Just to add to why it's not a good idea, it's possible to grab the starting sword TAS perfect without any frame-perfect inputs.

• Buffer left at start.
• Roll thumb up-left, and Link will slide into cave. You have a very large window, and unlike many situations, it's not possible to lose frames from grid snapping.
• Hold right on cave entry and Link will face right.
• Hold up-right while the old man is talking, and Link will auto-pump onto the correct column, and grab the sword with no time loss.

Copied from tetris.wiki, and the leaderboards kind of assume NTSC. Even where the start level speeds are the same, the level-increase logic is different, but it only matters above 100 lines.

NTSC (Level/Frames [60.098814 FPS]): 00 48 01 43 02 38 03 33 04 28 05 23 06 18 07 13 08 8 09 6 10–12 5 13–15 4 16–18 3 19–28 2 29+ 1

PAL (Level/Frames [50.006978 FPS]): 00 36 01 32 02 29 03 25 04 22 05 18 06 15 07 11 08 7 09 5 10–12 4 13–15 3 16–18 2 19+ 1

Yes.

It looks like a reasonable discussion is starting up. I'll chime in.

Maybe there's meta I'm not aware of, but I don't think there's actually different strats per level. Either the game is slow enough that you can play up high and go for doubles/triples, or you stay low/neat and go for tetrises. It that sense, it's pretty binary, and that was reflected in the previous categories.

I personally don't use filters to gauge leaderboards, and I suspect most other people don't either. It took a lot of effort and experimentation to grind down to the time I had. If I knew I was chasing 12th on a future merged leaderboard, and not WR, I could have spent that time learning Level 19 or a different game. And it's not just my time, but everyone's time and effort on that board is being marginalized by this merge.

I think a lot of the insults stem from this decision appearing to be unilateral as there was no previous discussion on this board. When this reached the Zelda Discord, a lot of us were like, "what the heck? why is the moderator redoing the leaderboards that we didn't have a problem with?"

My two cents.

I would be for a Version subcategory that separated NTSC from PAL. I'll wait a bit for comment before adding it.

FCEUX is probably the most common, although someone close to the authors says it's not very accurate, and prefers puNES instead. Bizhawk is supposed to be very accurate, and I'm not sure this game ever lags, so I wouldn't have a problem with it. (Well, unless the game was clearly running faster, but I'm too lazy to test that myself right now. :P)

Thinking about it some more, it probably makes the most sense to wait until the game actually displays the target value. I've filled out the rules to reflect that.

I dunno who, but someone made me a mod for some reason. :P I'll try to turn around runs within a couple days.

I dunno if there are hard rules anywhere. I've been timing against when the last line begins to disappear.

Oh, wow. That's exactly what happened. Thanks!

Sometimes this game will decide it doesn't want to listen to my controller seemingly at random. In this video with input display, I'm holding left on the straight piece, and it just stops for no apparent reason. Spamming left when I see it stuck doesn't help either.

I get why some things don't work, like quarter-circling from left/right to down will make the piece not drop, but I can't figure out what causes this. Help would be appreciated.