00:00 Turtle Bridge Modern Easy
03:59 Turtle Bridge Modern Hard
07:57 Egg Modern Easy
12:34 Egg Modern Hard
16:31 Donkey Kong Jr Classic Easy
19:59 Donkey Kong Jr Classic Hard
23:11 Donkey Kong Jr Modern Hard
29:19 Judge 1P
32:02 Flagman Game A
37:57 Flagman Game B
38:19 50 Stars Credits
First, I'd like to talk about the category of this run. This is 50 Stars, which is the requirement to see the credits for the first time. Each game and mode gives one star every 200 points, up to a maximum of 5 at 1000 points. It doesn't matter where the stars come from, as long as you get 50 total.
While doing research for this TAS, I did come across a player named beco who did an RTA run of this category ( • Game & Watch Gallery 3... ). Obviously I did my own testing for what is fastest, but they did have one interesting routing decision I would've never thought of myself - They got 2 stars from Flagman A and 3 stars from Judge, splitting up that group of 5 stars between two games. Their reasoning makes sense - most games speed up as they go on, but Flagman A takes longer and longer as it goes on, so they want to minimize the time spent there. However, if I went with that route, I'd have to add in another game to make up for those 5 stars lost (with DK Jr Modern Easy). After testing both routes, despite Flagman A taking longer and longer as it goes on, it's still faster than adding in another round of DK Jr Modern.
Stage by stage comments
Turtle Bridge - Modern
As it turns out, it's very nearly identical in time for getting the coins versus not getting the coins. However, starting after 500 points on Easy and 300 points on Hard, Peach will back away and come back periodically. As it turns out, this cycle almost exactly corresponds to an uninterrupted back-and-forth that gets both sets of coins! So for the most part, I don't really even have to worry about the Peach cycles. The point routing of this game works out so that on the final cycle, you only need 5 coins, and don't need to return to Mario, so I collect all 5 coins before delivering to Peach, and exit out of the game after delivering the final star to Peach.
Egg - Modern
You'd think optimizing this game comes down to simply eating each cookie as early as possible after it gets cooked. That's most of it, but not entirely. Throughout each 100-point section, the speed will slowly increase, and it'll actually slow back down when you cross over the 100-point barrier. So you'll notice when I approach each 100-point barrier, I also try to delay eating those cookies until as late as possible, so that the faster speed lasts as long as possible.
Donkey Kong Jr - Classic
Ah, this was a fun one! In this game, your speed isn't capped, so you can move as fast as you can mash the D-pad. For this game, everything is cycle-based, based on the swinging key. Any points I'm able to get while still making the same cycle is obviously worth it.
Donkey Kong Jr - Modern
I picked Hard because more enemies will spawn, and killing enemies with the fruit are worth 5 points each. Doing a frames-per-point analysis on this game, it's worth it to kill an enemy with the fruit if you go out of your way by 110 frames (a little under 2 seconds) or less. If you kill multiple enemies, the window for it being worth it is even larger. For this game, we finally have to talk about RNG manipulation. I have to heavily manipulate the RNG so that I'm able to weave in between the enemies while slowing down as little as possible, and when playing on Hard, the number of "bad" options heavily outweighs the number of "good" options. Additionally, the only way I was able to figure out to manipulate the RNG in this game is by doing things faster or slower, so essentially, every time I want to manipulate RNG, I need to slow down a little bit. This is probably the biggest point for potential future improvement I see in this TAS. Other than that, this game is fairly straightforward, just get to the end of each of the three screens as quickly as possible, while getting as many points as you can from killing enemies with the fruit.
Judge
Judge is another seemingly simple game, but optimizing it is another story. Like I said under Donkey Kong Jr, the only way to manipulate RNG in this game is by wasting frames. Now, I'm manipulating RNG for two different things here. First, and more obviously, I want to have the higher number (or have them equal). But also, there are four or five different speeds that each round can go by. The timeloss from the fastest to the second-fastest is 24 frames, so it's very important to manipulate it to get the fastest speed every time too.
Flagman
This game is incredibly simple. For Game A, just remember the pattern they give you and repeat it back. For Game B, hit the number they throw up as quickly as possible. In a TAS, there's not much to say here.