SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom - Rehydrated Has Been Patched On Switch

The developer was actually Purple Lamp Studios from Austria, not Heavy Iron, Heavy Iron did the original but had nothing to do with the remaster.

Saw some footage of this in gameplay playthroughs, while having that mad SpongeBob charm it looked rough and jaggy with an inconsistent framerate...
A decent patch sorting this out along with a half price sale would help make this game viable....

What a weird article.

No evidence or footage. Just copied and pasted some random Reddit user's comment and is taking it as highly probable information.

Could be a 30fps cap and placebo.

Updating the game now and will give my early impressions when it's finished. See you in 10 minutes.

Any improvement to load times? My son has absolutely no patience.

After testing the new update:

• Game looks a bit better.
• Framerate is still bad in some areas.
• Loading times are a bit faster (?)
• The tiptoe bug is still present.

I heard the patch was 5 GB something ??

I don’t see how they can possibly mess up a remake surely the hard bit of making the game has been done , it’s just making it run and look better ?

This update isn’t bad although they need to improve loading time still i don’t like how long I have to wait

1/3

Okay, so here are my early thoughts. There was a lot I wanted to test out, so it took me longer than I initially thought it would. Take everything with a grain of salt, as I am not the most well-versed in the technical aspects of game design. i.e., I'm no DigitalFoundry. However, I've put over 35 hours into this game because I love it so much (a normal playthrough only takes maybe 8-10 hours), so I think I have a pretty good understanding of the visuals and performance of this particular game.

I'll start by addressing some things I hoped would be fixed but are unfortunately still persistent problems in the game. It doesn't seem they've done much to patch glitches, as the tilting physics of the seesaw-like platform in Jellyfish Fields still completely throws off SpongeBob's jump. It's as annoying as ever to make this jump, and since it's one of the most obvious bugs in the game that many people have pointed out, I'm surprised they haven't fixed it yet.

Also, you are still unable to replay the robot boss fights after defeating them, as you could in the original game. This is another aspect I fully expected them to patch, as it seems like a very large oversight. See, if you collect all 100 Golden Spatulas, you're treated to a special end-game cutscene. Problem is, if you collect the last spatula after already defeating the final boss, you're out of luck, because you're supposed to defeat the final boss again with all spatulas to trigger the cutscene. Really hope they fix this one.

(My original comment was too long, so I'll have to upload in multiple parts, lol.)

2/3

Something I made sure to do was race down Sand Mountain in handheld mode to see if the frame rate was any better. Sand Mountain is basically a series of Mario 64-esque slide challenges that are a lot of fun, but unfortunately the speed of this level topped with severe frame drops makes this level almost unplayable in handheld mode. Unfortunately, I still encountered a few moments on this level where the frame rate either looks like a slideshow or completely drops to zero for a second. Maybe it's a little better, I don't know, but this level is still far from ideal when undocked. I'm unsure of the performance of other levels, but they never bothered me to begin with. This was the one level I was hoping would be substantially smoother, but it isn't.

@Beermonkey, as far as I can tell, load times are about the same, taking about 10-15 seconds or so when warping between levels.

I've seen people complain that SpongeBob moves much more slowly in Rehydrated than in the original. The update didn't seem to change SpongeBob's movement speed at all. Something that does seem to have been patched, though, is that I was able to hit one of the Tar Tar Sauce enemies twice in a row. They take 2 hits to kill, but after the first hit, they would be oddly indestructible for a little bit, and if you tried to hit them again, you would do no damage and get blasted in the face. It was very annoying, but that's seemingly not an issue now. The Cruise Bubble doesn't seem any easier to steer, though.

Issues with textures not loading properly (such as signs and billboards being illegible) is still a problem. Some shadows also still look incredibly pixelated, even in handheld mode. I went to Goo Lagoon to test this out, as that's where they look the most like they came out of an N64 game. Still looks pretty bad. There's also still a lot of pop-in, especially in Jellyfish Fields. The grass (or I guess seaweed?) in this level might extend further into the horizon without having to load in, but if so, it's not very much.

