes playing, I would press "A" and Down simultaneously, and it would off-set the level select cursor down one spot. You are then able to simply press "A" again to go into the next level like normal. Once you complete that level, if you returned to the World Map, it would show that you had completed the level you skipped, so that's hard coded into the game.

I have replicated this glitch again on console & it worked like how I have outlined. I have also found the emulator that ya'll use to run the game and was able to perform the glitch on it as well. I have taken some screenshots of the glitch in action and will attach them here. I also took video of me doing it on console, but I can't seem to upload the video directly here. I can upload it somewhere if further evidence is needed.

Thanks for reading. -Matix

That's amazing! Thank you for sharing this. I just tried it out. Really not hard. Super impressive stuff.

This is minutes of time save essentially for free. Great find!

If my math is correct, Sub-12 is the ceiling now, haha.

Well, technically a 10:5X is very much possible now.

I wouldn't know, I haven't played in years. I just know that it skips 3 levels.

Do you think that it’s possible to break the game further or do you think this is going to be it?

When I tried skipping other levels, the 2nd in a location, 3rd, etc. I was not able to produce any results despite performing the same inputs. I can always be mistaken, but this seems to only work on the 1st level of the 3 locations after the first one.

I have done more looking into the trick. If you don't get it successfully the first time, you can go into a previously completed level you can scroll down and the trick works again. So the trick must have something to do with mistakenly using your ability to scroll in the previous location to let you scroll in the new location. Very weird, but this can be a backup for if you miss the trick the first time.

Even more looking into the trick, you still cannot use it on London, the game doesn't get fooled into letting you scroll further than you should because it is the first and ONLY location available, BUT you are able to skip the 1st level in a location, complete the 2nd, and then head back to the World Map to perform the glitch AGAIN to skip the 3rd level in a location. This would mean that 9 levels are skippable, and that you could skip 6 of them in any given run, skipping the 1st & 3rd levels in China, Italy & Mexico. This completely breaks the game run.

I wonder if it's worth considering to created a separate category of Any% without Level Skips because they are fundamentally two different runs.

yeah I think any% needs to be a new category and the current any% is going to be All Levels

Category split is done. All Levels is now the default category and there is a new Any%.