Hot Potato! is a 2001 puzzle game for the GBA. In this game, you control a walking bus and are tasked with clearing the streets of an alien potato species called the "Spuds". It's a weird, little adventure with some neat visuals and challenging gameplay.
Objectives
- Clears every stage in Mission Mode as fast as possible
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.8
Basic Notes
- In Mission Mode, you have to clear a set number of "Special Spuds". These Special Spuds appear in various areas of each mission, and you can't progress to the next mission if you fail to reach the quota.
- Spuds are red and blue. To clear a Spud, you have to fire a Spud at it that matches the same colour. You can also fire green Spuds, which clear a line, regardless of colour.
- The bus contains a 3x2 grid of Spuds of randomly chosen colours. Firing a Spud will shoot the top row at once, move the bottom row up, and a new set of Spuds will generate at the bottom row.
- Firing Spuds at different frames can change what Spud colours will be generated next both in the bus and .
- The bus's grid can be flipped horizontally or rotated clockwise/counter-clockwise.
Scrolling Speed
This game is an autoscroller. Staying at the top of the screen will force the game to scroll at its maximum speed. Staying at the bottom will force its slowest speed. In the second level, you get introduced to Speed Pads. These affect the scrolling speed if you move on top of them. If there are three Speed Pads in a row, you can select which one you want to keep. If there's only one, it will automatically be forced. Basically, if there's three speed pads, we can choose the fastest (60) and not have to be stuck to the top of the screen. However, if there's only one pad, and it's 30 or 40, then we have stay at the top to not lose time. This can be quite challenging, since our movement is limited and we have less time to clear Spuds. When we're at 60, we can just dance around the screen and clear Spuds left and right (although this is mostly for entertainment value).
Note: If you fire a line of Spuds, it will actually push the bus back a bit, pushing you away from the top of the screen and losing speed. You can counteract this by just holding up while firing.
Lag
Too many Spuds on the screen can lag the game. This is especially problematic, because the final mission has many sections that are just full of Spuds, some of which are at a low speed (meaning that they're even harder to clear). Luckily, I was able to power through and finish the TAS without any frames of lag! Also, I believe too many particle sprites (like the exclamation bubbles, score popups, etc.) can also cause lag. So if you see me avoid some Spuds, it's likely because of that.
RTA Comparison
I did an RTA run of this game back in 2022. Using RTA timing, this TAS gets a 30:11. Trust me when I say this, this game is hard. I think if someone sat down with this game for a long time, they could probably be good at clearing out Spuds quickly, but even then, I don't see anyone getting close to this. The blind fires, the lag reduction, no one’s ever going to do that.
Comments
There you have it! Assuming I made no mistakes, I don't think you can save anymore time. I constantly stay at the fastest scrolling speed and there's no lag! The only way I think this could be improved is if someone does the same thing but clears more Spuds or gets a higher score. This is my longest TAS so far! To celebrate, I'm going to go to the grocery store and secretly paint the potatoes red and blue while no one is looking. Thanks for reading and I'm sorry to whoever is watching the run and hearing the exact same song loop for 30 minutes straight. - Walgrey
nymx: Claiming for judging.