TAS Competition 2016 Task 1 Banned Strat

Task 1 of the 2016 TAS competition was to enter BoB and collect the star "Shoot to the Island in the Sky" using 5 A presses or less. Additionally, the koopa shell, wing cap, and cannon were forbidden. After some thought, I realized a rather unorthodox strat might be possible using recently discovered HOLP tech. The more I looked into it, the more feasible it seemed. Unfortunately, the rules eventually clarified that the use of pre-set HOLPs and cloning were forbidden. Consequently, the strat became illegal. However, I decided to TAS it anyway just to show how cool HOLP strats can be, and so here it is. Enjoy!

Note that I started routing this strat before the rules stated that using a preset HOLP was banned. You see, in the competition discussion forum, TimeTravelPenguin had asked: "Can we have a pre-set holp? Do you want us to include setting the holp in our TAS? can we press A to set the holp?" Then SilentSlayers (the competition hoster) responded with: "You can use a pre-set HOLP, however, you must show how you achieved it on the same .m64. It will not count as time on the task, so it's completely doable if you think it can save you time, but some onus is on you to show the HOLP placement. On some tasks it may be banned, but for now it's fair game in correspondence with a demonstration of setting up the HOLP. Yes you can use the A button and as much time as you want for these kinds of pre-task set-ups." Under those conditions, using a pre-set HOLP as I do in this video would have been perfectly legal and not count as time on the task, and so once I read that I began routing this strat. However, SilentSlayers's response was soon revoked and his new response became that all pre-set HOLP usage was banned. Nevertheless, I decided to move forward with the strat anyway just because I thought it looked cool.

Determining the exact HOLP that worked best took a lot of trial and error. In fact, I made an excel function to which I could input an angle and a number of frames, and it would output the HOLP coordinates such that a bob-omb thrown from that HOLP at the inputted angle would come into contact with the star box after the inputted number of frames. Here is my excel workspace [http://i.imgur.com/Cw4VpSs.png]. For anyone interested, the set of points that make up the possible HOLP locations from which a thrown bob-omb would collide with the star box looks like this [http://i.imgur.com/SyKdGDH.png].

If you are unfamiliar with pause buffered hitstun, watch this: https://youtu.be/pHihyGlYfSw?t=8m27s

Rerecords: 2068

Competition Forum: http://sm64.org/forum/viewtopic.php?i...
Competition Discussion Forum: http://sm64.org/forum/viewtopic.php?i...
Task 1 Compilation Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cclcp...