3/3

Lastly, I'll touch on the overall resolution, which the article mentions. And yeah, that seems to be the main aspect this update was focused on. I remember watching some pre-release footage of the Switch version on YouTube an noticing areas in the distance looked very low-resolution, almost like a Wii game. I had hoped it was just a matter of YouTube compression, but when I got the actual game, it looked about the same. @Coach_A could be onto something here about a placebo, but I'm pretty confident the game looks at least a little sharper now, both in TV and handheld mode. Objects in the distance still looked a little jagged (think how Breath of the Wild handles rendering distances), but I never thought it looked as bad as a Wii game anymore.

Now, this is where things start getting weird. I initially thought maybe the game was lowering the quality of certain textures to compensate for a higher resolution. However, because the game is so inconsistent and randomly decides whether or not to load textures in the same area, I couldn't say for sure if it was a glitch or a conscious decision. I went into Downtown Bikini Bottom to test something, and it looked downright ugly, with buildings having little to no texture, the road not even loading, and tikis being stuck halfway in the ground. It looked like an early PS2 test room. I closed out of the game and re-loaded it, and all the textures were normal again, so I guess it was just some strange glitch. Let me tell you though, it did NOT look pretty, so hopefully this won't be a common occurrence.

So yeah, that was pretty much all of my takeaways. I didn't test out Kelp Forest yet, which has the most jank, so hopefully they ironed out the bugs there. I might do a follow-up comment about that. Just to summarize, basically none of the performance or gameplay issues have been polished as far as I can tell, nor have the load times. But I think the resolution has seen a significant improvement, and the one quality of life improvement is that Tar Tar robots are easier to kill.

I want to quickly give the disclaimer that I absolutely love this game (otherwise I wouldn't have played it for 35 hours) and despite its issues, it's a wonderful sandbox platformer I highly recommend, even on Switch. I even think the game looks very beautiful overall, even if the resolution wasn't great and shadows and pop-in are a problem. So even though my "unofficial patch notes" may sound very negative, most of these problems left unpolished aren't game-breaking. I find them mildly frustrating at worst to nitpicky at best, and even if the game doesn't get any more updates like I'm hoping for, I still think it's great as it is.

Just booted up the game with the patch downloaded and tried out in handheld mode for 5-10mins.
Resolution does seem to be better - Looks possibly native 720p to me, but probably not though.
Loading seemed quicker and assets stream/texture load in better.
Framerate seems capped at 30fps, which is good, BUT i feel Spongebob walks and jumps even slower now!

This was all in the Mermalair, so not sure how the rest of the levels look atm.

Didn't realize my reply was gonna be so lengthy, so hopefully I didn't annoy anybody too badly with how much they had to scroll past, haha. I'm just a big fan of the game and wanted to help give people a more clear idea as to what the update does and doesn't fix.

Who the heck buys this rubbish?!

@DoktorTotenKopf Me.

I've not played that much of it yet, but I'm still rocking version 1.0 and I think it looks great, so to hear these patches improve things further is great news. Haven't encountered any framerate issues yet that would bother me at all, but as I say, I'm not that far into it.

But for the £20 I paid for it I'm very happy. Lovely 3D platformer. Sure, it has aspects that betray it's age, but overall the vibe I get from it is exactly what I was hoping for.

Sweet victory or a load of barnacles?

@Not_Soos thanks for a proper in depth look and understanding. I wish game reviewers were more like this. Spent actual time and knew the games and gave proper information. Reviews used to be like this and now they just seem to be attempts to be trendy and pander to the crowd. Good stuff mate

@Marxally What is the tip-toe bug please? I've noticed SpongeBob seems to almost randomly tip-toe, but I'm not sure what's triggering it and how it should really be.

I was so disappointed when I first tried this one! It never ran at 60fps unless you downloaded essentially the entire game 5GB as a sort of crazy day one patch (I bought the cartridge precisely to save space on my SD card). With that patch it ran at 60fps only inside your house. So I've been hoping for either a complete bump up to 60fps, or a 30fps cap so that my TV can dejudder the motion up to 60fps. I guess I do prefer a locked 30fps over a jerky 35-55fps. Those even and regular frametimes make a difference to me in how pleasant the game is to behold in motion.

stupid question will it auto update or do i have to start game and the update

@Not_Soos Thank you, much more informative than the article!

