Submission #4176: CoolKirby's Coleco Frogger II: ThreeeDeep! in 11:50.38

About the run

• Emulator used: BizHawk 1.5.3
  • Skip BIOS Intro unchecked (though it doesn't seem to matter for this game)
• Aims for fastest time
• Plays until there is no new content (end of Level 5)
• Abuses a programming error in the game
• Genre: Action

• The sea is a lot like the highway in the original Frogger, except there's a current that always pulls you either to the right or left which gets stronger as you increase in level. There are always 3 holes to fill on this screen, inside logs. You can ride the white turtle through enemies, though it's slower than hopping around them. You can also zip through the yellow fish if you're facing them. The rest of the fish are instant death though.
• The surface is, unsurprisingly, like the river in Frogger, but you can actually jump on the mouths of whales and crocodiles without dying. Besides falling in the water or going off the edge of the screen, you can also die by being trampled by the mother duck. Normally, you can hop onto the mother duck to take to the sky, but if you stomp on her ducklings, she'll get mad and try to kill you (unless you hop off of them, then she's okay with you again). Your goal is to fill the 1, 2, or 3 life preservers, or rafts, trailing behind the tugboat.
• The sky has a forward perspective like the sea instead of a top-down one like the surface. Your goal is to bounce on the cloud and climb the birds to reach the cloud-hole(s) at the top. There are also some red bonus point birds that open up holes in the clouds when hit. Falling through these holes puts you back into the sea. If that happens, you won't lose a life but you'll waste time having to climb back up.

Lag reduction and strategy

Level by level comments

Level 1

• I start by getting the first sea hole out of the way since it doesn't cause any extra lag.
• The sky screens are where you'll see most of the fairly precise tricks in this run. Normally, you would have to wait for that pink pterodactyl to carry you to the hole, but you can reach it much faster with a good enough bounce.
• While going to the right to reach the middle sea hole may seem faster, Frogger actually can't make it into that hole with his long hops without waiting over half a second for the current to move him and the log into position. That log is still useful though, as touching its side is the fastest way to make it to the surface.
• I can't make it onto the first top log on the surface, but that's fine since I have to wait for the boat and life raft to slowly wrap back around the screen anyway. So I decided to anger the mother duck as much as possible.

Level 2

• Among the minor differences in this stage are a second raft on the surface screen and slightly different positions for the birds on the sky screen.
• I actually need to step on the ducklings in order to survive without stepping on the lily-Pacs. If I stayed on the first crocodile that passes Frogger's spawn point, there would be nowhere else to hop and I would die at the edge of the screen. But it's fun messing with the mother duck anyway.
• The bubble that appears in the sea screen doesn't cause extra lag. The lethal black algae that appears later does, but this lag is unavoidable because the algae can't be killed.
  • However, because the algae changes up the lag, it's actually 2 frames faster to make a precise hop into the middle log instead of the leftmost one.

Level 3

• There're plenty more fish in the sea, son...and also another hole in the sky.
• The mother duck has a new starting position right behind the ducklings. Normally, when she touches one of the ends of the row of ducklings, she'll turn around and swim in the opposite direction. Since that would waste way too much time, I force her to swim left by stepping on and off a duckling, giving me just enough time to catch her and take to the sky.
• The sky level is harder since there are fewer birds to hop on, plus an airplane and dragon that will kill you on contact.
• The second round of the sky level requires precision and clever strategy to make it around the dragon, especially without hitting the bonus point birds. While there is a route that would allow Frogger to make it to the hole 8 frames faster, it would mean hitting one of these birds, which would be 12 frames slower overall. Also, the pink pterodactyl is barely far enough away that it can't be hopped onto; otherwise, the hole could be reached around 7 seconds earlier.
• Despite the extra hundred bonus points, hopping across two lily-Pacs to reach the second raft actually saves 14 frames over only hopping across the third lilypad. I use this for the rest of the run to save time.
• Messing with the mother duck never gets old. At one point, I even partially clip through her when she wraps around the screen.

Level 4

• Here the sea screen's current becomes stronger, which makes it more difficult to traverse. There is also another raft and an instant death shark swimming over your platforms on the surface.
• Though I had originally planned to copy-and-paste the input from the previous level for the sky screens, I actually had to redo both screens due to different positions of the bonus point birds. This was a good thing, though, as the different positions allowed faster routes that saved 8 frames for the right hole and 30 for the left.
• I jump on the ducklings a bit to provide some relief for your ears from the shark's "theme".

Level 5

• The last level! And also the longest and most difficult. The current is now even stronger, the enemies, platforms and birds are in their toughest positions yet, and a ninth hole has been added in the sky.
• The mother duck is surprisingly in a near optimal position in this level. You only need to step on and off her ducks as fast as you can and she'll be right there to hop onto.
• In the first sky screen, the birds and plane are in positions that prevent me from going to the middle hole right away, so I have to wait for another high-flying bird to come from the right.
• Due to the dragon's position, there's no faster way to reach the left sky hole than waiting for the pterodactyl to fly over and help you in.
• Because there's no lag in this level, I get the sea holes out of the way before going on to the last raft.
• The last raft is difficult to reach in real time without running out the level timer. The timer starts when Frogger spawns in the sea, so every movement from the spawn point to this final raft has to be almost perfect. You'd think you would have plenty of time to reach the raft, or even to wait on a lily-Pac for the boat to drive by. But with everything moving so slowly, only one badly positioned top log and one whale, and the endlessly circling shark, this raft is designed to make you race the clock...and lose.
  • If time runs out, you die and lose a life, like in most games. You only have three extra lives, so three tries to reach that raft or it's game over, no continues.
  • And to add to the frustration, a horrible repeating noise plays to constantly remind you that time's running out.
• But since this is a TAS, Frogger reaches the raft with 5.4 seconds to spare (58 frames if you didn't hop across the lilypads to get there sooner). No problem for our theoretical superhuman player!
• And this is where I end the run, as Level 5 repeats endlessly after this point.

Suggested screenshots

992, 7520

Thanks to

• The BizHawk devs for the awesome emulator
• IceQueenZer0 for her helpful GameFAQ for this game
• You, for watching