Submission #3862: Quibus's MSX Frogger "Fastest stage 3" in 01:53.92

(Link to video)
MSX Home Computer System
Fastest stage 3
openMSX 0.9.1
6826
59.920819544054005
388
Unknown
Frogger (1983) (Konami) (J).rom
Submitted by Quibus on 2/10/2013 9:26:58 PM
Submission Comments
One of the earlier Konami games, released in 1983, the year in which MSX was introduced. A port of their own Arcade game from 1981.
The trick in TASing this game is to find the most efficient routes to the destination points at the top. This may look easy, but it isn't! There are many different possibilities.
A particular trick I discovered is that the Frog can jump faster if the jump-key is alternated with some other key. That helped to jump as fast as it does now.
The run is only of the first three stages, because the game doesn't really change anymore after stage 3, it only gets a bit faster.
Stage 1 is fairly simple (and looks thus very optimized). Not much to comment. But in stage 2 there are more trucks on the road, making it a bit tougher to cross it efficiently (trucks are long and are thus easier blocking the way). In stage 3 it becomes even worse to optimize a crossing: there's a deadly snake in the middle part and there are crocodiles at the end. You can walk on the crocodiles, but not on their heads when the mouth is open.
You can really notice in stage 3 that there are some pauses and there is some waiting. I've tried my utmost for alternative routes to reduce this waiting, but I couldn't get it more optimized than what I have now. This particular run shows some nice very close shaves and manages to distribute the waiting over several crossings, making it not too boring to watch. In an earlier attempt almost all waiting was in the last crossing, which looked bad and was in the end also not optimal (0.8 seconds slower). So, without having tried all permutations (there would be hundreds or thousands), I do think this is very hard (if not impossible, but I can't be 100% sure of course) to improve.
The game has more features than visible in this video: there's a lady frog on one of the drifting trees (appears after a while) and there can be bonus flies in the destination points, but also crocodiles (making the destination point temporarily unavailable). However, the game is played at such pace, that those features are completely invisible.
Enjoy the run!
Canceling this run, because I discovered that it repeats after stage 5, not after stage 3...
Last Edited by adelikat on 10/2/2023 5:07 PM
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