I'll probably put up an encode later.
Introduction
Bump 'n' Jump was a 1982 arcade game developed by Data East. The game has 32 unique roadways per loop where the player has to reach the end. Their car has the ability to bump into other cars on the road that affects movement, as well as the ability to jump to avoid obstacles such as water hazards. An Intellivision port was released in 1983 which retains having 32 different roadways. While this version has the problem or essentially running at 15 FPS input-wise and with the occasional lag to go with it, it's pretty faithful to the arcade version.
Run notes
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.9.1
- IntelliHawk core
- Heavy RNG manipulation
- Does a decent amount of bumping
- Does a decent amount of jumping, although that's avoided when possible
Mechanics and techniques
Vertical speed
The max speed of the car is 220 km/h. At 100 km/h or higher the car can jump, though landing will reduce speed. Acceleration control is done with up & down. It's faster to accelerate by bumping into other cars from their front though horizontal control is lost.
There are some jumps that require a certain vertical position so there are points where slowing down is deliberately done to adjust the position of the car for jumps.
Traffic
At all times, the game attempts to have 4 cars on screen. There are 10 types of other cars with different behaviors and speeds. The most dangerous ones are the dump trucks as they constantly drop debris on the road until either they scroll off screen or are destroyed by other cars.
Their spawning and behavior can be somewhat manipulated by having the car jump on different frames and being at different horizontal positions on the road. When jumping, the most ideal landing spot is on the front side of another car as it allows for fast acceleration to reach top speed faster. However, there are cases where the RNG of car layouts and/or roadway terrain in a given situation makes this ideal situation impossible.
End of level
Once the car reaches the end of level when not airborne, control is taken away and the car moves to a fixed spot. As some levels end on a jump, it's better to land as soon as the end level point is done rather than later as the game waits for the car to land. Also worth noting that the player isn't immune to obstacles during this loss of control and can still die from debris.
"Secret" roads/driving between the screen borders
I only discovered this after I completed the this TAS that has a run time of over an hour. The game does allow for horizontal screen wrapping when jumping. There's also a spot just off screen from either side that the car can drive on without crashing. Just driving at this spot until jumping back onto the road for the end of the roadway will allow for not having to deal with other cars and road obstacles. While I could do this TAS over again just doing this trick now that I know about it, I think I'd still have done this TAS without that glitch as I feel it more properly shows off this game despite probably being slower without that technique.
Possible improvements
The obvious one would be doing the "secret road" glitch for the entire run. The other big one is simply having better car RNG, or car-NG, for better speed control.
Suggested screenshot
Frame 88449: one of the black cars is driving where it shouldn't be
nymx: Claiming for judging.
nymx: Everything checks out here.
Accepting to "Standard" for publication.
despoa: Processing...