Look guys I made a proper encode this time are you proud of me?
Game objectives
- Emulator used: libTAS v1.4.6 + ruffle-nightly-2025_01_18
- Uses hardest difficulty
- Heavy luck manipulation
- Genre: Puzzle
Settings
- Linux version: Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS (Through WSL2)
- SWF MD5: 31d3106ad9a2b3821b385a964550aca4
- --no-gui command line option
- Renderer: Vulkan
- Game was obtained through Flashpoint.
Hi, everybody! Today I'm submitting a TAS for a different SpongeBob Flash game. This is Trail of the Snail, based of the Season 4 TV special "Have You Seen This Snail?". After being neglected and ignored by SpongeBob for too long, Gary runs away from home and goes missing. SpongeBob, finally realizing his mistake, goes out on a quest to find his beloved snail pet and reconcile with him.
This TAS beats the game in under 3 minutes, which also makes the Dirty Bubble's high score look like child's play in comparison to spunchbop's ludicrous paddle speed.
This is a score based matching game. The game is played by using SpongeBob's paddle ball to plunk the pairs of twins, which will disappear if they are identical, until only one character is left, the one the player is looking for. Plunking the character the player is looking for makes them have to restart the area. There is also a timer, and the player loses the game if time runs out.
Of course, this game is not as simple as it looks at a glance. First, there are fish hooks that show up that snag away one of the twins, which makes the level unbeatable, making you restart the level.
The big powerup that you always want to get is the blue Starfish. Clicking on it will temporarily give you a super paddle that will make a full pair of characters dissapear with one click. There's a catch, however. The Starfish spawns depending on RNG. You want the Starfish to spawn as early as possible, so you have to resort to a couple of ways to manipulate RNG. First, you "route" which character do you click on, and then secondly, you have to delay a specific number of frames when you click on the corresponding pair.
I did the best I could with this. The only areas where I couldn't spawn the Starfish reliably was Patrick's, Squidward's and Grandma's levels. Starfish either spawned way too late, where I would've had to slow down a bit too often, or I didn't get any Starfish at all. Every other level I'm pretty satisfied with the spawns I got (the luck I got in the last level was absolutely insane BTW).
For bonus rounds after beating a level, I try to make it as entertaining as I could. There doesn't seem to be an impact in gaining or losing time, from what I've noticed.
Thank you for watching and reading! I hope I can keep this up.
