"Cruise Boosting! Fuck yeah! Slow? Fuck that! Cruise Boost that bitch! Ooooh yeah! We're going fast baby! SpongeBob to mission control, this shit is sick! Jump you can't make? Fuck that! The world is your oyster with Cruise Boosting!"
SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom is full of Good Bad Bugs that can be very useful, as this channel
will show. Some of the best:
Original Game:
- Doing a Cruise Bubble and a Bubble Bowl at the same time against a flat wall (Like the side of a Teleport Box) lets SpongeBob retain the forward momentum from the Bubble Bowl's starting animation. This technique, called a "Cruise Boost," forces SpongeBob to slide along the ground while standing still, which opens up all kinds of ridiculous possibilities at full speed:
- SpongeBob moves forward up to twice as fast as his normal running speed, allowing you to move through levels extremely quickly or jump normally impassible gaps.
- SpongeBob can move horizontally while using moves that normally stop his horizontal movement like the Bubble Bash or Bubble Slam, allowing you to climb objects normally too tall or high to reach through conventional means.
- You continue sliding even while SpongeBob collects (and celebrates collecting) a spatula, which is very useful to speedrunners when they want to respawn at a checkpoint as quickly as possible and there's a convenient body of water nearby.
- Using the additional forward momentum in conjunction with a trampoline allows SpongeBob to access unintended areas or jump even wider gaps than is possible with a normal cruise boost. In addition, certain trampolines have set directions they catapult your character toward, but any momentum from SpongeBob's Cruise Boost overrides it, allowing even further unintended level parkour.
- With another small glitch, it's possible to phase through certain walls, which can be used to skip entire boss fights (or the Mermalair ball puzzle).
- If you hail a Taxi in the hub while you're being pulled away by Hans for being out-of-bounds, Hans is essentially disabled, letting the player take enormous shortcuts and explore areas you normally would be pulled away from after a few seconds.
- Taking the Hans glitch even further, with the glitch active, you can collect the Cowa-Bungee Spatula in Jellyfish Fields from the alcove overlooking the pond (where one of Patrick's socks is found) without needing the bungee hook. Since the Golden Spatula is located directly above the pond, SpongeBob will drown immediately after pick-up and respawn at the last checkpoint, during which, the Item Get! animation will play and the game will begin auto-saving. You can actually interrupt the process by pausing and warping back to Bikini Bottom, the only time you can do it. Doing so will lock the game in a perpetual save state where Hans cannot interfere at all, allowing you to truly break the boundaries and Sequence Break into the second part of Bikini Bottom without needing to defeat Robo-Sandy. Unlike the initial glitch, however, this extension is very limited and can only be triggered once with the Cowa-Bungee Spatula available. Once collected, it can never be triggered again for that playthrough, and the glitch will be fixed once you collect another Golden Spatula elsewhere.
- In several boss battles, there is an invisible trigger directly above the spawn point that, should you touch it, ends the fight and plays the cinematic as if you've won, allowing you to skip actually fighting the boss. The difficulty of reaching it varies, and for several bosses it's not known if the trigger even exists, but it's easiest to pull off on the final boss fight in the Chum Bucket, as it happens to have an early attack that catapults you high in the air if you stand in the right place and jump at the right time.
- By taking advantage of some odd geometry used for Goo Lagoon's lifeguard towers, it's possible to float to the island you normally can't reach until the end of the level. You can do it again to reach the loading zone for the Goo Lagoon Pier, allowing you to do the entire area backward (which is much easier and faster). A similar glitch can be used to skip the massive slide in Sandy's Dream. It's also good to use for exploring!
- You can "beat" Mermaid Man's time on the Kelp Slides by jumping just enough over the slide to trigger the time to start before drifting back onto solid ground, then using the Teleport Box to skip to the end of the slide. Mermaid Man will still give you the reward even if you cheat this way.
- Slamming into a bus stop as Patrick and immediately switching to SpongeBob at the same time will cause the shockwave effect of Patrick's slam attack to transfer over to him and remain active indefinitely for the whole level section. While under this effect, SpongeBob can kill smaller robots and stun larger ones by simply walking up to them, similar to the Infinite Sword Glitch from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
- In Goo Lagoon's boardwalk area, there is a Skee Ball machine in which Spongebob can use his Bubble Bowl move (provided he unlocked it; it's rewarded after defeating Robo-Sandy) to get various amounts of Shiny Objects. The payout is normally incredibly small, however, using Patrick to pick up and throw a pair of tikis in just the right spot inside the machine, swapping to Spongebob, and using the Bubble Bowl often leads to the ball becoming stuck in between one of the holes and the Tikis, rewarding Spongebob with the regular skee ball reward once per frame. This has been dubbed "Skee Ball Abuse" and is used in certain speedrun categories due to it being a great source for Shiny Objects to easily pay for the Golden Spatulas Mr. Krabs charges you for, as well as the clam gates that open additional areas for a fee.
