[TAS] Buster Mostly - moving platform skip via velocity zip

It's a brand new zip, baby! This is a major skip for Buster Mostly which saves 1,904 frames = 31.7 seconds.

To better see what's going on, see

Unfortunately, this is prohibitively slow for the other categories. You have to climb up to the second screen and then backtrack to the first screen, whereas any% can get straight into the action with Item 1. Even zipless strats are faster than this.

What's interesting about this strat is that you hardly zip at all--just 8 tiles. You pretty much walk through the stage like normal, or at least as normal as you can when you can't see where you're going and you can't shoot and the wrong enemies are on screen! The main utility is that it desyncs your screen and allows you to skip the tedious moving platform section.

Looking in from the outside, you may wonder how the hell no one tried this in 30 years, especially if you're familiar with the pausefall Bubble zip. Well, if you jump off the ladder at random, you'll most likely just land on top of the pipe. It's possible that someone's accidentally clipped through it before and had a good laugh, but it wasn't until last night that I synthesized a zip out of it, and tried a bunch of different positions on the ladder to get it consistently. The position shown in this video is the lowest possible, and it always clips you inside the wall. It's a 2-pixel window. There's another 2-pixel window a bit higher up that always clips you through but dumps you on the ground, in-bounds. You can recover from that scenario with a pausefall, but I'd classify it as TAS-only; it's a 3-frame window after loading the room.

Here are screenshots of the two usable positions:

Y=88:
Y=89:

I call it the velocity zip because how far you clip into the pipe (and thus whether you zip or not) is based on your velocity. Also because I discovered it during AGDQ 2020! :D

This is very similar to a zip in Fire Man's stage in Mega Man 1.

velocity