Table of contents
Intro
Hello everyone! In this TAS, we beat Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventure in the Park, and we do so in a bit under 1 hour and 45 minutes. This is my first Colecovision TAS, and will likely remain the longest published Colecovision TAS on TASVideos which has a credits screen for a long time to come.
Version
Made on BizHawk version 2.9, using the USA release of Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventure in the Park.
Gameplay
In this game, you play as one of the Cabbage Patch Kids (Anna Lee, according to the bottom of the screen, whoever that is). Your goal is to make it from one end of the screen to the other. After you cross 10 screens (or scenes, as the game calls them), you beat the level (which is called a stage in this game). The screen-number starts at 00, and wraps back to 00 once it goes above 99. The level number also starts at 00, and wraps back to 00 once it goes above 99.
The levels in this game appear to loop in blocks of about 10 or so (which corresponds to 100 screens). The only exception to this is the first 3 or so levels of the game, which are easier due to the lack of the bumblebee enemy.
Also, this game is an exact copy of the MSX game Athletic Land - just with different cosmetics for the player and different names for things on screen.
"Hold Right For Justice... Hey wait a minute! You can't go left!?!?!?!?!"
Although most players might choose to go right at the start of this game by convention, (like every other Atari and Colecovision platformer from this era), we choose to go left at the start instead! The game allows either option. However, once you go left on the 1st screen, you will permanently have to move to the left to advance to the next level after that (conversely, if you go right on the 1st screen, then you permanently have to move to the right to advance to the next level). Going left saves about 3 minutes over the course of the whole TAS, since there's fewer screens that you need to wait on when moving left (and you start closer to the left-side of the 1st screen in the game as well). There's only two screen-types which are faster going to the right - but the timesave of going left more than offsets that.
Ending Condition
Once you get past level 99 (the 990th screen of the game), the game displays an "All Stage Clear" message, and presents the credits. As such, this counts as the end of the game (even though we've seen all other content in the game besides the credits by level 5 or so).
Why TAS this game?
You know, that's a good question.
Mechanics
Walking and jumping are all the same speed in this game. However, you can get a speed boost by jumping onto+off a vine that's moving leftwards, as this is faster than walking. Also, if you walk on a lily pad which is moving left-wards, then you move faster than you would if you were walking left on flat ground. Once you jump, your speed and direction are locked until you land on the ground again.
Annoyingly, if you fall from a """large height""" in this game, then you die. The game has a very loose definition of what constitutes a large height - so even jumping from a platform which is very close to the ground can still cause you to die. This results in a lot of waiting around for the rising platforms to move into the right position (this even applies when jumping between 2 rising platforms).
Timers
Some items/enemies in this game are on local timers that initialize their position to the same value when you first enter a screen, while other items/enemies in the game are on global timers (meaning that if you wait on the previous screen for 250 frames, the object will be in the same place when you enter the screen that it would have been if you went to the next screen and waited 250 frames there instead). Additionally, a few items in this game are initialized based on RNG.
Below is a list of items/enemies that are on screen-specific local timers (that spawn after a set number of frames after you enter the screen they're on):
| Object Name | Notes |
|---|---|
| Pollen Balls | These 3 balls always spawn at the same locations a fixed number of frames after you enter a screen, and they always fall at the same frame-number since the screen was loaded. |
| Bumble Bees | These always spawn in the bottom right corner of the screen a fixed number of frames after you enter a screen, and move from right-to-left. Note that the 2nd time they move across the screen, they can go across the screen at a higher height. Also, before level 3, they spawn above your head to make it easier to avoid them. |
| Lily Pads | These always spawn at the right-most edge of their pond, and slowly move to the left until they hit the opposite edge of the pond. Unfortunately, we can't make it to the lily pad from the right-edge of the screen before they move out of jump range. This means that we always have to wait for it to go across the pond and back before we can get on - unless we can swing across a rope to get onto it. |
Below is a list of items/enemies that are on a global timer (their spawn position is determined by the global frame number, and is thus independent of when you enter the screen):
| Object Name | Notes |
|---|---|
| Vines | We often wait on the previous screen to get the vines to be at the perfect distance for us to jump on them and land on the lily pad in the fastest way possible (since lily pads are on a screen-local timer, but the vines are not). Note that it's faster to jump onto/off of the vines facing backwards, since this gives you a slight speed-boost when you jump. Thus, we always face right when we jump on the vines - unless we don't have time to face to the right when jumping on the vine before the vine moves out of grab range. |
| Rising Platforms | We often wait on the previous screen so that the platforms spawn at the right time for us to land on them without hitting a pollen ball. Note that we can't jump from very high off a platform without dying - which causes me to have to spend a lot of time waiting around for the platforms to lower. |
Finally, here is a list of items whose spawn is based on RNG:
| Object Name | Notes |
|---|---|
| Fish | When the fish will spawn is always the same, which is based on how many frames it's been since you entered the screen. However, which hole the fish will spawn in is purely RNG/input based, and you can alter this by pressing the jump button (even if you press the jump button while in mid-jump). This is why I often jump for seemingly no reason on screens which have both fish on them and long waiting sections for platforms to drop down. |
| Shooting Flames | The campfire enemy can shoot flames across the screen in one of 3 possible arcs: straight up, angled a little to the right, and angled far to the right. Much like the fish, pressing the jump button can manipulate their RNG to change which of the 3 arcs they will shoot out in. |
Stages
I'm not going to list all 990 stages. Instead, I'm going to just describe the first time each type of stage appears, starting from level 10 (that way, the game is already on max-difficulty. The only difference in levels 1-3 is that the bumble bee enemies don't spawn). I'll also list the level+scene number, along with a timestamp for where to find it in the encode:
Stage 10, Scene 90: Located at 9:36 in the encode. This is the first and last screen of each level. It's pretty self-explanatory: no enemies - just walk to the left.