Mabey I haven't played enough of the game (4 levels) or the bugs and low res visuals don't bother me so much but I have enjoyed what I've played so far. I'm anxious to start playing it more here soon though. Deadly Premonition 2 took up most of my time this past week.

@DoktorTotenKopf I would actually buy this rubbish. I bought Jak and Daxter on PSVita for its portability, despite its myriad problems.

@Coach_A seriously! Why bother with the article if you're not going to tell us if the game is much improved or not?

@Not_Soos "who buys this rubbish" me too

I plan on buying this rubbish. A Hat in Time has put me in a 3D platformer mood so I'm gonna get this and New Super Lucky's Tale soon. Thanks to those who gave detailed comments about the update. I'm looking forward to trying this out.

I had the strangest bug while playing this: Weird red lines. A few times the lines corrupted the picture to the point where the screen went black but the sound could still be heard. And it can't be a HDMI cable going bad, because this is literally the only game where I've experienced this, and I was still able to press the home button and get back to the Switch menu. I got this bug mostly in Kelp Forest for some reason.

Please tell me this bug was fixed with this patch.

@Chlocean goooood for you. /s 😜

@Not_Soos

Thank you very much for this in-depth analysis of the patch. Very helpful. Nintendolife should pay you for doing their work.

Too late, already got the Xbox version 😔

@DoktorTotenKopf I'm sorry Doktor, but this "rubbish" is enjoyable and nostalgic to many people.

Don't believe that one gamespot guy who rated the game 2/10 for being "too hard"; or the people at IGN who said it was "too kid friendly".

Also I see that you teased @Chlocean for liking this game and having an opinion. Don't be a jerk.

@Mrnotultra I really don’t care, bub. Fly away, little moth.

It looks better to me, like it's running sorta at 30fps. But it still looks too janky for me so I deleted the huge 5-6GB download after playing for awhile. If they never would've said it would run at 60fps that would help. It's playable for sure, but not nice to look at in motion in my opinion. This one falls into the category with Spyro where many people can enjoy it I guess, but it's not for me. Hopefully future patches can improve things further...

So they can add another Japanese voice but they can't get the Dutch cast together to record for this game? Can I just call this blatant discrimination?

@DoktorTotenKopf I respect your opinion while holding a different one. Stay healthy and take care of yourself.

@link3710 @LeonKennedy @Stocksy Thanks guys, I really appreciate it! To an extent I understand, though--there's tons of gaming news every day and only so much time for journalists to cover it. Meanwhile, I'm just a kid in college who's on summer vacation and not working a job, so I have all the time in the world. For the longest time, though, I've wanted to get a gaming channel going on YT but have been too intimidated to do so. By comparing me with actual gaming publications, you all have inadvertently given me a little more faith in myself that I might could actually put out quality, independent content, so... thank you!

Why has nobody mentioned the biggest glitch if them all? Where some spatulas are missing or don't appear. Especially after forgetting to talk to a character. Like the goo lagoon castle. Also is it me or is the cruise bubble harder to control than in the original?

@DoktorTotenKopf is there a legit reason why you're being a full on jerk to everyone? Is it because you don't like SpongeBob and you want to make SpongeBob fans look like fetuses? I don't like Teen Titans Go, South Park, or Dragonball, but you don't hear me making fun of their audiences! It's people like you who makes me want a block feature on this website.

@Chlocean you too, pal. Stay clean. Stay healthy. Stay happy.

@gcunit they didn't program spongebob's diagonal movement correctly on switch, so not only can u not run in clean circles, trying to move diagonally also makes spongebob "tiptoe". This made the game unplayable for me on switch so i had to get it on ps4 because i love this game. Hopefully they actually fix this and stop ignoring it.

@link3710 @LeonKennedy @Stocksy Heyyyyy, so I just found out SpongeBob Rehydrated got a new patch less than 2 weeks ago that, according to this IGN article, fixes a lot of the quality of life issues and bugs I mentioned that were still left in the 1.0.2 patch. Here's the link, if you want to check it out: https://www.ign.com/wikis/spongebob-squarepants-battle-for-bikini-bottom-rehydrated/Updates_and_Patch_Notes#Version_1.03

@Not_Soos Thanks! I heard and I'm planning to pick it up now.