Rehydrated:
- If you bring up the "Take the Taxi?" screen on any spatula you can warp to (such as the first level in the game), back out, and go to any other level and press the "Details" button twice on the same framenote , you can warp to any spatula on the new map screen regardless of whether you've unlocked it, including the final boss. As explained in this video, the game "stores" the "Take the Taxi?" screen whenever it's called, and pressing the Details button twice on the same frame skips the check that prevents the player from entering a locked level and goes straight into the taxi screen for that world (specific instructions detailed here). Amazingly, you even load in with all the necessary power ups if you warp to the first phase of said boss but not if you load into the second phase inside it. Because of this, it's possible to beat the entire game in under three minutes.
- Due to an oversight regarding the taxi warp with the Patrick's Dilemma mission, you can use it to bring Patrick and Sandy into levels they're not intended to be in, like Sandy in Jellyfish Fields and Patrick in Bikini Bottom.
- It's possible to cheese the first phase of the final boss by standing behind a bounce pad, which for some reason causes it to stop attacking you, allowing you to freely shoot it with missiles.
- Repeatedly Ground Pounding NPC characters as Patrick will result in them growing to hilariously gargantuan proportions.
- A variation of the Hans glitch returns in the remake, but instead of being enabled with taxi stands, it's now triggered by two methods. The first method involves firing a Cruise Bubble while out of bounds to trick Hans into grabbing nothing. This can cause him to put you back out of bounds where you'll be unaffected by the kill sand. The second method involves a trick called "Bounce Boosting", where by Ground Pounding a trampoline and then spamming the B/Square button, you'll interrupt the Bubble Bowl in a similar fashion to Cruise Boosting where you'll perpetually drift forward at a slower speed. By drifting out of bounds, this will cause Hans to grab you and put you back out of bounds in the direction you're facing (it can also be used to clip through solid objects). Much like the original game, this opens up a lot of possibilities for Sequence Breaking. See this video and this video for demonstrations.
- Related to the Hans glitch is a trick known as "Hans Height Stacking". Hans has a tendency of placing you back in-bounds on the height you were at when you entered out of bounds, so by jumping each time Hans places you back (since you're allowed to jump at least once while in the air) and re-entering out of bounds repeatably, you'll stack up your height with each respawn, allowing you to scale higher places that are otherwise inaccessible by normal means.
- An alternative to the Skee-Ball Abuse glitch had been found to speed up Shiny Object grinding in Rehydrated speedruns. Dubbed the "Tactical Nuke", by disconnecting your controller on a specific frame while switching characters, all Thunder Tikis in the current area will spontaneously explode at the same time (destroying any nearby tikis and robots in their vicinity). This causes a massive influx of Shiny Objects to come to you, as this video demonstrates.
- By grabbing a ledge as Sandy on the same frame as when she starts her lasso glide move, you'll be able to keep the gliding effect on her indefinitely for the whole level section, allowing you to fly around levels with no restricted limits. You can also boost her flight speed in this state by simply touching slide surfaces.
- A unique glitch and major oversight was discovered in regards to how the game saves your progress in Mrs. Puff's fetch quests. It turns out that collecting steering wheels in Downtown Bikini Bottom causes the game to actually store that data collectively for all of Mrs. Puff's quests, so by starting each of her quests in Goo Lagoon (5 kids), Rock Bottom (6 artwork) and Kelp Forest (6 campers), warping to her quest in Downtown, and then warping back to each level afterwards with the set amount of steering wheels gathered, you'll trigger an automatic prompt that lets you know you've completed her quests without needing to collect any of the asked items. Speedrunners took advantage of this by collecting only a bare minimum of 6 steering wheels since it's enough to cover all of her quests in other levels.
- Humourously, while the game will believe you've completed her request and reward you, any items in the level you haven't collected will still appear, but will no longer be interactable. No happy ending for those kids and campers, eh?
