Escape the Grapes

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Danni's picture

Long tongues and brief

Long tongues and brief unexplained periods of slowdown are two of my favorite oddly specific things in games. Unfortunately once I get a new CPU, the latter is going to go away. So it goes.

bpseudopod's picture

Got my best time down to 10

Got my best time down to 10 seconds. Beat that

Danni's picture

Got 9 seconds. Would have

Got 9 seconds. Would have gotten like six or seven if the ball had cooperated.

bpseudopod's picture

SPEEDRUN UPDATE: 0:04 SECONDS [WR]

As the game loads in, you have a moment to move your tongue freely through the grapes. If you can get it next to the tennis ball, you can scoop it out pretty much instantly. Maybe even take it over the top in one smooth motion if you're careful.

I got 0:04 and you can TOTALLY do it faster with precision and good RNG.

EDIT: 0:03! Sub 0:02 is possible, people!

bpseudopod's picture

THE GOD RUN: 0:02 ACHIEVED [WR][PB][GG]

WE DID IT, PEOPLE!
Quick recap on the speedrunning history for those who aren't in the know:
The casual strat is to just keep slurping at the grapes, knocking them out in batches until the general grape level of the bin is at the level of the tennis ball. Then, you can scoop it out like you do with the grapes. Pretty simple, but slow as hell, since the tongue only moves so fast and has a lot of momentum to it.
So then we developed the mole cricket strat. Turns out that you can slowly vibrate your tongue through the grapes to sort of burrow into them, like a mole cricket. This takes out the middle man. You can go straight to the tennis ball through the grapes, then dig it out way quicker. If you do this fast, you can get it down to, best case, about six seconds. Problem is, tunneling through the grapes is not only slow, but it's finicky; you can do a lot of vibrating without really getting anywhere if you're not lucky.
Well, I figured out a way around it. I called this new strat the "settling" strat. Just after the game initializes, grapes spawn randomly all over the bin, and it takes a second for gravity to kick in and for all the grapes to settle. Now, after the grapes settled, we're back to the tunneling strat, but before then, you can move your tongue more or less freely throughout the bin. If you do it right, you can get your tongue most of the way to the ball like that, and once you get there you only have to dig it out. Using this strat, I narrowed the WR down to 4 seconds, then 3, before I started optimizing.
See, the initial position of the ball is decided by RNG. If you keep refreshing the page, you can reset the position of the ball. If you reset until it's near the center line, where your tongue starts, you can actually start lifting the ball out before the grapes even settle, negating the tunneling issue altogether. I also optimized the lifting itself. If you position your tongue dead center under the ball and slurp up, it'll gain force and velocity until it bursts out, rocketing it towards the top of the bin more quickly. This is really tricky because it requires you to keep your tongue straight under the ball at all times, but with enough practice it's totally doable.

Frankly, I'm not sure where this run's going after this. This RNG optimization makes unrestricted tongue motion possible, and I think we've taken advantage of this as much as we can at this point. This is it, boys. We're in the endgame now. Hopefully the TASers will dig up some cool frame perfect stuff (that isn't an ACE exploit or some shit), but at that point we're just shaving off individual frames, and what kind of weirdo starts optimizing for frames on a speedgame that's like one day old? I think this is the last run, guys. It's unbeatable.

Try and prove me wrong.

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Danni's picture

Clearly we need a new

Clearly we need a new speedrun category to get more mileage out of this game. Maybe one for 100% Grapes? You'd have to get rid of all the grapes before lifting the tennis ball off the top.

Danni's picture

After a lot of fiddling I

After a lot of fiddling I was able to do it in 11:26. This is by no means optimized.

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rowen-conry's picture

grape

i very much enjoyed escaping the grapes! rover is a cutie

spiral's picture

(written by ruffty)

I'm pretty sure nikki played this before but, shockingly, she never left a comment, despite us knowing how important comments are to the integrity of the community!! don't worry though, because now that I have experienced the game, I am capable of saying something for it. it's good, it's immediately engaging, I like how the problem seems insurmountable at first (remove these grapes in the way?? but how?), but dedication to the game will quickly bring one to finding strategies for approaching it. for instance, "launching" the tongue from the top of the screen will increase its velocity much greater than simply running back and forth at the top of the grape pile. this way, one can slam into the grapes, sending handfuls flying upwards. a wonderful dog experience!