Stage 10, Scene 91: Located at 9:40 in the encode. This screen requires jumping across trampolines while fish shoot out of the ground. I press jump randomly to manipulate the fish not to get in my way, and then jump across on the trampolines (note that you have to make 1 regular jump on the 1st trampoline before you can hop across, and you die if you land on the ground in-between 2 trampolines). This stage sometimes appears with falling pollen in it - but this is the same concept, so I won't repeat this description for that. However, it is worth noting that going through this screen to the left is faster than going right when there's falling pollen - since you need to pause between jumps if you enter the screen from the right (based on the falling pollen's per-screen timer).
Stage 10, Scene 92: Located at 9:45 in the encode. This screen requires jumping over holes that fish shoot out of, and jumping over a flame-shooter while pollen balls fall from the sky. Once again, I press jump at random times to manipulate the fish spawns and which way the fire shoots out of.
Stage 10, Scene 93: Located at 9:50 in the encode. This screen requires jumping across rising platforms. There's sometimes fish and falling pollen balls on this screen. This can be one of the slowest or fastest screens in the game, depending on where the platforms are in their global cycle.
Stage 10, Scene 94: Located at 9:57 in the encode. This screen requires jumping over a bumble bee (there's a 2 frame window to make it over without stopping).
Stage 10, Scene 95: Located at 10:01 in the encode. This screen requires jumping across several blocks, and then jumping over a flame-shooter. I time when I jump to make sure that the flame gets shot out of my way.
Stage 10, Scene 96: Located at 10:05 in the encode. This screen requires jumping over some water holes, while also avoiding a bumble bee. Unfortunately, I need to pause about 8 frames before jumping over the last hole in order to make the jump over the bee. This wait can sometimes be avoided if the vines on this screen are in a good place in their global timer.
Stage 10, Scene 97: Located at 10:10 in the encode. The fastest way across this screen is to enter when the vine is about to swing to the left, jump onto the lily pad as soon as possible, and jump off the lily pad as late as possible. However, if the vines are on a good cycle, then it's faster to ride the 2nd vine to the end of the screen. In either case, jumping to the vines while facing to the right is preferred, since this gives us a slight boost forwards. It's worth noting that going through this screen to the left is faster than going through it to the right, since the lily pad always spawns at the right-most edge of the screen.
Stage 10, Scene 99: Located at 10:18 in the encode. This screen requires jumping across on the trampolines. Pretty straight-forwards. Another screen which is faster going left than right due to the falling pollen.
Stage 11, Scene 01: Located at 10:41 in the encode. This screen requires jumping over a pollen ball. There's also a round blue ball rolling behind us, but it'll never catch up to us, so we can ignore it. This screen sometimes has a tree branch on the ground to jump over - but that doesn't really change anything, since we can make it over both the pollen and tree branch in one jump.
Stage 11, Scene 02: Located at 10:46 in the encode. This screen requires jumping over some water holes and avoiding a bumble bee. Unfortunately, we need to wait 8 frames in order to be able to jump over the bee.
Stage 11, Scene 06: Located at 11:04 in the encode. This screen requires riding a lily pad to get to the other side. I time when I press jump to manipulate the flames to shoot over my head. This is one of only 2 screens in the game which is faster moving right than it is moving left, since we need to wait for the lily pad to make 3 trips across the screen when moving left (as opposed to only 2 trips across the screen when moving right).
Stage 11, Scene 09: Located at 11:22 in the encode. This screen requires jumping over a flame and avoiding a bee. Once again, we jump to manipulate when the flame shoots, if we're on a version of this screen where the flame shoots at all.
Stage 12, Scene 15: Located at 12:02 in the encode. This screen requires riding a lily pad to the other side, and avoiding a bumble bee. This is the one of 2 screens which is faster going right than it is going left, since we need to wait for the lily pad to make 3 trips across the screen when moving left (as opposed to only 2 trips across the screen when moving right).
Stage 13, Scene 21: Located at 12:47 in the encode. This screen requires jumping from vine-to-vine to make it across. How fast this is depends on the global timer. The longest I had to wait to make it across this screen in the whole TAS was 2 vine-cycles (which occurs twice in this TAS). Otherwise, I made it across in 0-1 vine cycles.
Note
In the first 10 levels, there were 3-4 spots where I could have stayed on the vines longer to reach the edge of the screen a few frames faster. However, when I tried re-doing those sections to include those timesaves, I ended up saving no time, since I couldn't beat the global timer for the next section of rising platforms in each of those cases. As such, I left things as they were.
Conclusion
And that's all she wrote! This is probably the 2nd most boring TAS I've ever made - although I'm pretty sure my Lethal Enforcers TAS for the SNES has this beat, since it's just 40 minutes of moving a cursor across the screen: Lethal Enforcers.
The 15 screen-types described above repeat more-or-less unchanged for ~1000 screens. The only exception is the last screen of the game, where I jump to end input early - thus preventing my TAS from getting spiked (eat your heart out, Spikestuff :D ).
In any event, I hope you can get some enjoyment out of this TAS!
ViGadeomes: Claiming for judging.
ViGadeomes: While verifying my version of the game, I discovered that the version used here is a Beta 1 version. This information is still very obscure and the only version available mostly everywhere is this version. I struggled finding the good one. On top of that, BizHawk considers this version used here as the good one, this means we can't use this argument against this movie.
I played the movie with the good ROM and it desyncs 1-2mins after the start. Seeing the length of the movie, the effort to resync the movie on the good ROM is too high so we will let it as is.
Now purely about the TAS, it seems optimized and I have nothing to say about it other than good work !
No matter how boring this TAS is, it had to be done so thank you for that !
Accepting.
despoa: Processing...