This topic is for the purpose of discussing #8243: Entepp's GBA SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom in 56:40.78

Review: It's about time I flexed my reviewing muscles again to help with the site's backlog. This post ended up being very long; strap in! Overview This game's developer, Vicarious Visions, is a familiar sight that I've encountered in several other licensed GBA platformers, including Shrek 2 and Madagascar: Operation Penguin. As such, the basic mechanics and game engine are somewhat familiar to me, although each game has its own unique twists on the formula. The game does suffer from some unfortunate design choices that disrupt the action, including halting character acceleration after the jump button is pressed, requiring a delay to push pushable objects, requiring a noticeable 2-second delay to get back onto Mystery after dismounting, and some poor enemy and platform cycles that require waiting to progress. However, the TAS is interspersed with moments of excitement and tricks, including the super fast glides and spatula duplications. As far as general routing within levels and game knowledge goes, the TAS seems pretty good. The TAS saves about five minutes over the current real time record on Speedrun.com (1m 13s 110ms at time of writing, held by this TAS's author), and about three minutes over the sum of ILs on the leaderboard (59:19.020 by my calculation). Improvements I decided to play around with the game a bit looking at some slow moments in the TAS. Some of them were easily improvable, while others were cycle-dependent and could not be improved. I didn't look at every level, and I didn't completely optimize my movement. My improvements (updated movie file) totaled a time save of 00:23.99; the new movie length is 56:16.79. Here's a breakdown:

• 00:07.65 throughout from advancing through menus and level transitions faster.
• 00:02.24 in 1-3 from tighter pathing to collect spatulas and less air time.
• 00:03.23 in 1-6 from better glide flow (fewer landings) and better enemy handling (less waiting for cycles)
• 00:00.44 in boss 1 ("Attack of the Steel Squirrel") from immediately stomping on the boss each time the boss's invincibility times out. I didn't look at the start of the boss.
• 00:02.85 in 2-2 from better ladder jumps, faster falling, loading floating platform in earlier, and generally tighter movement around platforms.
• 00:00.42 in 2-5 from tighter movement with Mystery and when generally navigating the level.
• 00:00.45 in 2-6 from falling faster in two parts.
• 00:01.46 in 3-1 from tighter early movement and advancing through the dialogue faster. Ideally, the dialogue would be avoided entirely and Mr. Krabs would have a better (leftwards) position when you do the double-jump with Mystery. I didn't experiment too much to figure out why Mr. Krabs is positioned poorly; if you can affect his position, I imagine you can save an additional 10-20 frames by avoiding the dialogue entirely. The real-time IL (link) doesn't appear to have this issue, but it does also reach Mr. Krabs more slowly.
• 00:01.24 in 3-2 from gliding a bit sooner early in the level and tighter movement around the ladder sections. This level has one of the most significant waits of the run: there's a platform that moves in a clockwise square that the character barely misses, and it takes 10 seconds for the platform to move back into an accessible position. Unfortunately, the platform movement appears to be based on the character's proximity, so I don't think this wait can be avoided; half of the time I saved was from just prior to this platform, and it didn't appear to affect the platform's relative position.
• 00:00.07 in 3-3 from jumping out of a crawl at the end of the level. I originally looked at this level because the bubbling on the left side looked slow, but you have to wait for the enemy to advance rightwards towards you to fall on the button and open the gate.
• 00:00.17 in 3-5 from avoiding a triple bot bonk near the end.
• 00:01.02 in 4-4 from falling sooner after pushing the fan down. The fall still looks a bit suboptimal.
• 00:02.49 in 4-5 from handling ladders better (jumping on the first possible frame). This is a very basic proof-of-concept; there's maybe a few seconds of other optimizations I can imagine.

There are almost certainly other movement microoptimizations in other portions of the run, since the TAS appeared to be largely done using slowdown instead of frame-by-frame inputs. In the author's movie, certain inputs were frame-adjusted to be pressed on the first possible frame, but there were also many segments where small amounts of time were lost from not jumping on the first possible frame, or moving a bit too far when moving around tight passages. I also learned certain mechanics while I was improving levels, so the improvements have varying levels of quality. There's also some specific game physics knowledge that came in handy for my improvements. Partway through, I figured out how to locate the RAM address for the character's coordinates (although, it is nontrivial and varies from screen-to-screen, so I will not describe the procedure I used here). Generally, you want to minimize time spent in the air, since walking is faster. There are situations where gliding off a platform can be the same speed as walking, but jumping is always slower because the character completely stops for 5-6 frames to wind up the jump. Sometimes it is better to hold jump for height, and sometimes you want to shorten jumps by gliding early in the jump. I will note this game is fairly sync-friendly, and later levels do not appear to depend on earlier levels. I didn't resync this movie to 2.9.1 for the sake of comparable time spent on screen transitions, but it probably wouldn't be that difficult. Synopsis For an hour-long movie, the level of optimization isn't too bad in my opinion. This movie isn't perfect, but I think it's nearly publishable. I would be happy to see this TAS published, especially with a few more improvements that I'm sure I missed from my one watch-through, although I also have a personal investment now since I spent several hours improving the movie.

Entepp, I heard from RetroEdit that you're working on an improved TAS for this game. Would you like have this submission set to delayed, where you can then upload your improvement input file to Wiki: Userfiles and have it replace the one in this submission, or cancel this submission and submit the improved version in the future?

Entepp, I heard from RetroEdit that you're working on an improved TAS for this game. Would you like have this submission set to delayed, where you can then upload your improvement input file to Wiki: Userfiles and have it replace the one in this submission, or cancel this submission and submit the improved version in the future?

Delayed will work!

It has been over two months since this has been submitted. Entepp, what is the current status of improvements for this submission?

Recently, the progress made to improve the TAS has slowed significantly, I believe it is best we cancel the submission for now

You can manually set the submission to "Cancelled" by editing your submission and changing the Status. EDIT: It's been over a week with no response. Cancelling it myself.

om, nom, nom... sweet!