Frog is a short and simple but inventive 2021 NES homebrew in which the player takes control of a bubble-blowing frog. The idea is simple: get from point A to point B, all on a single screen. It gets harder when you realise you have to ride on the bubbles you blow to make it to the end of each stage without being hit by a spike. This TAS uses the magic of U+A+B to use this ability with great ease and to acheive infinite height all to unlock the legendary saxophone.
Objectives:
- Emulator used: Bizhawk 2.8
- Aims for fastest possible time
For a game as beautiful as this, it's actually pretty broken. I managed to find a couple of glitches, none of which actually speed up the movie, unfortunately. Firstly, if you press Start before the logo appears on the title screen, the black screen will either A) wipe to one side, revealing the first stage but no frog, therefore softlocking the game and B) the screen will stay black forever.
The second one was more interesting and this is the ability to clip through ceilings (not vertical walls yet). The easiest place to do it is at the start of the final stage where you need to hold U+B and either left or right under the spike platform. Eventually, this should clip the frog through but this doesn't actually change anything because it'll immediately die. There are also no other places in the game where this would actually change anything.
It should also be noted that only upwards facing spikes kill the frog, ones hanging from the ceiling or from the walls will do anything.
U+A+B
This is the button combination that makes this movie as fast as it is. B is used to blow a bubble and A is to jump. A bubble's Y position can also be changed by holding up or down on the controller. Put these all together and the frog will infinitely blow bubbles moving upwards while jumping on them before the next one can be blown. It is sometimes faster to move the bubble down either to prevent the frog from bouncing off it when it pops or to get it in a better position to jump off of (like in level 3).
feos: Claiming for judging.
feos: Two improvements were posted in the thread, both based on basic optimization techniques, one being a 26 frame improvement by Alyosha, and another mine, by 40 frames.
I didn't spend any time testing how you can control the height of the bubble, so there's most likely more to save. But the timesave I found was very easy, it's called "not falling down several times while trying to go up". Unless you constantly and automatically go up as long as you hold the 3 magic buttons, different ways to bounce need to be tested. They consist of when to spawn the bubble, when to jump, how high to bounce off the bubble, etc. Some improvements are lost because the game seems to end the levels using a frame rule of 13 frames. But holding down the magic buttons all the time is definitely the wrong way to approach it.
For how short this run is and how basic the gameplay is, I think those missed improvements are too much to have this submission accepted. Rejecting for insufficient optimization.
Ideally, future attempts should beat my lazy test. Post in the thread if you try and not succeed.