Sometimes you come across a game that's just baffling.
Introduction
Fraction Fever is a 1983 educational game developed by Tom Snyder Productions and published by Spinnaker Software. The educational goal of the game is to teach kids how to identify fractions. Identifying and selecting the correct fraction will allow the pogo jumping player to ascend to higher floors until they loop going past floor 20.
However, the scoring goal involves selecting the incorrect fractions to remove them from the floor and earn points. This feels kind of antithetical to the entire point of teaching kids about fractions as it rewards incorrect behavior. The holes are also hard to jump over in the Apple II version as the jumping is pretty poor here compared to other versions. I feel this would at least be better as an educational tool if it rewarded getting the correct answer quickly. Math Blaster this ain't.
Anyways, the goal of this TAS is to complete a loop by clearing floor 20 as fast as possible. I did find that changing the real time clock affects the answers in a loop. The problem I had was that save states were prone to desyncs which resulted in me having to keep clearing green zones in TAStudio to be sure changes were sync friendly. Thankfully this TAS ended up being under 3 minutes in length and is pretty simple overall. It's still frustrating enough that I didn't want to find an absolute best starting seed but this one did save some time over the default RTC setting.
Game version notes
The one I used doesn't match the TOSEC set. However, the on in the TOSEC set is noted to be a cracked version. The one I have doesn't say if it's cracked but I'm not sure either way. Anyways, here's the hashes of the one I used:
File MD5: 2C4A4600317E3105017F76D46E9A182F
File SHA-1: 7DA9B933F3A2F66EFFA44E615155AAE4712D79C8
File CRC32: 32BF3857
Run notes
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.9.1
- Virtu core
- A little RNG manipulation
- May have learned a fraction or two
Mechanics and techniques
This one is pretty simple. The J (left) and L (right) keys are acceleration keys that speed up horizontal movement up to a speed cap. The I key is used for jumping over holes but this isn't used here as it's not needed for clearing a loop fast. The Space key is used to select a given answer if the player is over solid ground. A correct answer will send the player up while and incorrect one will cause the floor tile to disappear. There are some cases where there are two points to press Space to go up. At those points, the one that starts closer to the next correct answer on the next floor is selected.
The player starts on floor 3. The game is automatically over if the player falls below floor 1, which means starting at floor 3 in theory allows for some mistakes. A loop of the map is done when the correct answer is selected on floor 20, starting the player back at floor 3. Sometimes selecting the correct answer will send the player up multiple floors. This happens if there are floors above that don't have a tile to land on so the game simply sends the player higher as a bonus.
DrD2k9: Not that I expect anyone to be chomping at the bit on this game, but it would be interesting if someone did some work on RNG manipulation to see if it'd be possible to skip more floors. As I mentioned in the forum, I may dig into this idea more myself on the C64 version of the game.
That said, I have no complaints on this run as presented. Accepting.
